We’re all familiar with tribute bands; there are countless groups crisscrossing the world, dressing up as and playing the hits of the Beatles, the Stones, Pink Floyd, and loads of other superstar bands that have either broken up, stopped touring regularly, or if they’re still on the road, charge a fortune for tickets. Some tribute bands are more successful than others at playing the songs of the band they’re honoring note for note. But nobody has taken the goal of emulating a superstar artist to its absolute obsessive extreme as Japanese guitarist Akio Sakurai, aka “Mr. Jimmy,” the eponymous subject of a 2019 documentary now playing in theaters. (Two guesses as to the delay between its initial showcase at film festivals and its now wider distribution.)
The Jimmy in question is, of course, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin.
If you’ve ever seen a cover band dressed up as the Beatles in their Sgt. Pepper-era silk finery or as Fleetwood Mac circa 1977, that’s one thing, but Sakurai is utterly hyper-focused on all things Jimmy Page. Shortly into the documentary, he’s with a tailor and freeze-framing a DVD of The Song Remains the Same concert movie, fixating on where the seams are located in Page’s 1973 stage jacket. Should the flower patterns on the jacket have green or silver beading?
Which version of “Stairway to Heaven” to play on stage — the 1971 BBC version, the 1973 Madison Square Garden version, the 1977 U.S. tour version, or the 1979 Knebworth version? Should the pickup covers on his Gibson Les Paul guitar have square or beveled edges? How much of a difference do the soldering techniques used in his rebuilt amplifier impact his tone? No detail is too obscure for Sakurai to fixate on as he pursues his goal of being more Jimmy Page than the man himself.
When Worlds Collide
Speaking of Page, in 2012, Sakurai was playing in a Tokyo club when the real Jimmy Page — in Japan to promote Celebration Day, the DVD of Led Zeppelin’s one-off 2007 reunion concert — stops by to check out his doppelganger. After Page walked into the club and started to shake Sakurai’s hand, Sakurai, dressed in Page’s 1973-era stage clothes, performed the “We’re not worthy!!” bow.
While Sakurai plays the blindingly fast blues solo that opens the live version of “Since I’ve Been Loving You” in “The Song Remains the Same,” Page, sitting in the audience, moves his head up and down in sympathy when the drums come thundering in with a crash. After the show, and after giving Sakurai a standing ovation, Page told the tribute musician, “The work that you put in was just incredible.”
After the show, Sakurai’s wife told him, “If you don’t make a move right here, right now, you’re gonna be stuck in Japan playing with ‘Mr. Jimmy’ for the rest of your life.” Sakurai moved to Los Angeles with the goal of expanding his horizons, despite not speaking very much English.
Shortly after the Beatles broke up in 1970, John Lennon told an interviewer, “The blues is a chair, not a design for a chair or a better chair…it is the first chair. It is a chair for sitting on, not for looking at. You sit on that music.” There is a long tradition in rock music of up-and-coming musicians aping their heroes on the way to developing their own style. By the mid-1960s, Keith Richards could play Chuck Berry riffs better than Berry could. Around that same time, Eric Clapton had absorbed all of the licks of B.B., Freddie, and Albert King. In his early days as a singer, David Bowie imitated British crooner Anthony Newley. Stevie Ray Vaughan knew Albert King and Jimi Hendrix licks inside and out. Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck were serious scholars of the father of the electric guitar, Les Paul.
But these are all artists who absorbed the styles of their heroes before forging their own distinctive approaches. In contrast, Sakurai is absolutely possessed with the all-consuming goal of becoming the greatest performer of Jimmy Page’s Led Zeppelin-era riffs and solos, seemingly without any desire to ultimately create his own style.
“And Of Course, He Can’t Become Him.”
The man who rewires the pickups in Sakurai’s Gibsons says, “Ultimately, he’s going for something that doesn’t have an answer. Well, not an answer, just not a ‘final answer.’ Because the final answer is Jimmy Page himself. And of course, he can’t become him. The fact that he keeps pursuing something that doesn’t have an answer—I respect that.” The man who molds the plastic rings that surround those pickups, in an attempt to get closer to the shape and feel of the plastic parts that Gibson was making for their guitars in the 1950s, says, “We understand Jimmy’s obsession. It’s very Japanese. Jimmy plays to re-create. We manufacture to re-create. It’s the same. It’s the re-birth of the original.”
After decades of woodshedding, then playing in small Tokyo nightclubs while working during the day as a “salaryman,” Sakurai’s insane dedication takes him to America, where he joins the L.A.-based tribute band Led Zepagain. At first, his bandmates are thrilled to have someone so devoted to Page’s musical techniques in their band. But eventually, Sakurai’s driven personality begins to grind on the band, and he ultimately quits. (A happy ending awaits in the end, but I don’t want to spoil it for those who haven’t seen the film yet.)
Mr. Jimmy is an alternately fascinating and terrifying documentary, part Spinal Tap, part Rain Man. It’s one thing for a musician to practice obsessively to shape his musical “chops” to the point where they take him to a unique place as an artist. It’s another to lose yourself completely in someone else’s life. As Sakurai himself admits in Mr. Jimmy, “That I think is the meaning of tribute. Not showing yourself at all. There is no ‘me’ to begin with. Because I’ve been playing only Jimmy Page’s music. I have nothing but him.”
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