Did Jimmy Page help The Beatles get their name?

Realistically, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin exist in two different chapters of music. The Beatles dominated the 1960s. They captured it, with their albums perfectly tracing the evolution of early rock and roll into something new. Then, Jimmy Page and his band were that something new, passing the baton and running with it. But despite the lack of overlap, Page played a minor role back at the beginning of the race.

Really, between The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, the history of countercultural music in that moment in time can be tracked. When The Beatles first emerged, with their bowl cuts and their clean, respectable suits, they were on the forefront of a new sound. Rock and roll was only just floating across the Atlantic and so it had to be handled carefully. It needed to be softer, more vanilla for lack of a better word as UK audiences embraced it.

Then, when they did, the evolution of The Beatles’ album tracks the evolution of music as a whole. Rubber Soul nods towards the rise of the countercultural folk scene. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the ultimate interaction with psychedelia and the LSD culture. Later releases like Abbey Road perfectly capture the way things got weird in the end. As the ‘60s darkened with events like the Manson Family or the Altamont Festival, so too did the music, reflected in the chaotic track listing there.

Then, right as the Beatles were falling apart, Led Zeppelin emerged. Out of the ashes of the end of the 1960s optimism, they brought in the next chapter of rock and roll. It was sexier, more dangerous, darker and more epic. It was exactly what people needed next, and so the band succeeded.

But, as with all musicians from that time, and arguably most ever since, Page recognises the huge impact of The Beatles and the fact that without them, there may have been no Led Zeppelin. It was more than even just music. It was a socio-political impact as Page once said, “Certainly, at the time, you know, the social question poised by The Beatles, with the long hair and the sandals – it was cool the long hair then – it had a lot of impact.” He added of their music too, “They were very musically prominent and productive, I think there is a classic example of a group who shows so much development and maturity within their music, within the years that they were together.”

Yet while the timeline of the two bands suggest Page came after The Beatles, he was actually there at the start, perhaps playing a, minor, role in giving them their name. During a visit to Oxford University in 2017, he was hit with deja vu. “I was actually here before when I was 16 years old,” he explained. Already working in music, doing session performances where he could, he was there to play with a poet, explaining, “he came here to give a talk, and I was accompanying him on guitar for a couple of his poems.”

But the poem in question was crucial to the story of The Beatles. “There was a poet called Royston Ellis who was actually hanging out with The Beatles at some point,” he explained. Ellis was the one that convinced the band to do a change that would change everything; “As he was sort of a beat poet … from over here, he encouraged The Beatles to change their [name] — they were The Silver Beetles at one time, with two Es — and he said, ‘Why don’t you make it like the beat poets?’”

And the rest was history. The band became The Beatles, and while simply backing the guy up on guitar once doesn’t really qualify Page for bragging rights or any ownership, it’s a cool moment where music legends combined.