Elton John Told Jimmy Page to Play Piano as a Joke — What Jimmy Did Left Him in Tears

Elton John Told Jimmy Page to Play Piano as a Joke — What Jimmy Did Left Him in Tears

Elton John told Jimmy Page to play piano as a joke. What Jimmy did left him in tears. Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane in November of 2001 had been dressed for the evening with the specific care that private charity events of this caliber received. The kind of attention to detail that communicated through flowers and light and the arrangement of tables that what was happening here was both serious and celebratory.

 That money was being raised for something that mattered and that the raising of it was an occasion worth marking properly. The Elton John AIDS Foundation had been operating for nine years by this point and the annual gala had become one of the more quietly significant events in the London philanthropic calendar. Attended by people who were there because they cared about the cause and because Elton John had asked them personally.

150 people occupied the tables in the main room. The atmosphere had the warmth of a gathering where most people knew most other people or at least knew the same people. The specific ease of a milieu that has been operating long enough for its members to have developed a shorthand of shared reference and accumulated history.

Elton had performed for 40 minutes which was the kind of performance that the 40 minutes at the piano of someone who has spent 50 years in music produces when they are in good form and in a room of this size. Something that felt both complete and intimate. Something that the people in the room would carry with them because they had been close enough to it that it would remain their own.

 He played several of his songs and one or two things that weren’t his and the room received all of it with the attention it deserved. In the back of the room, Jimmy Page was sitting with Robert Plant at a table that was near enough to the edges to allow for the kind of observation that Jimmy preferred in rooms like this.

The position from which you could receive everything without being at the center of it. He and Robert had traveled together from a session they had been doing, an informal collaboration that had no particular destination yet. And they had come to the gala because Elton had asked them and because the cause was something they believed in.

 Jimmy and Elton John had been friends for 30 years. The friendship had the specific quality of friendships between people who have existed in the same world for long enough to have witnessed each other’s full range, who have been present for the difficult parts as well as the celebrated ones, who have no need to perform for each other because the performances have all been given already and what remains is the genuine article.

Elton was theatrical where Jimmy was contained, expansive where Jimmy was concentrated, the kind of man who filled a room with his presence where Jimmy was the kind who made a room quieter by being in it. Elton’s relationship with Jimmy included, as 30-year friendships between people with strong personalities tend to include, a comfortable habit of teasing.

 It was affectionate teasing, the teasing of someone who knows you well enough to identify the things that can be gently poked without damaging anything that matters. Jimmy’s quietness, his characteristic refusal to perform himself for rooms, was a regular subject. Elton had spent 30 years finding ways to draw Jimmy Page into the center of rooms that Jimmy preferred to observe from the edges.

 After his final song, Elton stood from the piano and took the applause with the ease of someone who has been receiving applause for a very long time and has developed a genuine relationship with it, rather than merely a professional one. He began moving through the room as he always did at these events, talking and laughing, creating the warm circulation of a host who genuinely enjoys the people he has invited.

 His eyes found Jimmy in the back corner. “Jimmy,” he said, loudly enough that the tables nearest them turned to look. “Jimmy Page, ladies and gentlemen, hiding in the back corner as always, is Jimmy Page.” The room turned. Jimmy raised a hand in the minimal acknowledgement of someone who has been identified and is accepting the identification without elaborating on it.

“Come on, Jimmy, come up here,” Elton said with the irresistible energy that Elton at his most gregarious deployed, the energy that made refusal feel not rude, but simply unnecessary, because what was coming was going to be enjoyable and everyone knew it. I want to ask you something. There was the good-natured urging that rooms produce when someone famous is being called to an impromptu moment, and Jimmy, who disliked this intensely and who was very good at resisting it, stood anyway, because Elton and 30 years was a

different calculation from the ordinary resistance. He walked to the front of the room with the unhurried deliberateness that characterized all of his movement, and Elton put an arm around his shoulder in the manner of someone who was about to use their friend for comedic effect and is entirely comfortable with this, who has done this before and knows it will be received in the spirit it’s intended.

“Jimmy Page,” Elton said to the room, “is widely considered one of the greatest guitarists in the history of rock music, possibly the greatest. I won’t argue about it tonight.” He paused for the laugh, which came. “But here’s my question. Here’s what I’ve always wanted to know.” He gestured toward the Steinway grand that was still open from his own performance, its lid raised, its keys reflecting the room’s light.

