Someone Told Jimmy Page He Wasn’t on the List — He Was the Headline Act

Someone Told Jimmy Page He Wasn’t on the List — He Was the Headline Act

Someone told Jimmy Paige he wasn’t on the list. He was the headline act. The Hammersmith Odon on a November evening in 1975 was 3 hours away from selling out which it had done weeks earlier. The 3,000 tickets gone in the specific speed that Led Zeppelin tickets went in 1975, which was the speed of something that cannot be stopped once it has begun.

Physical graffiti had been out since February. The tour had been running since January. By November, the momentum of it had achieved the quality of something that was simply happening, too large to be contained by any particular evening, but contained by each particular evening. Anyway, the full weight of it landing in each city, as if that city were the only city.

 Jimmy Paige arrived at the Hammersmith Odon at 4 in the afternoon, wearing a hat and a jacket that had been chosen for the purpose of spending three hours working with a sound crew rather than for any other purpose. And he arrived alone, without the assistant or the driver, or the various people who might ordinarily have accompanied someone in his position to a venue of this size on a night of this significance.

 He had done this before. He preferred to do sound checks in conditions as close as possible to the conditions in which he actually thought about music, which were conditions of quiet and relative anonymity without the production that surrounded the full event. The sound check was something he took seriously in the way that he took all aspects of the music seriously, which was completely and without the performance of seriousness that some musicians produce in lie of the actual thing.

 The sound in the Hammersmith Odon needed to be right, and whether it was right was something that only the person who was going to play in it could determine, and so he came three hours early in a hat and a jacket to determine it. Steven Dow was 23 years old and had been working in event security for 11 days.

 Before the 11 days, he had worked security at a distribution warehouse in Suffukk for 2 years, a job in which the primary requirement was presence rather than judgment. The occupation of a position that deterred rather than managed. Event security was different in ways he was still learning. And the primary difference as far as he had understood it in 11 days was that the events attracted people who had various kinds of claims to access and that his job was to evaluate those claims against the list he had been given and the criteria he had been told to apply. The criteria were simple credentials or the list both if possible one at minimum no credentials no list no entry. He had applied these criteria consistently across 11 days and had found them for the most part sufficient. He had let in the people he was supposed to let in and had stopped the people he was supposed to stop.

 And the stopping had produced in him the specific satisfaction of someone who is doing their job correctly and who knows it. But there was something else in the 11 days that Steven had not fully examined, which was the specific quality of the satisfaction that the stopping produced, its texture and its flavor. The fact that it was not simply the neutral satisfaction of a task completed, but something more personal, something that was about the person being stopped as much as about the task.

 In the two years at the warehouse, his authority had been indistinguishable from his presence. He was there and therefore things were prevented. There was no particular pleasure in it because there was no particular person on the other side of the prevention. Event security was different. Event security placed him at a threshold that people wanted to cross and gave him the power to prevent them from crossing it.

 And the people who wanted to cross it were often people of a kind he had not previously had power over. People who were impressive in some way or who believed themselves to be impressive and the power to stop them had a flavor that the power to guard a warehouse did not. He had not named this to himself.

 He had simply experienced the satisfaction and accepted it as part of the job. What he had not understood was that the satisfaction was the sign of something wrong rather than something right. that the enjoyment of stopping people rather than the neutral exercise of a necessary function was the specific indicator of a person who was using their position for something it was not designed for.

 He would understand this later. He did not understand it yet. Standing at the artist’s entrance of the Hammersmith Odon with his clipboard and his criteria when Jimmy Paige came around the corner. He was standing at the artist’s entrance at the back of the Hammersmith Odon at 4 in the afternoon, arms folded, when Jimmy Paige came around the corner.

 He looked at the man approaching. He performed the rapid assessment that 11 days of event security had trained him to perform, the assessment of appearance and bearing, and the various signals that experienced security people learned to read, and that Steven was still in the early stages of learning. What he saw was a man in his early 30s.

 Hat, jacket, jeans, no lanyard, no credential, nothing that marked him as anything other than someone who had arrived at the back of a large venue and was walking toward the door. This is the artist’s entrance only, Steven said. You’ll need to go around to the front. The man stopped. I know. I’m Jimmy Paige. I’m here for the sound check.

Steven looked at him. He looked at the list on the clipboard he was holding. Jimmy Page was on the list right at the top with the designation headline act beside it. He looked at the man again. Your name’s on the list, he said. But that doesn’t prove you’re him. I am him, the man said. Anyone can say that, Steven said.

