A Busker Played The Rain Song Outside the Same Pub for 8 Years — Then Jimmy Page Sat Down D

November 8th, 2018. London Bankside. The rain had been coming since mid-afternoon. Not the dramatic kind, the London kind, fine and persistent. The sort that doesn’t announce itself, but simply finds you. By 7:00 in the evening, the cobblestones along the South Bank were dark with it, and the lights from the restaurants and bars were smearing into long amber reflections across the wet stone.

People walked quickly, collars up, heads slightly forward, doing what Londoners do in November rain, enduring it without complaint, as if it would be unsporting to acknowledge it. The Anchor had been at the corner of Bankside and the River Walk for three centuries. 300 years of the same dark wood, the same low ceilings, the same amber warmth visible through the windows from the outside.

On Friday evenings, it filled early, and by 7:00, the sound coming through the door when someone entered or left was a wall of conversation and laughter, and the particular noise of a room full of people who are glad the working week has ended. On the pavement outside, perhaps 10 ft from the door, a man sat on a low folding stool with a guitar across his lap and an open case on the cobblestones in front of him.

He was 43, though he looked older in the way that particular kinds of difficulty age a person. Not the face so much as something behind it. He wore a waxed jacket beaded with rain, a gray scarf wound twice around his neck, fingerless gloves. A small battery-powered amplifier sat beside the stool, turned low.

In the case, a few coins, a couple of pound notes, a small laminated card that read Thomas Bell Live Music. The card had been there since the beginning. If this is the kind of story that stays with you, the ones about music, about absence, about the things we carry without knowing why we carry them.

Subscribe and turn on notifications. We look for these stories every week, and this is one of the ones we needed to find. Thomas Bell had been playing outside the Anchor every Friday and Saturday evening for 8 years. He had started in 2010, 3 weeks after the funeral, and he had not stopped since. He had been a music teacher before secondary school, 12 years of it.

Guitar and music theory, and the particular patience required to sit with a 14-year-old who cannot yet hear what they are doing wrong. He had been good at it. He had also been, for those 12 years, the kind of man who came home to someone, which is a different kind of stability than anything professional. And when that ended, he had found that the teaching required a steadiness he could no longer locate.

His wife’s name had been Caroline. She had died in January 2010, 8 months after the diagnosis. She had been 41. In the last week, she had asked Thomas to play for her in the evenings. Not anything specific, just play, she said, “I want to hear you play.” He had played Led Zeppelin.

Not the obvious ones, not the ones everyone knew. The Rain Song from Houses of the Holy. She had chosen it herself, heard it on the radio one afternoon in October, and said, “That’s the one. Play me that one.” He had learned it that week and played it every evening for the remaining 2 months of her life. After the funeral, he had needed to play it somewhere that wasn’t their flat.

The Anchor was where he had ended up. The landlord then had been a reasonable man named Peter who had let Thomas set up outside without much ceremony, on the understanding that he moved on by 10 and didn’t obstruct the door. Peter had retired 4 years ago. The man who took over was different. Ray Dobson was 56, broad-shouldered with a particular confidence of someone who has spent 20 years behind a bar and reached the conclusion that this gives him a thorough understanding of what people want.

He was not without genuine knowledge of his trade. The pub was well run. The beer was kept correctly. The staff were competent. But he had also, somewhere in the accumulation of 20 years of reading what a Friday night crowd wanted, arrived at a set of conclusions about music that had not been tested against any reality beyond his own certainty.

He came through the door at 7:15, as he did most Friday evenings, with a clipboard and the air of a man conducting an inspection. He looked at Thomas the way he always looked at Thomas, not hostile exactly, but with the slight impatience of someone who has tried to resolve a situation and found it still present.

“Bell,” he said, not unkindly, just efficiently. Thomas looked up from the chord he was fingering. He had been playing for 40 minutes, a series of finger-picked pieces, moving quietly through them, not performing so much as occupying the space. Three people had stopped briefly. Most walked past.

A few had dropped coins without slowing. “Ray,” Thomas said. Ray looked at the case. He looked at the small amp. He looked at the street in both directions, at the Friday evening crowd moving along the South Bank. “I’ve said this before,” Ray said. “Friday night is our busiest night. What you play, it doesn’t match the energy of what’s happening inside.

People come here to feel good, not to feel” He searched for the word contemplative. Thomas waited. “And this Zeppelin thing,” Ray said, “that’s the other thing. Every week you end with this Zeppelin song. Nobody wants to hear sad old Zeppelin songs on a Friday night. It’s 2018. People are inside listening to things that are current.

What you’re doing out here isn’t drawing people in. It’s just a pause. It’s just you, Bell. Just you, Bell. Thomas had been playing outside the Anchor for 8 years. He had heard variations of this conversation many times. He looked at Ray and said, as he always said, “I’ll keep the volume where it is.” Ray looked at the clipboard.

