The Letter Jimmy Page Wrote Robert Plant After Karac Died—Plant Found It in a Box 31 Years Later

The Letter Jimmy Page Wrote Robert Plant After Karac Died—Plant Found It in a Box 31 Years Later

Robert Plant was going through boxes in the spare room of his house in 2008. The kind of sorting that people do when a space has accumulated too much and they finally commit an afternoon to it. He was working efficiently, making decisions without overthinking them. Keep, discard, donate, set aside for someone else.

 He had done a reasonable amount of this kind of sorting in his life. He had moved houses, cleared out the aftermath of tours, dealt with the accumulated paperwork of a career that had been generating documents and photographs and physical objects for 40 years. He was by 2008 practiced at it. Then he opened a box that had been sealed since 1977.

Inside, under some tour programs from the North American leg and two photographs he recognized but hadn’t seen in decades, was an envelope with his name on it in handwriting he recognized immediately. He sat down on the floor of the spam room with the envelope in his hands. He had not forgotten the letter existed.

 That would have been impossible. The circumstances under which he had received it were not the kind of circumstances that permit forgetting. What he had done was something different from forgetting. He had put the letter in a place where he would not encounter it accidentally, where it would remain available without being present, where the act of reading it again would require a deliberate decision rather than a casual encounter.

He had made that decision 31 years ago. He had not in the time since reversed it. He sat on the floor of the spare room for a while before he opened the envelope. Then he opened it. To understand what the letter said, or more accurately, to understand why what it said mattered in the way it did, you have to go back to August of 1977 to a sequence of events that had already been the worst sequence of events in Robert Plant’s life.

 And that in the days immediately following had not yet finished being that. Carrick Plant died on July 26th, 1977. He was 5 years old. He died in England while his father was in America on a tour that was, by the external measurements of such things, the most successful tour Led Zeppelin had ever undertaken. Plaid flew home. The tour was cancelled.

The remaining dates, the soldout arenas, the tens of thousands of tickets already purchased were suspended with a single statement from the band’s management that said very little and needed to say nothing more. The music industry understood. The fans understood there was nothing to explain.

 What followed in the weeks after Carrick’s death was a period that Plant has never described in any detail in any interview, which is consistent with the way he has always handled the most private chambers of his life. By maintaining a careful boundary between what he performs for the world and what belongs to him and to the people who are actually present, what is known about those weeks is the shape of them rather than the interior.

 Plant was in England with his wife Moren and his daughter Carmen in the house in the Worershure countryside in the specific silence that follows when something has been taken from a house that cannot be returned. Jimmy Page was not in England in the days immediately after the news arrived. He was in the process of returning from America, from the tour infrastructure, from the practical enormity of what Led Zeppelin’s operational machinery required when it stopped suddenly rather than winding down in the ordinary way. The logistics

of cancing a tour of that scale involved a specific kind of work that fell primarily on Peter Grant and the management infrastructure. But Paige was not entirely exempt from it, and the process of getting home was not as simple as buying a ticket and boarding a flight. He arrived back in England in the first week of August.

 He did not go directly to plant. He understood with the particular intelligence about people that Paige had always had and that existed somewhat separately from his public persona that arriving at the house in the immediate aftermath of the death might be the wrong instinct acted on at the wrong time.

 That what he needed to offer had to be offered in a form that Plant could receive without it requiring him to perform anything in return. Plant in those days needed not to be visited. He needed not to have to manage anyone else’s response to what had happened. Paige sat at his kitchen table in Sussex on the third evening after he arrived home and wrote a letter.

 He was not a person who wrote letters easily. His communication with the world, with the press, with the industry, with even his closest colleagues was almost always managed through spoken words or through music, which was the language in which he was most fluent and most fully himself. He had written very few personal letters in his life.

 The few he had written to people he was close to tended to be short, practical, focused on specific questions of logistics or arrangement rather than on the emotional register in which the relationship actually lived. The relationship between Jimmy Page and Robert Plant had been built in the particular way that relationships are built when two people have been thrown together into a shared enterprise of extreme intensity and have discovered through the process of that enterprise that they understand each other in ways that ordinary social circumstances would

never have produced. They had met in 1968 when Paige called Plant about a new project he was assembling. Plant was 20 years old, unknown outside the Midlands music scene, playing to half- empty venues in Birmingham and the surrounding towns. Paige was 24, already established as a session musician and a member of the Yard Birds, with a clarity of vision about what Led Zeppelin needed to be that had arrived before the band itself existed.

 What Paige had recognized in planned from the beginning was not simply the voice, though the voice was by any standard extraordinary. It was something underneath the voice, a quality of emotional directness, a willingness to commit fully to whatever the music was asking of him that was rarer than technical ability and less susceptible to development through practice.

 You either had it or you didn’t. Plant had it in a form that Paige understood immediately and responded to with the specific enthusiasm of someone who has found unexpectedly exactly the thing they were looking for. The 9 years between 1968 and 1977 had built the kind of bond that only forms between people who have been through a great deal together in conditions that demand everything.

 They had been through the early American tours where the response was larger than anything either of them had anticipated. They had been through the years of ascending commercial and critical success that had progressively removed Led Zeppelin from any recognizable comparison class. They had been through the roads accident of 1975 when Plant and his wife Moren had been nearly killed in a car crash on a Greek island and the band had suspended touring while Plant recovered.