“Jimmy, can he play piano?” The room produced the laughter that the suggestion warranted, which was the laughter of people who understood the joke, which was the absurdity of imagining the architect of Led Zeppelin’s guitar sound sitting at a piano and producing anything. The mismatch between the image of Jimmy Page that the world carried and the image of a pianist. It was a good joke.

 Elton’s jokes were usually good jokes and it landed well. “Jimmy,” Elton said, grinning. “Go on. Sit down. Play us something.” Jimmy did not laugh. The room noticed this in the way that rooms notice when the expected response to a joke does not arrive. The laughter had peaked and was receding and Jimmy was standing beside Elton with an expression that was doing something that nobody in the room could quite read.

 Something that was not offense and was not humor and was not the characteristic blankness that Jimmy sometimes deployed when he preferred not to be read. Elton noticed first as he always noticed first in rooms because his talent for reading rooms was as cultivated as his talent for filling them. “Jimmy, mate,” he said, his voice lower, the performance stepping back from it.

“I’m only “Actually,” Jimmy said. He said it quietly but the room was quiet enough that it carried. “Actually, I can.” The specific quality of the silence that arrived in the room after this was different from the silence that had followed Elton’s invitation, which had been the silence of anticipation before a punchline.

 This was the silence of a room that has understood it is not going to receive a punchline. Robert Plant, at the back table, had gone very still. To understand what happened in November of 2001 in the Grosvenor House Hotel, you need to go back to 1969 when Led Zeppelin was a different kind of new, and Heston was the place Jimmy Page came from, rather than the place he had already left.

 His mother, Patricia, was 55 years old that year, and she was in the house in Heston where Jimmy had grown up, in the front room where there was an upright piano that she played in the way that people play instruments when they have taught themselves from love rather than instruction, imperfectly and with great feeling. Patricia loved Chopin.

 She loved the specific quality of piano music that was lyrical rather than brilliant. The music that spoke rather than demonstrated. She would play in the evenings the same pieces she had learned by ear over years, and the playing was the private version of herself, the version that existed apart from the wife and the mother and the person who managed the practical demands of a life.

Jimmy had come home from a tour. Led Zeppelin’s first album had been out for several months, and the world had changed in the specific way that the world changes when something arrives that nobody was quite expecting. He was in the front room with his mother, sitting in the chair nearest the window, and she was at the piano, and they were having the conversation that people have when they have not seen each other for a long time and are finding their way back to the ordinary version of the relationship.

“Jimmy,” Patricia said, still facing the piano, “will you do something for me?” “Anything.” “Learn to play piano.” He laughed. “I play guitar, Mom.” “I know what you play. I’ve heard it.” She said this without reproach. “But guitar is” she searched for the word, “guitar is Jimmy Page. It’s the stage version, the person the world knows.

 Is that bad?” “No, it’s extraordinary.” She turned to look at him. “But piano is different. Piano is just you. No distortion, no amplification, no spectacle, just the music and the person making it. She paused. I want to hear that before I’m too old to hear anything. He promised her. It was the kind of promise that gets made in front rooms in Heston in 1969 with genuine intention and genuine uncertainty about when the intention would find its occasion.

 The years that followed were the years of Led Zeppelin, the enormous structure of that decade and its demands and its music and its losses. And the promise lived in the background of all of it, present but not yet called upon. In the spring of 2001, Patricia Page was diagnosed with cancer of the colon.

 By the time the diagnosis was made, the cancer had been present long enough to have intentions of its own. The doctors spoke with the careful honesty of people who have learned that the careful honesty is more useful than false comfort. Jimmy came home. He sat with her in the hospital and then at home and he was, in the way that children are in the presence of a parent’s serious illness, confronted by something that his experience of everything else in his life had not prepared him for, which was the specific helplessness of love in the face of what

love cannot change. One evening, sitting with her in the house in Heston, he said, “I’m going to keep that promise.” Patricia looked at him. “What promise?” “1969, the piano.” She was quiet for a moment. “Jimmy, you don’t have to.” “I want to.” He paused. “I should have done it years ago.” She smiled.

 “Well, better late than never.” For eight weeks, Jimmy Page took private piano lessons from a woman named Sarah Collins who had trained at the Royal Academy of Music, and who had been teaching advanced students for 15 years. She was not told initially who her new student was, and when she understood, she managed this with the professional discretion of someone who understood that the reason for the lessons was more important than the identity of the person taking them.

