Jimmy Page LOVED HER for 10 Years and Never Said a Word — Then She Heard the Song

Jimmy Page LOVED HER for 10 Years and Never Said a Word — Then She Heard the Song

Jimmy Paige loved her for 10 years and never said a word. Then she heard the song. Foil’s bookshop on Chering Cross Road in London in September of 1969 was the kind of place that existed before the internet made the finding of books a transaction rather than an event. a large and slightly chaotic space on several floors, where the organization of the stock followed a logic that was not immediately apparent to the uninitiated, and that rewarded the kind of patient browsing that people who love books bring to places full of

them. It smelled of paper and dust, and the specific warmth of a building that has been full of people for many hours, and it had the quality of places where time moves differently from how it moves in the street outside. Jimmy Paige was in the poetry section on the second floor, which was where he sometimes went when he was in the part of London that contained Chering Cross Road and had an hour that belonged to him rather than to the schedule.

 He had been recording Led Zeppelin 2 for most of the year, and the recording was in its final stages, and the particular kind of creative exhaustion that comes from sustained intensive work had produced in him, as it sometimes did, the specific appetite for something quiet and non-musical, something that operated in a different register from the music, and that could be received without the professional attention that music always triggered.

 He was looking at a copy of Yates, the collected poems, an addition he didn’t have. He had been holding it for several minutes, reading a few lines and then looking up and then reading a few more. The way you read in a bookshop when you are deciding whether to buy something you are already fairly certain you will buy.

 A hand reached past him. He looked up. A woman was reaching for the shelf, for the space where the book he was holding had been. She was perhaps 26, 27 with the specific quality of someone who knows what they are looking for and is accustomed to finding it. She saw the empty space, saw the book in his hands and looked at him.

That’s the last copy, she said, not accusing, observing. I know, Jimmy said. A moment. You can have it, he said. Why? He looked at her. It was a genuine question. the kind that expects a genuine answer rather than a social formula. Because you noticed it first, he said, “You were holding it. I was holding it. You were looking for it.

There’s a difference.” She considered this. Then she took the book from his hands with the directness of someone who has decided to accept what is being offered without performing gratitude. She looked at the cover. She looked at him. “Do you read much poetry?” She said, “When I have time.” What do you do when you don’t have time? Music, he said. She nodded, filing this away.

 What kind? Guitar, he said, which was the simplest true answer and the one that gave the least away. They talked for 10 minutes in the poetry section of foils on a September afternoon about Yates and about the specific quality of poetry that works as music and music that works as poetry and the differences between hearing something and reading it.

 She was clear and precise and said what she thought without the social softening that people sometimes apply to opinions when they are not certain of their reception. He was quieter than usual, which he was sometimes in certain kinds of conversation with certain kinds of people. She was Catherine Wells. She worked as an editor for a small literary publishing house in Bloomsbury.

 She had been looking for the Yates because she was working on something that required it. He didn’t tell her his name. She didn’t ask. When they moved toward the door separately, following the natural conclusion of a conversation that has been what it needed to be without requiring extension, she said, “Thank you.” And he said, “Read it carefully.

” And they went in different directions on chairing Crossroad. And that was the end of September of 1969. Three months later, at a music industry party at the end of the year, Catherine Wells was standing near the window with a glass of wine when someone appeared beside her and said, “Did you read it?” She turned, “The man from the bookshop.

” She needed a second and then she placed him, not as a musician or as a public figure, but as the person who had given her his copy of the Yates. “I did,” she said. and and I understood why you were reluctant to give it up. I wasn’t reluctant, he said. You were holding it for quite a long time.

 He looked at her with the expression that occasionally appeared on his face when something had surprised him in a way that he found worthwhile. “You’re right,” he said. “I was.” They talked for longer this time, standing near the window as the party happened around them, about the Yates and about what she was editing and about the specific quality of certain kinds of writing that functioned like music in the sense that the understanding arrived before the explanation.

 He said something about a piece he had been working on that had the same quality, where the structure was clear to him before he could have explained why the structure was right. And she said that was exactly what writing felt like when it was working rather than when it was being made to work. And he said he had never heard the distinction put that way, but it was accurate.

