“Zeppelin Was Just Pentatonic Noodling” — He Was Sitting Right There

“Zeppelin Was Just Pentatonic Noodling” — He Was Sitting Right There

October 17th, 2019. Hackney, London. The Anchor, Mare Street, 9:15 in the evening. The pub had been running live music on Thursday nights for 11 years, and had developed, over those 11 years, the specific character of a room that has absorbed enough music to have an opinion about it. An opinion that was not explicit, that nobody had written down anywhere, but that was present in the way the regulars arranged themselves, and in the way the musicians who came to play treated the stage.

Which is to say, with the specific respect that musicians give to rooms that have already heard a great deal, and know the difference between something real and something merely competent. Not a music venue, exactly. A pub with a corner of the main room cleared for a small raised platform, a backline of a Fender Twin, and a Marshall JCM 900 that had been there since 2014.

 A vocal PA that was better than it looked, and a Thursday night calendar that had become, through good booking and word of mouth, and the specific decision to let acts play sets rather than truncated showcases, one of the more reliable small room nights in East London. The regulars knew this. The musicians who played there knew this.

The room held approximately 80 people standing, and had been at approximately 73 tonight, which for a Thursday in mid-October with rain in the forecast was a good number, and the sign of a room that had built something real. The Greyfield brothers had been the second act on the bill. Three musicians in their mid-20s who played the kind of guitar-led rock that drew equally on blues vocabulary and digital production, which was a combination that worked live with some bands, and produced a specific kind of technically impressive, but emotionally

incomplete sound with others. Music that the head responded to without the chest following. The Grayfield brothers were on the better side of that spectrum. The better side meaning that their set had a shape and a commitment and a lead guitarist who knew what he was doing. Their set had been good, tight, energetic.

 The lead guitarist, Connor Walsh, displaying the kind of technical fluency that comes from genuine practice and a real relationship with the instrument. The kind of player who had put the hours in and whose hands showed it. They had finished their set to solid applause. The warm applause of a Thursday night room that has been given something worth its time and were in the process of packing up the cable runs when Connor stepped back to the mic.

This was a habit of his. He had things to say and a post-set moment at the mic had become the place he said them. “Thank you,” he said. He had the slightly flushed confidence of someone who has just played well and knows it. Before we get off, I want to say something about what Martin was telling me earlier.

” He looked at his bandmate, Martin, who had the expression of someone who had said something in a private context and had not anticipated it reappearing through a PA system. “He was trying to tell me I needed to study more Zeppelin. Study more Page.” He paused, the pause of someone building toward a position they have prepared.

“No offense to anyone here who grew up on that stuff, but technically pentatonic scales, basic chord positions, a lot of sustain and the right production. The mythology is bigger than the music. Any trained guitarist can do what Page did. The legacy is built on the era, not the technique.” There was a mixed response.

 Some laughter. Someone at the bar made a noise that was not agreement. A woman near the front looked at her friend. At the back of the room, in the corner booth that had a partial view of the stage and a direct line to the bar, a man set down his glass. He was 76 years old. He had long, silver-white hair and a dark coat.

 He had come to the Anchor because the friend he was meeting had suggested it. A friend who came to Thursday nights regularly and who had, when he texted to say he was running 20 minutes late, recommended the second act. He had arrived during the Greyfield Brothers set and had been listening from the corner booth.

He had not been recognized, or if he had been recognized by anyone in the room, that person had made the specific decision to allow him to continue being unrecognized, which was the decision he preferred. He had been listening to Connor Walsh play for 35 minutes. This channel exists for the thing you say into a microphone when you don’t know who’s in the room.

 Subscribe and turn on notifications before we go any further. Paul Hewitt was the host of Thursday nights at the Anchor. He was 41 years old and had been running this night for seven of its 11 years and had become, through seven years of standing at the side of the stage and watching every act that came through this room, a very good reader of musicians and rooms and the specific chemistry between them.