He was not trying to become a pianist. He was trying to learn one song, and he was trying to learn it well enough to play it for one person. And the one song was Tangerine. He had written Tangerine in 1970 for Led Zeppelin 3, and it had the quality of Led Zeppelin’s most gentle music.

 The quality of something that was trying to say something directly, rather than through the volume and the power that the band’s other material deployed. It had always been, in his understanding, a piece about the things that don’t survive the distances that the music creates, about what gets left behind when something moves too fast and too far.

 He had played it on acoustic guitar on the album, and the acoustic version had a tenderness that the electric material didn’t require of itself. He learned the piano version over 8 weeks that were also 8 weeks of visiting his mother in hospital and managing the distance between the work of learning the piece and the reason for learning it, which was present in every practice session, whether he attended to it directly or not.

 Sarah Collins noticed, after the third week, that the technique was rough and would remain rough because 8 weeks was not enough time to develop technique, but that what he was doing with the music was not about technique. “You’re playing it for someone specific,” she said one afternoon, after he had played through the piece for the 14th time that session.

“Yes. It sounds like that. You can hear it. Is that good or bad?” “It’s the only reason any of it matters,” she said. “The technique is the vehicle. What you’re playing is the reason.” He did not elaborate, and she did not ask further. She understood the terms of the lessons well enough to know that the information she needed was in the music and not in what he said about it.

 In March of 2001, he brought a small electronic keyboard to his mother’s room in the hospital. The nurses helped him position it beside the chair where he sat when he visited. Patricia was having a good day, alert and present in the way that she was sometimes alert and present and sometimes less so. “I kept the promise,” he said.

She looked at the keyboard. She looked at him. “Play it then.” He played Tangerine. He hit wrong notes. His timing was imperfect. The technique was everything Sarah Collins had said it was, which was rough and would remain rough for the 8 weeks he had been learning. But the piece was there, recognizable and complete, the melody intact and the harmony supporting it, and he played it with the attention of someone for whom the performance is not the point but the communication is.

 When he finished, Patricia was quiet for a moment. “That’s your voice,” she said. “Not the guitar, you.” He didn’t answer. “Do you understand what I mean?” “Yes,” he said. “I understand.” She died 6 weeks later. He was with her when she died, in the way that he had been with her through the months of the illness, present and quiet.

 He brought the keyboard home, and he did not play it again. At the Grosvenor House Hotel in November of 2001, Jimmy Page sat at the Steinway Grand that was still open from Elton’s performance and placed his hands on the keys. The room was entirely silent. Elton stood beside the piano without moving, without speaking, without doing anything that might change whatever was about to happen.

 He had understood in the second since Jimmy had said, “Actually, I can.” that he had accidentally opened something that he did not know was there, and that the appropriate response was to step back and let it be what it was going to be. Jimmy looked at his hands on the keys. Then he began. The opening notes of Tangerine on the piano were not what anyone in the room was expecting, which was partly because nobody in the room was expecting Jimmy Page to play anything at all, and partly because the piano version of the song had never existed publicly, had existed

only in 8 weeks of practice in 2001, and in one performance in a hospital room in March of that year. It was not Led Zeppelin’s Tangerine, with its acoustic guitar and its arrangement. It was the melody and the harmony beneath it, and nothing else. The technique was not perfect. The people in the room who were professional musicians registered this, registered the imprecision, and registered simultaneously that the imprecision was irrelevant because what they were hearing was not a demonstration of technique, it was something else. It was

a piece of music that had been learned for a reason, and that carried the reason inside it. That was playing the reason as much as it was playing the notes. Elton’s hand came up to cover his mouth. Robert Plant, at the back of the room, put his head down. The woman at the table nearest the piano began to cry without knowing why she was crying, which is what happens when music does something that exceeds the listener’s capacity to account for it.

 When the thing the music is carrying arrives in the listener without passing through their understanding. Jimmy played with his eyes closed. His lips moved, barely, forming words that no sound accompanied. The people who were near enough to see this could not have told you what the words were, but they understood what was happening the way you understand things when you are in the presence of something that is not performed for you, but that you have been allowed to witness.