 She learned his name that night, not from him, but from someone else at the party who passed by and said something to him. She recognized it with the specific quality of a recognition that reorganizes something you thought you already understood. and she held it quietly and did not say she recognized it because he had not introduced himself and there had been something in the not introducing that felt deliberate.

 When the evening ended, neither of them offered a phone number and neither of them asked for one. He said it was a good party for a conversation. She said most parties weren’t. He said this one had been specifically she agreed. They left by different roots. The years that followed were the years in which Led Zeppelin became what Led Zeppelin became, which was enormous in the specific way that things become enormous when they are the right thing for the right moment.

 And the right moment has arrived. The world changed around the music in the way that worlds change when something arrives that says more clearly than the previous things what a large number of people needed to hear said. Jimmy Paige was at the center of this and also in some way that was his specifically outside it, moving through it without being entirely of it.

 Catherine Wells edited books for the publishing house in Bloomsbury and then for a slightly larger one in Soho, and she read widely and thought carefully and lived the life of someone for whom the interior life is the primary life and the exterior life is managed with competence but without particular investment. They encountered each other across the decade at the rate of two or three times a year.

 Not at planned meetings or not meetings that were acknowledged as planned. A reading at a bookshop in Marilleone, a private view at a gallery in Mayfair. The kind of events that circulate in the cultural life of London, and that people with particular kinds of interests attend, and at which the same people are occasionally present at the same time.

Each time they talked in the specific way that they had talked in foils and at the party, and that turned out to be the way they always talked, which was directly and without social padding, following the subject wherever it went, rather than steering it toward comfortable ground. He was not like this with everyone. She probably was.

 They never talked about the music specifically. They talked about music in the way you talk about a subject you both understand deeply using shorthand that assumes the understanding. She never asked him what a song meant or where it came from. He never explained. This was one of the things that made the conversation possible.

 The absence of the explanatory burden that fame tends to create between the famous person and everyone else. The thing that neither of them said was present in the conversations. The way that certain things are present in conversations, felt rather than stated, acknowledged through the specific quality of attention that both of them brought to the others company rather than through any direct address.

 He noticed things about what she said that he retained and sometimes returned to weeks later in a different conversation. She noticed things about the way he listened, which was not the listening of someone managing a social situation, but the listening of someone who is genuinely interested in what is being said. In October of 1970, Led Zeppelin 3 was released.

 Catherine saw it in a record shop window in Bloomsberry and went in and bought it. The way you buy something when you are not entirely sure why, but the not being sure is itself a reason. She took it home and played it on the turntable in the sitting room of her flat and worked through most of the side one while reading in the way that she sometimes listened to music as background to something else.

 Tangerine began and she kept reading. Then she stopped reading. She set the book down and listened to the song. It was not a long song, not even 4 minutes. A piece built on an acoustic guitar foundation with a specific melodic quality. Something that moved between folk and something older than folk and that had a relationship with words that was unusual.

 The words not quite carrying the full meaning. The melody carrying what the words didn’t. The two of them together saying something that neither could have said alone. She listened to it twice more. Then she sat for a while with the record still turning after the song had ended, listening to the silence of the next groove.

 She was not certain she understood what she was feeling. She was certain she was feeling something. The next time she saw him, which was at a gallery opening in Mayfair in November, she waited until they had been talking for a while about other things and then said without particular emphasis that she had bought the album. Which one? He said. The third one.

 A pause. What did you think? I thought Tangerine was extraordinary. He looked at her. He had the expression he occasionally had in their conversations when something had happened that he was choosing how to respond to the expression of someone taking a moment. It’s a very personal song, he said. I could hear that, she said.

 Could you? Yes. They looked at each other for a moment. Then someone appeared beside them, and the conversation moved elsewhere, and Tangerine was not mentioned again that evening, and was not mentioned again in the years that followed, and yet was present in all of their subsequent conversations, in the way that certain things are present once they have been named, hovering at the edge of everything else without requiring direct address.