He wrote something. He went back inside. Have you ever kept doing something that mattered to you while someone stood at the door every week to tell you it didn’t? Tell me in the comments. I need to know I’m not the only one who has been in the rain with something worth playing. Thomas played on. The rain continued.

The street moved. He was not unhappy. This was important and easy to miss from the outside. He was not out here in misery. He was out here because this was where he had found, 8 years ago, that the music could breathe, and he had come back every week since because that had remained true. He asked very little of the evenings.

Warmth would have been pleasant. Acknowledgement was occasional. What he required was the pavement and the rain and the sound of the guitar and the particular quality of air that comes off the Thames on a November evening. And these the city provided reliably. At 8:40, after 2 hours, he reached the point he always reached at the end of a session.

He settled his fingers on the neck. He adjusted the position of the guitar slightly. He took a breath. He began to play the rain song. It is not a simple piece. The open tuning, the particular chord voicings, the way the melody moves between registers. It requires a specific technical understanding and a specific emotional one.

And the second is harder to acquire than the first. Thomas had been playing it for 9 years every week, and what he had developed in that time was not merely a clean execution of the notes. It was the thing underneath the notes, the particular way the music breathed, the sense that the song was not being performed but remembered.

The cobblestones were empty immediately in front of him. The Friday crowd moved behind and around indifferent. The rain was steady. The amp was low. The sound was small against the size of the evening, but it was the right sound doing what it was supposed to do. 40 ft away, on the wider stretch of the river walk, a man with silver-white hair had slowed to a stop.

He had been walking south along the river, the long black coat moving gently in the damp air. He had been somewhere, a dinner, a meeting, somewhere that had ended, and he was walking because walking was the thing he did when he had finished being somewhere and was not yet ready to be anywhere else. He walked along the Thames regularly in all weathers.

The city changed around him and the river did not, and that had a value he had never needed to explain to anyone. He had heard the guitar from 40 ft away and turned his head before he had identified what it was. By the time his mind had caught up with his body, had registered that what he was hearing was the rain song, his own piece from 1973, arranged for this open tuning by his own hands in a room in Plumpton Place 45 years ago.

His feet had already changed direction. He walked to the corner of Bank End. He stood in the light from the pub window and looked at the man on the folding stool, the rain beaded wax jacket, the small amp, the open case with the laminated card. He listened for a full minute without moving. Then he walked to the wall beside Thomas, looked at the wet cobblestones, and sat down.

Not on a chair, on the pavement itself, his back against the brick wall of the pub, legs extended in front of him, the long black coat settling around him. A man in his mid-70s sitting on wet cobblestones in November rain outside a South Bank pub because there was nowhere else he needed to be. Thomas did not immediately notice.

He was deep in the song, in the place the song took him, which was the only place he went to that reliably felt like the right distance from everything. When he became aware that someone had sat down beside him, his fingers continued moving. The muscle memory of 9 years was not easily interrupted, and he looked to his left without breaking the phrase.

An elderly man, silver-white hair to the collar, slightly damp from the rain, black coat, long fingers resting on his knees, eyes closed, the expression of someone who is not merely listening, but is inside the music, which is a different thing and is visible from the outside if you know what you’re looking for.

Thomas played on. The song takes 7 minutes when played fully. Thomas played it fully. He did not shorten it or rush it because someone had sat down. He had been playing it for Caroline every week for 8 years, and it did not belong to the Friday night crowd or to Ray Dobson’s assessment of what the evening required, and it did not belong to this stranger, either.

He simply continued. If you’re not subscribed yet, this is a good moment. This is what this channel is, a man on a folding stool in the rain, and the person who sat down to listen. Subscribe and turn on notifications. The man beside him remained still throughout. His eyes stayed closed for most of it.

Once, when Thomas moved through the second section, the chord sequence that lifts and expands before returning, the man’s head moved slightly, a barely-there movement, as if something had landed and been acknowledged. When the final notes of the rain song faded into the sound of the rain and the river, Thomas lifted his fingers from the strings and sat quietly for a moment.

The man beside him opened his eyes and looked at the middle distance for a few seconds, at the wet cobblestones and the streetlights, and the Thames just visible at the end of Bank End. Then he said, “You’re playing it in the tuning I used in ’73. Most people use a capo and a standard tuning.” Thomas looked at him.

“I learned it from the album,” Thomas said carefully. “I worked it out by ear. I didn’t know there was a standard way.” The man nodded. “There isn’t. That’s the right answer.” He looked at Thomas’s left hand. “The phrase in the second section, the way you’re letting it breathe, where did you learn that?” Thomas thought about it.

“From listening,” he said, “from playing it many times.” The man was quiet for a moment. Then he said, very simply, “I wrote that song in 1972.” The door of the Anchor opened. Ray Dobson came through it with his clipboard, doing his 8:45 check of the exterior. He looked at Thomas. He looked at the man sitting against the wall beside Thomas.