 He was aware at a level he could not quite articulate that the situation had a quality he had not encountered before. But the framework he had been given did not contain a provision for that quality. And so he applied the framework. Have you got credentials, a pass or a photo ID with the event on it? I don’t carry a credential, the man said.

 I’m the artist. The sound check is in 3 hours and I need to get in. Steven had the experience in this moment of someone who has a position and who is aware that the position is being tested and who has decided that the testing is itself a reason to hold the position rather than an invitation to examine whether the position is correct.

Look mate, he said, and there was in his voice the particular quality of someone who is performing authority rather than exercising it. the slight excess of confidence that is the signature of someone who has recently acquired a small amount of power and who has not yet understood the difference between its use and its display.

 Anyone can say they’re Jimmy Page. If you were really the headline act, you’d have credentials. So, either you’ve got them or you haven’t. And if you haven’t, he made a gesture with the clipboard that completed the sentence. Several members of the technical crew were working near the loading bay. 20 m away. Two of them had glanced up when the conversation began and had identified what they were looking at, which was Jimmy Paige being stopped at the door of his own concert.

Neither of them said anything. Steven was the official security, and they had their own jobs, and the situation was not their situation to resolve. “Call your supervisor,” Jimmy said. His voice had changed. The patience was still there, but it had the quality of something that has reached a particular point and is waiting for a specific resolution rather than for any resolution.

 Get someone who can sort this out. I don’t need to call my supervisor, Steven said. I’ve got my instructions. If you don’t have credentials, you can’t come in. That’s the rule. I’m aware of the rule, Jimmy said. I’m also aware that I’m the person the rule is designed to admit and I’d like to be admitted. Well, Steven said, and the word had that particular quality again.

 The quality of someone enjoying a thing they should not be enjoying. You’ll need to prove that, won’t you? The technical crew had stopped working. Not conspicuously, not as a group, but individually. each of them finding reasons to be stationary and facing in a direction that included the artist’s entrance in its field of view.

 Jimmy Paige stood at the door of the Hammersmith Odon for 11 minutes. He had performed a calculation in the way that people who are accustomed to managing complex situations perform calculations and had determined that escalating the confrontation was not the right response to the situation. The right response was to wait for the situation to resolve itself through the arrival of someone who had the authority to resolve it which would happen because it always happened because the systems that produced this kind of situation also contained the mechanisms for

addressing it. He was aware while he waited of the technical crew in the loading bay who were aware of what was happening and who were not intervening. He understood why they were not intervening. Steven was the official security which meant that intervening meant contradicting the official security in the presence of the official security which created a kind of conflict that people who work in venues learn to avoid because the conflicts have a way of following them into subsequent jobs. He did not hold the

non-intervention against them. He had been in enough working environments to understand the specific pressure that produces it. He waited because the alternative was a confrontation that would create exactly the kind of scene he did not want to create in the loading bay of his own concert 3 hours before it was due to begin.

 The kind of scene that would be talked about that would generate exactly the kind of attention he was at that moment specifically trying to avoid. He was here for a sound check. He intended to do the sound check. What was required to make that possible was about to arrive. Peter Grant came through the artist’s entrance from the inside at 13 minutes past 4.

Peter Grant was the manager of Led Zeppelin and had been since the band’s formation. And the relationship between Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin was the relationship of someone who had understood from the beginning what the band was going to become and who had organized his professional life around ensuring that what it was going to become was able to become it without interference from the machinery of the music industry.

 He was a large man in every relevant sense and he occupied space with the authority of someone who has spent years ensuring that the space is his to occupy. He came through the door and saw Jimmy Page standing on the outside of it and his face went through a sequence of expressions in approximately 2 seconds. The first expression was confusion.

 The second was the specific kind of anger that is produced when something has happened that should not have been able to happen and that someone is responsible for Jimmy. He said what the bloody hell are you doing outside? I was explaining to your colleague here Jimmy said that I’m the headline act. Peter Grant looked at Steven Dow.

 Steven looked at Peter Grant and understood with the specific understanding that arrives when the full weight of an error becomes visible that the framework he had been applying with such confidence had been insufficient for the situation he had been applying it to. Peter Grant did not say anything for a moment.