 The autumn of 1973 was when they came closest. It was a Sunday afternoon and they had been walking in Hamstead Heath because they had both been at a lunch nearby and had left at the same time and continued talking while walking and had not quite found the point at which the walking should end. The afternoon light had the quality that October afternoons in London have, the quality of something winding down, and they were walking through it in the comfortable silence that had developed between them over four years of conversations. The silence

that two people inhabit when they trust each other enough to not fill space with sound. Catherine said, “Can I ask you something?” “Yes,” he said. She was quiet for a moment. He waited. “Never mind,” she said. He looked at her. He understood with the specific understanding that their years of talking had produced what she had been about to ask.

 He also understood in the same moment that he had been about to say something, that there had been a sentence forming in him that had not found its way out. “It’s getting late,” he said. “Yes,” she said. They walked back to the road and found a taxi and she went one way and he went another and the sentence that had been forming in him dissolved in the way that sentences dissolve when the moment for them has passed.

 He had known for several years by then what the not saying meant. It meant that there was no form available for what he felt toward Catherine Wells that would not have required both of them to become different people to inhabit it. His life was the life his life was. The tours and the studios and the sustained intensity of making something large and her life was the life her life was.

 The books and the quiet and the interior concentration. He had understood in the specific way that certain understandings arrive fully formed without requiring the working out. That the thing between them was the thing between them precisely because it had never been asked to become something else.

 That the moment they tried to make it into what it almost looked like from the outside, it would cease to be what it actually was. He had understood this. understanding it had not made the October afternoon in 1973 easier. In January of 1979, at a restaurant in Soho, Catherine told him about New York. A large publishing house had offered her a position.

 She would be leaving in March. He was quiet for a moment. That’s good, he said. Is it for you? Yes. She waited. He looked at the table and then at her. Will you be happy there? He said, “I think so.” “Then go.” She had been looking for something in his face. He knew she was looking and he knew what she was looking for.

 And he also knew that if he gave her what she was looking for, it would not change what was true, which was that New York was right for her. And that his life was what his life was. And that the 10 years of conversations had been what they had been, which was real and complete and not a lesser version of something larger, but a thing in its own right.

 He said, “Take care of yourself.” She said, “You, too.” She left in March. Led Zeppelin’s last concert was in July of 1980. John Bonham died in September. The band ended in October in a statement that was brief and final and said what needed to be said without saying more. Catherine read the statement in New York.

 She thought about writing something. She didn’t. The years passed in the way that years pass when people are living their lives fully in different places. Catherine became a senior editor and then a publisher. She married in 1991 a man named Thomas who was thoughtful and steady and who made her life larger in the ways that a good marriage does.

 She was happy in the specific way that she had told Jimmy she thought she would be. The happiness of someone whose interior life is rich and whose exterior life is calm. She listened to tangerine sometimes, not often. on certain kinds of evenings when the light was the right light and the mood was the mood that certain songs require.

 Every time the same thing happened which was the same thing that had happened on the first listening in her flat in Bloomsbury in 1970. The same stopping, the same stillness, the same thing felt that could not quite be named. In 2019, a literary magazine published a career retrospective interview with Catherine Wells, who was 76 years old and recently retired and considered one of the most significant editors of her generation.

 The interviewer asked toward the end about the cultural world she had moved through across her career and whether the music world had ever intersected with the literary one in her experience. Catherine was quiet for a moment in the way that she had always been quiet when a question deserved a real answer. Once, she said, a long time ago.

 Can you tell me about it? Someone who understood silence the way I understood words, she said. We never needed to explain ourselves to each other, which is rare. What happened? Nothing, she said. And everything, depending on how you look at it. The interviewer waited. “There’s a song,” Catherine said.

 “You might know it. It’s called Tangerine by Led Zeppelin.” She looked at the interviewer. “Listen to it sometime. You’ll understand.” The interviewer asked if she wanted to say who the person was. “No,” she said and smiled. “But listen to the song.” Jimmy Page in the various interviews he gave across the years when the subject of Tangerine arose said the same thing he always said about songs that people wanted explained which was that they meant different things to different people and that the meaning was in the listening rather than

in the explanation. He said this with the consistency of someone who means it, who genuinely believes that what a song says to the person hearing it is more important than what the person who wrote it intended, and who understands that explaining a song is a way of making it smaller rather than larger.

