The magical stories of how Bob Dylan and Jimmy Page got their first guitars

Bob Dylan and Jimmy Page are two of the most important musicians of all time, having played key roles in the evolution of their respective genres. But unlike many of their peers, the way they got their first guitars was remarkably similar and really magical, as if the instruments had been given to them by destiny or some kind of divine intervention.

The magical stories of how Bob Dylan and Jimmy Page got their first guitars

“I started playing guitar pretty early on, maybe when I was about 10 or 11. We (my family) found a guitar in the house that my dad bought, actually. I found something else in there, that’s kind of mystical overtones. The people who had lived in the house previously, they had left some of their furniture. Among the furniture was a great big mahogany radio, like a jukebox. It had a 78 turntable when you opened up the top.”

“I opened it up one day and there was a record on, a Country record, it was song called ‘Drifting Too Far From The Shore’, I think it was The Stanley Brothers, if not Bill Monroe. I played the record and it just brought me into a different world. The sound of the record made me feel like I was somebody else. (Made me feel) that I was maybe not even born to the right parents or something” Bob Dylan said in an interview with Jeff Rosen in 2000 (Transcribed by Rock and Roll Garage).

The same thing happened to Jimmy Page

Coincidentally, another legendary musician, the Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, also got his first guitar the same way Bob Dylan did. It is a really interesting story, one that many people might call fate or divine intervention, considering that the two artists went on to become two of the most influential musicians of all time. The British musician wasn’t from a rich family too, his father was a personal manager at a plastic-coatings plant and his mother was a doctor’s secretary. So a guitar was something the family couldn’t easily afford when he was young.

For example, as he said a few times, he really wished he could have gone to see Buddy Holly playing back in the 1950s, but it was something too expensive for him. So a guitar was also something his family couldn’t easily afford. Like a “divine intervention”, in Jimmy’s words, his first guitar was left at a house his family moved into when he was about 8 years-old.

What Jimmy Page said about how he got his first guitar

“Getting a guitar was like dreaming about a Cadillac. It was something you would see on albums by Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps and Buddy Holly. Buddy Holly came over here (in 1958). I couldn’t afford to see him, I would have learned so much, in one evening. I did see Jerry Lee Lewis. That was tribal. He wasn’t a guitarist — he was a pianist. But it was what he represented.”

“I investigated biochemistry (That’s what my parents wanted for me). But I had a voracious appetite for all things guitar. When we moved to Epsom, there was one in the house. It was like divine intervention. There weren’t that many guitarists in the area, but there was one guy at school who said, ‘Bring it along. I’ll tune it up and show you some chords.'”

He continued:

“I probably played three chords for the next year. I took over my parents’ living room as my music studio. At 15, I was playing in a band. I had been headhunted out of Epsom and was playing gigs in London,” he told Rolling Stone in 2012. The guitarist told Mojo magazine in 2004, that the instrument was probably left behind by the people who lived in the house before them or it was a friend of the family. But according to Page, nobody seemed to know why that guitar was in there. Jimmy described the instrument like a “campfire guitar” which had steel strings on it.

Bob Dylan is only three years older than Jimmy Page but both of them started their musical career in 1957. The American musician was 16 and the British only 13. It took  Dylan only five years to release his first record and achieve fame. Page on the other hand, started working as a session musician, becoming one of the most respected ones in England. But he would only become well-known by the audiences when he became part of The Yardbirds in the mid-60s, then becoming a worldwide guitar hero with Led Zeppelin.

Although Bob and Jimmy’s music wasn’t always similar, they both were inspired by many of the same artists when it came to Folk Rock. Led Zeppelin might be remembered as one of the most influential Hard Rock bands that ever existed, but they had many incredible and praised acoustic songs.