 Paige had visited He had sat with plant in the specific way that people who love each other sit with each other when the alternative is not being there. By 1977, the relationship between Paige and plant was not a professional relationship with a personal dimension. It was a personal relationship that happened to exist within a professional context.

 The distinction mattered in the days after Carrick’s death, when what Paige had to offer Plant had nothing to do with Led Zeppelin, and everything to do with nine years of being the person who was present for what Plant went through, good and bad, triumphant and devastating, and of Plant being the same for him. This letter was not short.

 The housekeeper who had seen him sitting at the table that morning had noticed the paper in front of him, the pen in his hand, the quality of his stillness. She had left his tea on the counter and gone. When she came back an hour later, he was still there. When she came back an hour after that, the paper had been replaced by new paper and he was still writing. He wrote for 3 hours.

 Paige was 43 years old when he sat down to write the letter. He had spent 25 years understanding music with an almost forensic precision, taking apart the structures of the things he admired, understanding their mechanisms, knowing how they produced their effects. He was not someone who encountered things he could not account for without wanting to account for them.

 The experience of writing the letter was by all inference the experience of encountering a situation where his usual analytical equipment was not sufficient where the thing that was required could not be produced by understanding alone but had to be reached for in a way that understanding could only partially guide.

 He found that he had more to say than he expected. Not because grief is simple. It is not. But because what he needed to say to plant was not primarily about grief. It was about something else. Something that grief had made visible in the way that loss has of making visible the things that were present all along, but that the ordinary momentum of the life in motion tends to obscure.

 What Paige wrote in that letter has never been fully disclosed. Plant has not quoted it in any interview. The existence of the letter became known through a conversation that Plant had with a close friend in the early 2010s in which he mentioned finding it in the box and which that friend subsequently described in generalized terms without quoting anything directly in a context that eventually reached the edges of the music journalism world.

 The specific content remains private in the way that the most important private things tend to remain private. Not through any active suppression, but simply because the people who know it understand that it doesn’t belong in public and have respected that understanding without needing to discuss it. What is known from the generalized account, from what Plant said in the conversation with his friend, from the context that 31 years of not opening a box provides, is something about the quality of what the letter contained rather than its

specific content. Paige had written apparently not about Led Zeppelin, not about the tour, not about what would happen next with the band, not about any of the practical questions that surrounded the immediate situation. He had written about Carrick, about what he had known of the child, which was not enormous in terms of time spent, but was substantial in terms of attention paid.

Paige had been present in Plant’s life through the years of Carrick’s life in the specific way that people are present in each other’s lives when they spend enormous amounts of time together in the pressurized environment of a touring band. Not constantly, not in the domestic texture of daily life, but in the concentrated way of people who have been through a great deal together and who have developed through that shared experience a quality of knowledge about each other that ordinary friendship rarely achieves in the same amount of

time. He had written about what he remembered. Specific things, the kind of specific things that only someone who had been paying attention would remember. A moment from 1974 that Plant would not have expected anyone else to have registered. A thing Carrick said on one occasion that Paige had found himself thinking about in the days since the news arrived.

 The way the child had a quality of, and this was the phrase Plant quoted to his friend, the only direct quotation that exists from the letter, your kind of presence, which Plant had understood immediately, and which had been, he told his friend, the most accurate thing anyone had said to him in the weeks following the death. Paige had also written apparently about the music, not in a consolatory way, not in the way of someone reaching for something to say and landing on the wrong thing, but in the specific way that Paige understood things, which was

through the frame of sound and its relationship to feeling. He had written about what music was for in terms that Plant recognized as coming from somewhere genuine rather than from the available language of comfort. He had written about what he believed happened when something was put into sound that was otherwise inexpressable.

This was not a theological argument. It was a musician’s understanding of why music existed, offered to another musician at the moment when that understanding was most needed and most accessible. He had signed the letter with his first name, not Jimmy James, the version of his name that belonged to the private person rather than the public one.

 Plant had read the letter once on the day it arrived. He had folded it and put it in an envelope and placed it in a box. Not because it hadn’t reached him. It had perhaps because it had reached him more completely than he was prepared to process at the time. In the first weeks of the loss, when everything that reached him was reaching him at a frequency that was too high to fully absorb, the box was a way of keeping the letter available without having to be inside it every day.

31 years later, on an afternoon in 2008, when he had not planned to do anything except clear out a spare room, Robert Plant sat on the floor with the envelope in his hands and made the decision he had deferred since 1977. He read the letter again. He has not said what it was like to read it the second time.

 He has not said what he felt or what he thought or what the interval of 31 years did to the experience of the words. What he said to his friend in the conversation that eventually became the only public trace of this story was simpler than any of that. He said that reading it the second time, he understood something he hadn’t understood the first time.

 something about what Paige had been trying to do when he sat alone in Sussex for 3 hours and wrote words that he was not by disposition or by habit a person who wrote. He said he thought Paige had been trying to do for plant with language what they both knew how to do for each other with music. He had been trying to find a form adequate to something that had no adequate form.

 He had been trying in the only other medium available to him to make something that reached. It did. It just took 31 years to be heard completely. Today, Robert Plant continues to make music that people who listen carefully describe as carrying something, an understanding of loss and time, and the way love persists after the thing it was attached to is gone.

 He has said in various forms across various decades that the most important things he has ever experienced are not available for interview. The letter from Paige in August of 1977 is not something he discusses directly. But the box from which it came has not been resealed. If this story of what friendship looks like when it tries to reach past the limits of language moved you, hit that like button and subscribe.

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