He opened his mouth to say something, something about obstructing the frontage, about this not being what he had in mind, and he stopped. He was looking at the man against the wall, at the silver-white hair, at the long black coat, at the hands on the knees, the particular hands, the ones that looked exactly like the ones he had seen in photographs on the sleeves of albums he had owned since 1975.

He stood with his clipboard and his mouth slightly open and said nothing. Behind him, a woman in her 30s who had come out for air recognized what Ray was looking at. She took out her phone. She looked at the screen. She looked at the man against the wall. She said quietly to the man beside her, “That’s Jimmy Page.

” The man beside her said, “That’s not Jimmy Page.” The woman said, “Look at his hands.” Several people looked at his hands. Thomas Bell had stopped playing. He was looking at the man beside him on the cobblestones. He knew who Led Zeppelin were. He had known since he was 16. He had listened to Houses of the Holy the first time in his friend’s bedroom in 1991, cross-legged on the floor, and had felt the particular shock of music that tells you something you didn’t know you needed to be told. He had played their songs for 20 years before he had been playing the rain song for Caroline in January 2010. He knew what Jimmy Page looked like. He looked at the man beside him on the cobblestones. “I didn’t know,” Thomas said, “I would have.” “You wouldn’t have played it the same,” Page said. And there was no performance in it, just the simple statement of a man who understood what happens to a

musician when they become aware of being watched by someone whose opinion matters. He stayed where he was on the cobblestones. He looked at the river. “How long have you been playing it?” he said. “Nine years,” Thomas said. “I play it at the end of every session.” “Every session?” “Every Friday and Saturday for 8 years.

Before that at home. Paige looked at the open case on the cobblestones. The few coins, the pound notes, the laminated card. He looked at the small amp. He looked at Thomas. What made you choose that song? Thomas thought about how to answer that. He had never been asked directly, though everything about why he played it had been with him every session for 9 years.

“My wife,” he said. “She chose it. The last month she was alive, she asked me to play it for her.” Neither of them said anything for a moment. The rain continued. A bus went past at the end of Bank End. The sound from inside the Anchor drifted through the closed door. Paige reached into the inside pocket of the coat.

He produced a small notebook, the spiral kind, worn, the cover soft with use. He opened it, wrote something, tore out the page, and held it out to Thomas. A phone number, and beneath it five words, “Play it for her still.” Thomas took the piece of paper. He held it carefully, as you hold something that has gotten wet, and that you don’t want to damage further.

Ray Dobson was still standing in the doorway with his clipboard. He had not moved. The woman with the phone had lowered it. The small group that had gathered on the pavement stood very quietly, as if noise might disturb something that was still completing itself. Paige stood up from the cobblestones.

He straightened the coat. He looked at Thomas once more, not a long look, just a direct one. The look of a man leaving a room where something real has happened. “Keep playing it,” he said. He walked back to the river walk and turned south, the black coat moving gently in the rain. And within a minute, he was no longer visible.

Thomas Bell sat on his folding stool on the wet cobblestones outside the Anchor with a piece of torn notebook paper in his hand. Ray Dobson looked at the clipboard in his hands. He looked at where Page had been sitting, at the wet patch of pavement. He looked at Thomas. He went back inside without saying anything about the energy of a Friday night.

Thomas sat for a while longer. He did not pack up. He placed the notebook page carefully in the breast pocket of the wax jacket, close to where it wouldn’t get damaged. Then he put his fingers back on the neck of the guitar. He played the rain song again. Nobody asked him to stop. In the months that followed, Thomas continued playing outside the Anchor.

What changed was very small and very visible to anyone who knew what they were looking at. The way he held the guitar had shifted slightly, not technically, not in any way you could specify, but in the way a person carries something differently when they understand more precisely what it is they are carrying.

Ray Dobson stopped coming to the door on Friday evenings at 7:15. He came at other times, for other reasons, and sometimes glanced out through the window at Thomas on his stool, and did not say anything about the energy of the evening or about sad old songs. The notebook page Thomas kept in the breast pocket of the wax jacket for 6 months.

Then he had it framed simply, without glass and without a mat, and put it on the wall of his flat above the chair where Caroline used to sit. Play it for her still. He did. On this channel, we make videos to pass on the beautiful things that have moved through the hands of the people who shaped music, because those things deserve to to remembered.

If you’re not already with us, please subscribe and turn on notifications. Every story we find is a story worth keeping. Let’s close with something Jimmy Page has said about the music he made. The music is bigger than the people who made it. It belongs to whoever it helps. If there is a song that has belonged to you, one that got you through something, or that you’ve played for someone you loved, tell me which one in the comments.

I read every single one, and I’ll see you in the next story.