 He looked at Steven with the expression of someone who is deciding whether to speak immediately or to let the silence do the work first. He let the silence do the work first. Then he said, “You stopped Jimmy Page at the door of his own concert.” Steven began to explain about credentials and the list and protocol and the instructions he had been given, and each element of the explanation sounded as he heard himself producing it more inadequate than the last.

 “Peter held up one hand.” “Get your supervisor,” he said. “Now.” He held the door open and Jimmy walked through it into the Hammersmith Odon and the door closed behind them and Steven was left at the artist’s entrance with the clipboard and the list and the very clear understanding that the 11 days of event security work he had completed were almost certainly the last 11 days of event security work he was going to be allowed to do inside.

 The sound crew were genuinely relieved to see Jimmy in the way that people who have been waiting for a thing to happen are relieved when it happens. And Jimmy went immediately to the stage and began the work of the sound check, moving through it with the concentrated attention that it required, saying little, listening carefully, making the adjustments that the space and the equipment and his own ear told him were needed.

 He was aware that he was working with the particular quality of someone who has had something taken from them that they cannot recover. The 20 minutes outside had not been simply inconvenient. They had been the 20 minutes in which he was supposed to have been inside doing the work that made the show what it needed to be and they were gone.

 He worked around the loss and made the adjustments that the loss required and continued. Dave Morrison, the supervisor for the security company contracted to the venue, arrived at the Hammersmith Odon at 20 minutes to 5, summoned by Peter Grant’s call and went directly to the small office near the artist’s entrance where Peter was waiting and where Steven Dow was sitting in the particular posture of someone who has already composed themselves for bad news.

 Dave Morrison was a professional who had spent 15 years running security operations for events of various kinds and who had encountered in those 15 years most of the situations that this kind of work generates. He had not encountered this one before or not in this precise form. And what he said when Peter Grant had finished explaining what had happened was brief and unambiguous.

Dowed, I’m going to have to let you go. What happened here tonight is exactly the kind of thing that this company cannot be associated with. It reflects badly on everyone. Steven had prepared himself for this. He had been preparing for it since the moment Peter Grant’s expression had done what it had done at the artist’s entrance.

 He had his explanation ready. the explanation about the list and the credentials and the instructions he had been given and he offered it and Dave Morrison listened to it with the patience of someone who has heard many explanations and who knows how to weigh them. You had instructions, Dave said.

 Those instructions didn’t tell you to mock a man who told you he was the headline act. They didn’t tell you to enjoy making someone wait, did they? Steven was quiet. Get your things,” Dave said. The knock on the office door came two minutes later. The three men in the room looked at the door. Dave Morrison opened it. Jimmy Page was standing on the other side of it.

 He had finished the section of the sound check that he needed to complete before this particular piece of business, which he had heard about from Peter Grant, and which he had decided required his presence. and he had asked where the security office was and had been told and had come there. He looked at the room.

 He looked at Steven Dow who had his head down and who had the posture of someone who is waiting for everything to be over. I heard you’re letting him go, Jimmy said. Dave Morrison confirmed that he was. I’m asking you not to, Jimmy said. The room received this in the specific way that rooms receive information that contradicts their expectation of what was going to be said next.

 Peter Grant, who was standing by the wall, produced a sound that was not quite a word and was not quite silence. Jimmy, he started Peter. Jimmy said not sharply, simply the word that closes a discussion rather than opens one. He looked at Dave Morrison. What he did was wrong. He made me wait outside my own concert.

 He mocked me when I told him who I was. He enjoyed having power over someone for reasons that had nothing to do with doing his job. He paused. But he’s 23 years old and he made an error of judgment in the first real job he’s had that requires judgment. And I can see on his face that he understands the error. Steven had lifted his head.

 His eyes were wet. With respect, Mr. page. Dave said, “This isn’t the kind of error I can overlook. The professional consequences. I understand the professional consequences.” Jimmy said, “I’m asking you to set them aside this once because I’m asking.” Dave Morrison looked between Jimmy Page and the young man who had stopped Jimmy Page at the door of his own concert and who was sitting in a chair in a security office with wet eyes and the posture of someone who has been completely reduced by the weight of their own mistake. He

made the calculation that the situation required and arrived at the answer that the presence of Jimmy Page in the room made available. If you’re asking, he said, “Then I’ll keep him on with a final warning.” Jimmy looked at Steven. “Stand up,” he said. Steven stood. Jimmy looked at him for a moment.

