Frank Sinatra Mocked Jimmy Page’s Guitar on Live TV — Jimmy Made Him Regret It in 90 Seconds

Frank Sinatra Mocked Jimmy Page’s Guitar on Live TV — Jimmy Made Him Regret It in 90 Seconds

Frank Sinatra mocked Jimmy Page’s guitar on live TV. Jimmy made him regret it in 90 seconds. The Parkinson show on BBC Television on a Saturday evening in November of 1975 was watched by something approaching 10 million people, which in the Britain of 1975 represented a significant portion of the population choosing to spend their Saturday evening in the company of Michael Parkinson and whoever he had arranged to sit on his sofa.

 The show had achieved by this point in its run the specific status of a cultural institution. The kind of program that was not merely watched but discussed on Monday mornings at work and in shops and in the specific way that Britain discussed things it had witnessed together with the assumption that everyone had seen it, that the reference required no explanation, that to have missed it was a minor gap in one’s participation in the life of the country.

Michael Parkinson was good at his job in the way that people who are genuinely good at their jobs are good at it with an ease that concealed the effort with an intelligence that presented itself as interest rather than analysis with the specific skill of making the person across from him feel that what they had to say was the most interesting thing that could currently be said.

 He had by 1975 interviewed enough people across enough categories of fame and achievement that he had developed a philosophy about what made an interview worth watching which was that the interesting thing was almost never the thing you expected to be interesting when you looked at the names on the list in advance.

 The interesting thing was what happened between people in the space where they encountered each other with their real selves rather than their professional ones. He had looked at the names for this particular Saturday and had thought with the specific combination of professional calculation and genuine curiosity that characterized his best booking decisions, that the combination might produce something that nobody watching from their living rooms would be able to predict.

 He was right about this, though not in the ways he would have predicted if pressed, because what happened between Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Page on that sofa was not what anyone, including Michael Parkinson, had arranged for. Frank Sinatra was in London promoting a new record and had agreed to appear. This was not a small thing. Sinatra in 1975 was 60 years old and had been famous since before most of his audience had been born, and the decision of where to place his attention and his time had long since become the decision of someone who understood that his

attention and his time were not infinite and who applied them accordingly. He appeared on Parkinson because London suited him in the specific way that London suits a certain kind of American performer, offering an appreciation that is not the same as American appreciation, and that means something slightly different, and that Sinatra valued.

 He appeared because Parkinson had asked him personally and because Parkinson was the kind of interviewer who understood that the interview was in service of the subject rather than the interviewer, which Sinatra had learned to recognize and to value. Jimmy Page was in London because Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti Tour was in its British leg, which meant concerts at venues of a scale that few acts had managed, and because Parkinson’s producer had made the call that producers make when they understand that a particular moment in a particular

artist’s career has reached the point where television documentation feels like a cultural obligation rather than a promotional exercise. Physical Graffiti had been released 4 months earlier and had done something to the conversation about what a rock band could aspire to that people were still processing.

 Jimmy was available on a Saturday evening. The call was made. Neither man had been told with any specificity who else would be on the sofa. In the green room before the broadcast, Jimmy Page was alone and had been alone for about 20 minutes, which was time enough for a cup of tea and the quiet preliminary playing that he did before appearances of this kind.

 Not practicing in the directed sense, but keeping the hands and the mind in the relationship that performing required. The guitar across his lap was an acoustic instrument that he traveled with because it could be carried on a plane and because the acoustic was where the music was most directly audible without the amplification that could, if you were not careful, make things sound like things other than what they were.

The door opened and Frank Sinatra came in with two people from his team. Sinatra in motion was Sinatra in public, which is to say that the quality of his entrance was not something he could turn off. Not because he was performing it, but because it had become, after 60 years, simply how he moved through spaces.

 He registered Jimmy immediately, the way people who have read rooms for six decades register everything in a room within the first 3 seconds of entering it. His team member introduced them. Sinatra crossed the room with his hand extended and said, “Led Zeppelin, the loud ones.” Which was not intended as hostility, but was intended as the kind of statement that establishes the speaker’s position before the conversation begins.

 Jimmy said that was one description. Sinatra asked if he played the acoustic in his lap. Jimmy said he did. Sinatra asked if he could play something Sinatra would recognize. Jimmy said that depended on what Sinatra recognized. Sinatra looked at him for a moment. The response had a quality that he found interesting, which was the quality of being precise without being unkind, of meaning something specific without performing the meaning.