The chemistry that produced good nights and the chemistry that produced nights that were fine but not good, and the specific electricity of occasionally exceptional nights, which were not common but happened often enough to keep him coming back. He had recognized the man in the corner booth approximately 12 minutes after he arrived.

He had recognized him the way you recognize someone when you are not expecting them in a place and the recognition arrives in stages. The hair first, the specific color and length of it, then the hands on the glass, then the quality of attention he was giving the stage, which was the attention of someone who had been in rooms with musicians for 60 years, and whose listening had a specific weight to it.

He had then stood very still for approximately 30 seconds, processing the implications of what he had recognized. He had not said anything. He had gone back to his position at the side of the stage and watched the rest of the set. He had watched the man in the corner booth watching the set. He had watched Connor Walsh play and watched the corner booth listening to Connor Walsh play.

 He had thought during that last song about what he was going to do when the set ended. After Connor’s mic moment, Paul walked to the corner booth. “I have to ask you something.” he said. He said it quietly, in the way of someone who is aware of the specific delicacy of what they are about to do. The man looked at him.

 Paul had the expression of someone who has already decided to do something and is informing rather than asking. “Would you play one song?” Paul said. “I’ll introduce you however you want, or I won’t introduce you at all. One song, whatever you want.” The man was quiet for a moment. He looked at the stage where Connor Walsh was coiling a cable.

 He looked at the Marshall JCM against the back wall. “What’s the backline?” he said. Paul told him. The man nodded once. He picked up his glass and finished it. He set it down. He said, “One song. Don’t introduce me until after.” Paul walked to the stage. What happened next took approximately 4 minutes and has been described differently by everyone who was present, partly because people were in different positions in the room and heard different things at different distances, and partly because descriptions of exceptional things are always incomplete

and always disagree on the details that seemed most important to each person. But the things they all agree on are these. Paul said from the stage that there was a special guest who had been in the room for the set and wanted to play one song, and that he would introduce him properly afterward. He said it with the specific composure of someone who is managing an unusual situation and has decided that composure is the right register for it.

Connor Walsh looked up from his cable. He caught Martin’s eye. Martin shrugged in the way that bass players shrug when the night has produced something they cannot immediately process. A few people moved from the bar toward the stage area. The man from the corner booth walked to the stage.

 He was tall and slightly stooped, the stoop of a tall person who has spent their life bending toward microphones and amps and mixing boards. He picked up the guitar that was still plugged into the Marshall JCM, a Stratocaster that belonged to the Grayfield Brothers rhythm guitarist, a mid-range instrument, standard factory setup, the kind of guitar that does what it is asked and nothing more, and adjusted the strap.

He spent a few seconds with it, checking the feel. He looked at the Marshall JCM. He reached around to the back panel and turned the volume from seven to four and the tone from its current position a quarter turn toward treble. One adjustment on the guitar’s volume knob, then he turned back to the room. He played the opening of Since I’ve Been Loving You, not the recorded version exactly, the studio version, which is its own perfect thing.

Something that understood the studio version from the inside and then made a different set of decisions about what to do in this room, at this volume, on this specific night, which is what playing something live means when you know both what it is and what it needs to be. He played for 3 and 1/2 minutes. He did not use the pentatonic scale exclusively.

 He did not use basic chord positions. What he used was 60 years of specific technical development that had produced a relationship between his hands and the Stratocaster, a guitar he had never played before, in which the instrument immediately became an extension of something he had been building since before most of the people in the room were born.

The sustain was not the sustain of a studio production or a digital pedal chain. It [snorts] was the sustain of a player whose vibrato kept a note alive past the point at which the physical properties of the string and the amp should have ended it. The specific result of a left-hand technique that had been developed over 60 years until it could do things that the physics of the instrument suggested were not quite available.

The bends were not the bends of a pentatonic vocabulary. They were the bends of someone who had spent 60 years thinking about what an interval contained and whose hands expressed that thinking without being asked to and without stopping to check. The room went quiet in stages. First the people nearest the stage, then the people at the bar, then everyone.