 “You made a serious mistake tonight,” he said. “Not because you didn’t recognize me. You might not have recognized me. That’s not the point.” He looked at him steadily. “The point is what you did when I told you who I was. You didn’t simply follow protocol. You mocked me. You enjoyed making me wait.

 You used the power you’d been given for something it wasn’t given for. He paused. That’s the thing you need to understand and not do again. Steven nodded. His hands were not quite steady. Every person who comes through that door, Jimmy said, deserves to be treated with basic respect. Whether they have a credential or not, whether they look like someone important or not, whether you recognize them or not, respect first.

Then verify in that order. He extended his hand. That’s the job. Steven took his hand and shook it. And the handshake had the quality of something that is both a conclusion and a beginning. The ending of one version of an evening and the start of another. Thank you. Steven said the words had the quality of words that are insufficient for what they are trying to convey and that are being used anyway because they are the only words available.

 Don’t thank me with words, Jimmy said. Thank me with how you do the job. He left the office. That evening, Steven Dow stood at the artist’s entrance of the Hammersmith Odon with a quality of attention that was different from what it had been at 4:00 in the afternoon. He greeted the musicians and the crew members and the production people and the various individuals who came through the door with the specific courtesy of someone who has recently been shown the cost of its absence and who has decided the cost is too high to pay again. When Led Zeppelin’s set ended

at half 10, and Jimmy Paige came through the backstage corridor and passed the artist’s entrance on his way out, Steven straightened and gave the small, precise nod of someone acknowledging a debt they intend to honor. Jimmy Paige glanced at him and returned the nod and continued out into the November evening.

 Peter Grant asked Jimmy in the car on the way back from the Hammersmith Odon why he had done it. He made a mistake, Jimmy said. He knew it. That was enough. Peter was quiet for a moment. Most people in your position would have let him go. I know, Jimmy said. That’s what power is usually used for.

 He looked out the window at London going by. I prefer to use it for other things, he said. Steven Dow worked in event security for the next 30 years. He worked in venues across London and eventually across the country. And he built a reputation in the industry as someone whose judgment was reliable and whose treatment of every person who came through his doors was consistent and respectful regardless of who they appeared to be or what credential they were carrying.

 The people who worked with him and who knew the full story of the November evening in 1975 noted that he mentioned it occasionally, not as an anecdote about a famous person, but as the specific moment at which he had understood something about what his job was actually for. Jimmy Page has not spoken publicly about the evening at the Hammersmith Odon.

 He has not mentioned Steven Dow in any interview. These things live in the register he keeps for things that were simply what was required. The things that needed to be done and were done, the things that do not require his public account of them. What he said in the office of the Hammersmith Odon on a November evening in 1975 to a 23-year-old who had made a serious mistake and who was sitting in a chair waiting for the consequences covers most of what there is to say.

 respect first, then verify in that order. That is the job for everyone. The thing that Juan Gabriel understood when he walked to the office where Rigoberto Salana was being dismissed in Mexico City in 1989 was the same thing that Jimmy Paige understood when he walked to the office where Steven Dow was being dismissed in London in 1975, which is that the most powerful thing available to a person in his position is the choice not to use that power for what it could most easily be used for.

The most obvious use of the power was the obvious one. Jimmy Page could have confirmed that he wanted Steven Dow dismissed and Steven Dow would have been dismissed and the evening would have continued with that fact as a footnote to the larger facts of the concert and the music and the 23,000 people who had bought tickets to see Led Zeppelin play at the Hammersmith Odon in November of 1975.

Nobody would have questioned the decision. Nobody would have found it unreasonable. The young man had stopped the headline act at the door of his own concert and had mocked him. The consequence was proportionate. But proportionate consequences and the right consequences are not always the same thing.

 And Jimmy Paige had understood something about this that has to do with what power is actually for. When it is used well rather than when it is used simply because it is available. Steven Dow had made a mistake. The mistake was serious. The mistake had consequences that were real. But the mistake had also already produced something in Steven Dow that was more valuable than the dismissal would have produced, which was the understanding, complete and visceral and permanent of what the mistake had cost and what it said about the person who had made it.

He carried that understanding when he left the office. He would carry it for the rest of his professional life. The dismissal would have added nothing to it except the loss of the job and the loss of the job would have been the end of the lesson rather than the beginning of it. Jimmy Page chose the beginning.

 That is what the most powerful thing available to a person with power turns out to be when they understand what power is actually for. The choice not to destroy. the choice to give the lesson instead. Respect first, then verify in that order. That is the job for everyone who comes through the