“Touché,” he said, and sat in the chair across from Jimmy. And for the next 10 minutes, before the makeup artists and the camera crew began the preparations that would transform the green room into the anteroom of a broadcast, they had a conversation that was more substantive than anyone outside the room knew, and that established, at a level below what would be visible on camera, a mutual recognition that the evening was going to be something.

On camera, Sinatra was the version of Sinatra that 10 million people had come to know, which was not less than the version in the green room, but was differently configured for the medium. He was larger in his certainty, more absolute in his pronouncements, more performatively willing to be contradicted, because performance requires edges, and the green room Sinatra, who was thoughtful and curious, and genuinely engaged with whoever was in front of him, had fewer edges than television required.

When Parkinson asked about modern rock music, Sinatra settled into the posture of a man who has been asked a question he has answered before, and answers again with genuine conviction, rather than with the emptiness of repetition. He said he had tried. He said he had genuinely made the effort, had sat in rooms while his daughter played the music, had read about it.

 He said it was organized noise. He said there was no melody he could find, no craft in the traditional sense, that the young men who made it were making sounds that were technically very loud, and calling it music, and he had stopped arguing with his daughter because the argument never went anywhere. He said music, as he understood music, required melody and craft and the ability to communicate something specific from one human being to another, and that he did not hear those things in Led Zeppelin.

The studio audience laughed because Sinatra was funny and because the statement was delivered with the charm that made even absolute pronouncements feel like the conclusions of a reasonable man who had thought things through carefully and arrived at a position that, while firm, was arrived at through genuine engagement rather than mere prejudice.

 The laughter was the laughter of people who found the statement amusing and credible simultaneously, which was the specific response that Sinatra’s wit at its best produced. The sense that the person speaking had thought about this more carefully than you had and had found a way to make the conclusion entertaining as well as convincing.

Parkinson said, “Well, as it happens,” he looked off to the side of the set and Jimmy Page walked out. He was carrying the acoustic guitar from the green room. He was wearing what he had been wearing in the green room, plain clothes that made no announcement about who he was, and he walked onto the set with the same quality of movement he had in the green room, unhurried and without any of the performance that the occasion might have licensed.

Sinatra watched him come. He was a professional, which meant that whatever he felt in the moment when he understood what was happening did not reach his expression in any form that the camera could clearly read. He stood, extended his hand, said that he hoped he hadn’t caused offense. “None taken,” Jimmy said.

 “You haven’t heard it properly yet.” Sinatra looked at him. “Is that so? Would you like to?” The studio audience was completely quiet. 10 million people watching from their living rooms were in their various states of Saturday evening relaxation, paying a different kind of attention than they had been paying 30 seconds earlier.

 Sinatra looked at Parkinson. He looked at the audience. He looked back at Jimmy. And Jimmy was looking at him with the quality of attention he brought to things that he had decided required it, which was the same quality of attention he gave to guitars when he was checking their tuning, to PA systems when he was listening for problems, to music when the music was asking him to be fully present.

“90 seconds,” Jimmy said. “Very well,” Sinatra said. “90 seconds.” Jimmy sat in the chair to the side of the sofa that Parkinson used for musicians, the chair that was positioned for performance rather than conversation. He settled the acoustic guitar into his lap with the hold that came from classical training.

 The left hand ready on the neck, the right hand positioned over the strings with a precision that was visible to anyone who knew what they were looking at, and that Sinatra, who had spent his entire career surrounded by musicians, very much knew what they were looking at. He began. What came out of the guitar in the next 90 seconds was not what anyone in the room had prepared themselves for, including Michael Parkinson, who had spent 30 years on television watching people do things that surprised him, and who had therefore developed a

professional relationship with the experience of surprise that was more calibrated than most people’s. The calibration did not prepare him for this. It was not rock music. This was the first thing that became clear, and it became clear within the first 5 seconds, which was not enough time to form an opinion about what it was, but was enough time to understand what it wasn’t. There was no amplifier.

 There was no distortion. There was no volume in the sense that Sinatra had been discussing. The volume that was the primary thing Sinatra objected to in Led Zeppelin’s music, and that Jimmy Page, sitting in a chair with an acoustic guitar and an audience of 10 million people, had set aside entirely. What there was instead was a single melodic line.