Conor Walsh had stopped coiling the cable somewhere in the first verse. The cable was loose in his hands in the way of something that has been forgot rather than put down. He was standing at the side of the stage, the position from which he had a clear view of the hands and of the amp and of the room, and his expression was the expression of someone whose taxonomy has just been reorganized without their consent or preparation.

The thing he had described 12 minutes ago into a microphone, The technique, the vocabulary, the proposition that any trained guitarist could do this was happening 4 feet away from him. The thing he had described and the thing that was happening were not the same event. They were not in the same category.

 He had been describing something he had a theory about. What was happening in front of him was something that had no theory available for it, only the sound and the room changing as the sound moved through it. Have you ever heard something that reorganized what you thought you knew about a subject in real time while you were standing in the same room with it? Tell me in the comments.

 I read every one. The last note decayed. The room remained quiet for 3 seconds, then someone started clapping, then everyone. Paul stepped to the mic. He said the name. Connor Walsh’s cable fell from his hands. He made a sound that was not a word. Martin, beside him, said something into Connor’s ear that Connor later described as completely inaudible over the sound of the room.

The man set the Stratocaster back on its stand. He looked at it for a moment. He reached into his coat pocket and took out a guitar pick, dark, worn to an asymmetric thinness on one side and set it on the amp. He walked to where Connor was standing at the side of the stage. Connor was 24 years old and had just said something into a microphone that he was going to want to think about for a long time.

 And he knew this, which was part of his expression. He looked at the man with the silver-white hair and had the specific expression of someone for whom the evening has produced substantially more information than they were expecting and who is still in the process of integrating it. The man looked at him. His expression was not triumph and not correction.

 It was not even patience, exactly. Patience implies waiting for something, and this was more like the look of someone who has finished doing something and has a small number of things left to say and is being careful about which ones. Any trained guitarist can do what I did, he said.

 He said it simply at the volume of a conversation without irony and without cruelty. He said it the way you repeat a proposition back when you want to look at it as a proposition rather than as a fact. He left a pause where the response would go. The pentatonic scale is a tool, he said. Like every other tool, it does exactly as much as the person using it understands, no more and no less.

 The understanding is not in the tool. He looked at Connor. What you played tonight was good. Your hands are doing what you’ve learned to ask them. The question is what else there is to ask. He paused one more time. That’s the only question that matters. He looked at him directly, not unkindly. Ask it more. He went back to the corner booth and put on his coat.

 He stopped at the bar on his way out, paid his tab, and left through the front door into the Mare Street evening. The pick was on the amp. Connor picked it up. He turned it over in his hand. He looked at the asymmetric wear on one side, the specific angle, the specific pressure, 60 years of a particular approach to a string. He put it in his jacket pocket.

He played Thursday nights for 3 months after that, and then stopped playing Thursday nights specifically, and started playing every night he could get a booking instead, which is a different relationship to gigging and a better one for what he was trying to do. The sets got longer. He stopped saying things into microphones between songs, stopped making statements about music and musicians, and what was or wasn’t worth studying.

He started asking things into microphones between songs instead, which is the opposite direction of travel and a more productive one. Once he asked the room whether anyone had suggestions for what he should play next. Someone shouted a request for a Led Zeppelin song. He paused. Then he played it as well as he could, which was better than it had been 12 months earlier and not yet as good as he was going to get.

He still has the pick. It is in the pocket of the jacket he was wearing that night, the black jacket, which he has not worn since that evening and which is hanging in his wardrobe in Dalston because there are things you leave where they are, undisturbed in the position in which they acquired whatever they acquired.

If this story found something in you, subscribe and turn on notifications. This channel exists for the thing you say into a microphone and for the room that is always, always larger than you think it is. What did you say before you knew who was listening? And what happened when you found out? Tell me below.

 I read every single comment. Jimmy Page once said, “The guitar is the instrument of the people.” He played Since I’ve Been Loving You in a pub in Hackney for 73 people, one of whom had just explained into a microphone why this wasn’t necessary. “The guitar is the instrument of the people.” The people were in the room. They heard it.

See you in the next one.