Tangerine is not a long song. On the piano, stripped to melody and harmony, it was shorter still. The final note was held for its full duration and then released. The room was silent for several seconds. Then Elton moved. He crossed to the piano and crouched beside the bench where Jimmy was still sitting, his hands still resting on the keys, and he put his arm around his old friend’s shoulders.

 He did not speak immediately. He had the wisdom to understand that what had just happened did not immediately require speech. Then, what was that? Tangerine, Jimmy said. When did you Eight weeks, in 2001, for my mother. Elton pulled back slightly to look at him. She heard it? In hospital. Before she died. And then? And then nothing.

 I put the keyboard away. Until tonight. Until tonight. Elton was quiet for a moment. His hand was still on Jimmy’s shoulder. He had the expression of someone who has said something he thought was small and has discovered it was large and who is rearranging his understanding accordingly. Jimmy, he said, I’m sorry. The joke. Don’t be sorry.

Jimmy looked at him. She wanted the music to be given, not kept. I didn’t understand that until I heard it in the room just now. He paused. So, thank you. Robert Plant had come from the back of the room at some point during this exchange and was standing at a distance that was close enough to be present and far enough to give the conversation its space.

 When Jimmy looked at him, he said nothing. He simply held Jimmy’s gaze for a moment, and in the exchange that passed between them, which was the exchange of people who have known each other long enough to communicate in the register below words, something was acknowledged that neither of them needed to name. Elton stood.

 He took the microphone from the stand at the side of the room and addressed the guests, who were still in the particular quiet that the piano had created and had not fully dispersed. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “and his voice had the texture of someone speaking from the part of themselves that is below the performance. What Jimmy just played was a promise made to his mother.

 She wanted him to learn piano, just to be himself without the guitar, without the stage. He learned it for her in 2001. He played it for her in hospital. And tonight, because of a joke I thought was funny, he played it again.” He paused. “Patricia Page gave the world something extraordinary when she supported her son’s music. So tonight, in her name, I’m making a personal gift to this foundation, and I’m designating it for music education, for children who love music and don’t have access to it, the way Patricia Page deserved access to music and never had.”

He looked at Jimmy. “Because the best music isn’t the music that impresses, it’s the music that is honest. And the most honest thing I heard tonight came from a man who promised his mother he’d learn piano.” Jimmy Page said nothing. He had returned his hands to his lap and was looking at the floor in the way that he looked at things when he was receiving something rather than producing it.

 After the gala, when the guests had moved to the smaller rooms and the conversation had resumed, Robert Plant found Jimmy in a corridor. “I didn’t know,” Robert said. “Nobody knew.” “She would have.” “She did. She heard it. Robert was quiet for a moment. The album version, Tangerine. Did she know it was? She knew, Jimmy said. She always knew things like that.

 A month after the gala, a letter arrived at Jimmy’s address from a piano teacher in London. She wrote that one of her students, a 12-year-old girl, had heard the story of the gala and what Jimmy had played. The girl had been wanting to learn guitar, she wrote. After hearing the story, she had told her teacher she wanted to learn piano instead.

 Because she wanted to play something for her mother that was just herself. No effects. No spectacle. Just the music. Jimmy wrote back. One sentence. Tell her that she doesn’t need to play it perfectly. She needs to play it honestly. Those are not the same thing, and the second one is harder and matters more. Elton John, in a conversation with a journalist two years later, was asked about the most unexpected moment of his musical life.

 He described the November evening at Grosvenor House without naming Jimmy Page, simply describing a friend who had played something on a piano that nobody had known he could play and why. The journalist asked why he hadn’t named the person. Because he didn’t play it to be known, Elton said. He played it because his mother asked him to. That’s enough of a reason.

 That doesn’t need my name attached to it. The keyboard that Patricia Page’s son had used to practice in 2001 is in the house where he grew up, in a room that has not changed much since the years when it mattered more. He plays it sometimes, alone. The same piece, the same imperfect technique that was never the point.

 The promise was made in Heston in 1969 in a front room where a woman who loved Chopin was asking her son to be himself without the guitar. It was kept in a hospital room in March of 2001 to an audience of one. It was kept again in November of 2001 to an audience of 150 because Elton John made a joke that turned out not to be a joke at all. Some promises are made once and kept once and that is enough.

 Some promises, when they are made from the right place, never fully complete. They simply become quieter and in the quiet they keep going.