It began simply, which is a description that sounds like a limitation and is not one. Simplicity in music, genuine simplicity, rather than the simplicity of someone who cannot do more, has a quality that announces itself immediately to anyone who has spent time in the company of music.

 It has the quality of something that has arrived at its essential form, that contains nothing that is not necessary, and nothing that is there because the player needed to demonstrate something. The melodic line that Jimmy began with had this quality, and the studio audience, which was a professional audience trained by 30 years of television to know when to respond and when to wait, waited.

 This was the right response. In the first 15 seconds, the room found the silence that the music was creating around itself. At 30 seconds, a second voice entered the playing. Jimmy’s right thumb had been maintaining a baseline through the first section, a grounding presence beneath the melody that gave the melody something to rest on without competing with it.

 Now the thumb and the fingers of the right hand began to work independently, the thumb continuing its baseline while the fingers carried a separate melodic voice above it. The two lines in a conversation that was harmonically coherent and that produced, from a single instrument with six strings and one player, the impression of something more complete than one instrument should be able to offer.

Frank Sinatra had worked for 60 years with orchestras and arrangers and guitar players who were among the finest musicians of their generation. He understood counterpoint. He understood what it meant to maintain two independent voices simultaneously in a musical structure. He understood it at the level of someone who had been inside serious music all his life.

 What he was watching at 30 seconds into 90 seconds that he had agreed to as a concession was counterpoint. Actual counterpoint applied to an acoustic guitar in a television studio by the man he had described 45 seconds ago as someone who made organized noise. His hands had stopped moving. The piece continued developing through its middle section, moving through harmonic territory that was neither the territory of Sinatra’s music nor the territory that Sinatra assumed was the territory of Jimmy’s music, but something that had the quality of music

that has found its way past the categories that different traditions used to describe themselves, past the point where you can say this is blues or this is classical or this is folk to the place where it is simply what it is when a musician plays without reference to anything except the music itself. The studio audience was still.

 Not still in the way that an audience is still when it is being polite, when it is giving the performer the silence that the performer’s presence licenses, but still in the way that people are still when they have stopped doing everything else because what is happening in front of them requires more of their attention than the things they were doing before it started.

In the last 15 seconds, the piece returned to where it had begun. The single melodic line coming back to the opening phrase with the quality of a musical sentence returning to the thought it had started with. And the final note was held for the duration of its sustain, which was the duration of what needed to be said.

 And when the sustain told him it was finished, he released it. The silence lasted 3 seconds. During those 3 seconds, Sinatra’s expression did something that his 60 years of professional experience had not fully equipped him to prevent, which was to be genuinely and visibly surprised. The expression lasted only as long as the surprise was fresh, which was not very long, because a man who has managed his public face for 60 years develops a facility for recovery that is nearly automatic.

 But it lasted long enough for 10 million people to see it, and for Michael Parkinson to see it from 18 inches away, and for it to have been real in the room in a way that no subsequent management could entirely erase. The studio applauded. The applause had the specific quality of an audience that has witnessed something and is responding to the witness rather than to the performance.

 The quality of people expressing something they actually feel rather than performing an expression the occasion requires. Sinatra was not applauding. He was looking at Jimmy with the expression that Parkinson later described as the most honest face he had seen on television in 30 years of making it. He was looking at him with the attention of someone who has been shown something they did not expect to be shown, and who is still in the process of understanding what it was.

Then his hands came together, slowly, with a deliberateness that was not the automatic applause of a live audience, but the considered acknowledgement of one musician recognizing what another musician had done. “Where did you learn to play like that?” Sinatra asked. His voice had changed in the way that voices change when something that has been performing drops below the performance.

 When the question is genuine, rather than rhetorical. “The same place you learn to sing,” Jimmy said. “From people who did it before me, and then from doing it.” Sinatra was quiet for a moment. 10 million people in their living rooms were quiet in the same moment, for a different reason, which was that they were watching something real happen on television, and real things on television require a silence that performed things do not.

“I said it wasn’t music,” Sinatra said. “Yes, I was wrong about that.” He paused. “I wasn’t wrong about the loud part.” The studio laughed, because Sinatra had found his way back to himself, to the width that was his natural register, and the return was graceful enough that it did not feel like retreat, but like completion.

