“Haunted by Fame: Jimmy Page Opens Up About Addiction and Isolation During Zeppelin’s Peak”
The guitarist reveals how global stardom nearly consumed him.
Jimmy Page, the mystical mastermind behind Led Zeppelin’s thunderous guitar sound, has long been celebrated as a rock icon—an innovator who shaped the very fabric of modern music. But in a rare and candid interview marking the 55th anniversary of Led Zeppelin’s formation, the reclusive guitarist peeled back the layers of legend to reveal a darker truth: that the very fame he helped build nearly destroyed him.
“There’s a point where the magic turns into madness,” Page said, his voice calm but heavy with reflection. “The same energy that lifts you up in front of 90,000 people can pull you into a hole if you’re not grounded. And I wasn’t grounded.”
During the band’s meteoric rise in the late 1960s and 1970s, Led Zeppelin became synonymous with excess—private jets, hotels trashed, endless parties, and the dangerous mystique of the “untouchable” rock star. For Page, the band’s creative high was matched by an emotional and physical low. By the mid-1970s, he was battling addiction to heroin, isolating himself from bandmates and loved ones, and slipping into a world that threatened to consume both the man and his music.
“I wasn’t chasing drugs, I was running from pressure,” he admitted. “There was this illusion that being high kept me sharp, focused, creative. But in truth, I was slowly disappearing. I lost friends. I lost time. I lost control.”
Page described his addiction not as a momentary lapse, but as a creeping descent that grew with each tour and studio session. The pressures of maintaining Zeppelin’s colossal reputation, writing music that could outdo their last record, and being the band’s unofficial leader began to erode his health and mental stability. At times, he wouldn’t eat or sleep for days, subsisting on narcotics and whiskey to “keep the music going.”
The 1977 North American tour marked a particular breaking point. Amid chaos backstage, the death of Robert Plant’s son, and increasing tension within the band, Page’s condition became impossible to ignore. “That tour was haunted,” he said simply. “I was a shadow on stage. I don’t remember half of it.”
Despite the band’s brilliance, critics and fans began to take notice. His playing, once razor-sharp and electrifying, became inconsistent. There were missed cues, forgotten solos, and moments of complete absence. Behind the curtain, his relationships with Plant, Jones, and Bonham became strained. “We weren’t talking much by then,” he said. “It was like we were on different planets, orbiting the same burning star.”
It wasn’t until after the death of drummer John Bonham in 1980—an event that led to the band’s immediate breakup—that Page began to confront his demons. “Bonzo’s death stopped everything. Suddenly, there was no tour, no record, no excuse to keep running from myself.”
Page disappeared from the public eye throughout much of the 1980s, focusing on recovery, reflection, and slowly rediscovering his love for music. He returned to the stage in the 1990s with various projects, including collaborations with Robert Plant, but the fire of Led Zeppelin was never reignited in full.
Now, decades later, Jimmy Page says he finally feels peace. “I’ve come to terms with my ghosts,” he says. “But I’m not proud of everything. There’s brilliance in what we did, sure. But there’s pain in the pages of that story, and it’s not something I ever want to romanticize.”
Fans still revere him as a guitar god, a visionary, a sonic alchemist. But as Page himself now acknowledges, the price of genius was steep. “I survived it,” he says. “But I wouldn’t wish that kind of loneliness on anyone.”
In telling his story now, perhaps Jimmy Page has done what Led Zeppelin always did best—shined light into the
dark, and made it echo.