 He never said Catherine’s name. He never said anything that would have made her findable, identifiable, the subject of the kind of attention that his world produced, and that her world had always been insulated from. This was, of all the things he had done for her across the 10 years of their conversations, the one she would have been most grateful for, if she had known he was doing it, she had always understood silence.

 He had always understood music. between the two of them across a decade and a bookshop and a song and the specific kind of love that is real because it was never asked to be more than itself. They had said everything that needed to be said. Some things don’t need words. Some things are better as songs.

 On an autumn evening in 1970, Jimmy Paige sat down and wrote Tangerine. And she heard it and she knew. The 1973 autumn afternoon in Hamstead Heath was the closest they came. And the closest they came was the distance of a question that was not asked and a sentence that was not completed, which is a particular kind of distance.

 Not the distance of arangement, but the distance of people who understand each other well enough to know that certain questions once asked cannot be unasked and that the asking changes the thing it is asking about. Catherine had been about to say something. He had felt this the way you feel these things when you know someone well.

 The specific quality of a person preparing to say something significant. The change in the texture of the silence. He had been about to say something himself. Then neither of them did, and they said it was getting late instead, and they found separate taxis, and the thing that had been about to happen remained what it had always been, which was something felt rather than said.

 He had understood over the years of the conversations that this was not a failure. It was the shape of the thing. Catherine Wells and Jimmy Paige were not people whose lives would have fit together in any conventional sense. Not because either of them was difficult or unknowable, but because the lives they were living were different kinds of lives that occupied different kinds of time and space, and the joining of them would have required both of them to become different people.

 And the different people they would have become would not have had this. the conversations and the October afternoons and the 10 years of knowing someone in the way you know them when you have never had to explain yourself to them. He had understood this. The understanding had not made January of 1979 easier.

 sitting across a restaurant table in Soho while she told him about New York, watching her face as she told him, and knowing what she was waiting to hear from him, and knowing also that what she was waiting to hear was something he could not honestly say, because saying it would have been the beginning of something that would have unmade what was already real.

 He said, “Will you be happy there?” She said, “I think so.” He said, “Then go.” and she did. And the 10 years were what they were, which was everything and nothing. Depending on how you measure these things, depending on whether you believe that love requires the forms that love usually takes, or whether you believe that love is sometimes the thing that stays in the poetry section and the autumn afternoons and the song that gets written and the listening that follows and the silence between two people who understand each other completely and

never needed to say so. Some things don’t need words. Some things are better as songs. On an autumn evening in 1970, Jimmy Paige sat down and wrote Tangerine and she heard it and she knew and that was enough. It was always in the end enough. There is a version of this story in which Jimmy Paige says something at the restaurant in Soho in January of 1979 and Catherine Wells does not go to New York and the two of them find out what the life of the two of them would have been.

 That version exists somewhere in the space of things that almost happened and it may be a beautiful version. The version in which love is declared and received and acted upon and takes the forms that love usually takes. But there is also this version. The version in which the 10 years of conversations are the thing itself rather than the prelude to the thing.

 In which the notsaying is not a failure of courage but a form of understanding. In which two people who know each other as well as two people can know each other without the scaffolding of conventional relationship choose separately and without discussion to let the thing be what it is rather than risk making it into something it is not. This version has a song in it.

 A song that was written in autumn of 1970 and that a woman heard in her flat in Bloomsberry on a winter evening and that stopped her reading and made her sit in the specific stillness of someone who has understood something they did not fully know they needed to understand. A song she listened to alone for 50 years on certain kinds of evenings with the same feeling each time.

 and a man who when asked in interviews what the song was about always said the same thing. It means different things to different people. Which was true and was also in its way the most honest answer available because what it meant to Catherine Wells was something only Catherine Wells knew and what it meant to Jimmy Page was something only Jimmy Page knew and neither of them ever said and neither of them needed to because the song had said it for them. That is what songs are for.

That is what this one was