 The statement that preceded the humor was not erased by the humor. It had been made. 10 million people had heard it made. It lived in the record now, alongside the 90 seconds, alongside everything else that had happened in that studio on that Saturday evening. After the show, in the green room, Sinatra found Jimmy before his team had fully assembled around him for the departure. This was unusual.

 Sinatra’s departures were typically managed with precision, his time carefully guarded. He had dismissed his team briefly, which was itself notable. “I owe you something,” Sinatra said. “You don’t. I made a statement on national television about your work. It was not accurate. I’d like to correct that, beyond what happened on camera.

” “You corrected it on camera,” Jimmy said. “That’s the appropriate place.” Sinatra looked at him for a moment. “You’re not what I expected,” he said. “What did you expect?” “Someone louder, offstage as well.” “I’m not the music, Jimmy said. Sinatra was quiet. What do you mean by that? The music is loud.

 I’m not the same thing as the music. Most people assume that what I am is what the music is. It isn’t. The music is what I make when I have an instrument and something to say. When I don’t have the instrument or the occasion, I’m something else entirely. Sinatra processed this with the speed of someone who has spent 60 years understanding what people say and what they mean by it.

 I’ve been making that assumption, he said, about you and about others in your field. Most people do. It’s a significant error. It doesn’t matter much. It mattered tonight. He paused. What I heard tonight was not what I’ve heard when I’ve been in the room while rock music plays. It was different in a way I’d like to understand. The difference was the acoustic, Jimmy said, and the room.

 When there’s amplification, people hear the volume. Without it, they hear what’s underneath. What’s underneath is the same either way, but the amplification is so large that people can’t hear past it. You play acoustic and electric as if they’re the same instrument. They’re not, but the music I’m trying to make is the same through both.

 The instrument changes, the intention doesn’t. Sinatra was quiet for a long moment. Then, I’d like to hear more of your work. You know where to find it, Jimmy said. Sinatra smiled, a different smile from the television one, less managed and more genuine. I do, he said. Three weeks after the broadcast, a letter arrived at Led Zeppelin’s management office addressed to Jimmy Page.

 It was on Sinatra’s personal stationery, handwritten with the care of someone who had learned to write before handwriting was simplified by technology and who had never stopped treating it as a form of communication that deserved care. It was two paragraphs. Jimmy has never read from it publicly and has never confirmed its contents beyond saying, when asked, that it was generous and considerably more than was required.

The piece Jimmy played on the Parkinson show was never formally recorded. He had described it before playing it as something he had been working on. It was never named. It never appeared on a Led Zeppelin album or on any solo release. It exists in the BBC broadcast footage and in the memories of the 10 million people who were watching that November Saturday evening and in whatever Jimmy chose to do with it in the years after.

Michael Parkinson wrote about the evening in his memoir published in 2008. He wrote that in 30 years of television, he had watched many people surprise each other. That surprise was one of the things his format was designed to produce. That he had become, over those years, reasonably good at predicting when and how surprise would arrive.

 He wrote that what happened between Frank Sinatra and Jimmy Page was different from most of those occasions and that the difference was in the quality of what he had watched rather than in its dramatic shape. Frank said something absolute. Jimmy gave him 90 seconds. Frank revised the absolute. “This is rarer than it sounds.” Parkinson wrote.

“Most people who say things absolutely do not revise them. Sinatra revised it because the 90 seconds deserved revision. That was the whole story.” Jimmy Page has said, in the one interview in which he addressed the Parkinson show directly, that it was a good evening and that Frank Sinatra was very generous.

 He was asked what he had played. He said something he had been working on. He asked if it was on an album. He said no. He was asked why not. He said it had been right for that evening. Some things he said are right for one evening. That was enough. Frank Sinatra said it was good. This is a statement that requires context to understand fully because Sinatra did not describe things as good when they were not good.

 And his understanding of good had been formed over 60 years of work with the finest musicians the 20th century had produced. His description of the 90 seconds as good was therefore not a diplomatic gesture or a concession made under the pressure of the moment. It was an accurate report from someone qualified to make it.

 Delivered with the directness of someone who has long since stopped needing to be anything other than direct. The piece had no name. It had one performance. Frank Sinatra said it was good. Jimmy Page said that was enough. And it was.