Deep Purple Laughed at the Opening Act — Until Jimmy Page’s First Note Silenced the Room D

Deep Purple laughed at the opening act, until Jimmy Page’s first note silenced the room. Jimmy Page had always been the one people looked past. Not through malice. The people doing the looking were not unkind. It was simply that certain musicians filled a room in a way that made other musicians difficult to see.

In London in 1968, Ritchie Blackmore filled rooms that way. He had a quality of technical confidence that communicated itself before he played a note. The specific bearing of someone who has spent years developing an ability that he knows to be exceptional, and who has stopped being surprised by his own capabilities.

He played fast, precisely, with the kind of classical precision that formal training produces in people who have both the discipline to pursue it, and the talent to receive it. When Deep Purple formed in 1968, Blackmore was the reason that serious musicians took the band seriously. Jimmy Page had been playing guitar since he was 14 years old.

He had been playing it in the London session circuit since he was 17. By 1968, he had played on more recordings than most musicians make in a career. Had played on hits that people remembered without knowing his name. Had been in the Yardbirds, and had watched them reach the edge of what they were capable of, and begin to come apart.

He had learned to play the way that people learn things when there is no teacher available, and no institution willing to provide one, and no money to access the institutions that exist, which is by listening. The records in Heston in the late 1950s were the records that had been made in America, and that were finding their way to London on import.

Blues records and jazz records and early rock and roll. And Jimmy had listened to them with the focused attention of someone for whom listening was not passive, but active. Not receiving, but studying. Not hearing, but taking apart and understanding and rebuilding in his own hands. He slowed the records down.

This was the method, the specific method that worked when you needed to understand what a musician was doing with their fingers. When the speed at which the playing happened at regular tempo was too fast for the ear to track and the hands to follow. He slowed the records down and he found the notes one by one until the sequence was clear and his hands could find it, too.

And then he sped up to regular tempo and found that his hands could do what the record had been doing because he had been patient enough and thorough enough to have understood it from the inside rather than approximating it from the outside. He did this with blues. He did it with jazz. He did it with folk guitar, with the finger picking traditions of Chet Atkins and Merle Travis and Davey Graham.

The people who were demonstrating what the acoustic guitar could do when the right hands were on it. And he did it in the evenings and the weekends when the records were available. With classical music. With the recordings of guitarists like Andres Segovia and Narciso Yepes who had spent their careers demonstrating what the instrument was capable of when it was given the full weight of a trained and dedicated musical intelligence.

Nobody watched him do this. There was no audience for the hours in the room in Heston. There was the record player and the guitar and the specific silence of a bedroom in a house where other people were doing other things. And there was Jimmy working out note by note what the recording was doing and then working out how to do it himself.

This went on for years. It went on through the session work and through the Yardbirds and it was still going on in 1968 when the evening at the Marquee Club produced the situation in which what the hours had accumulated became briefly visible to people who had not known the accumulation was happening. He was not, in the common understanding of the London music scene that year, on the level of Ritchie Blackmore.

This was not a malicious assessment. It was simply the assessment that the available evidence supported. Blackmore was visible. His playing was visible. The things he could do with a guitar were things that people who listened closely could identify and evaluate and be impressed by.

Jimmy’s playing was mostly on other people’s records without his name attached. What he had been doing alone in rooms for the previous decade was not something that the London music scene had any particular mechanism for knowing. George Harrison had spent five years playing in the shadows of John Lennon and Paul McCartney before a roomful of musicians understood what had been there the whole time.

Jimmy Page had spent somewhat longer in the shadows of musicians whose visibility obscured what he had accumulated in the hours that nobody had watched. The evening at the Marquee Club on Wardour Street in the early summer of 1968 had the quality of those evenings that the London music scene produced regularly in that period.

When the circuit of venues and studios and recording sessions created enough points of intersection between musicians that encounters happened with a frequency that the mythology of the era makes seem planned and significant and that were, in reality, simply what happened when a certain density of musical talent occupied a relatively small geographic area.

The Marquee was the center of much of this density, the venue where the significant acts of the period appeared and where the musicians who were part of the same circuit encountered each other in the specific informality of a shared professional space. Deep Purple were the headlining act. They had formed earlier that year and were in the process of establishing what they were and what they were capable of, which in Ritchie Blackmore’s case was a great deal.

The band had about them the quality of musicians who are confident that what they are doing is serious, that the music they are making deserves to be taken seriously by people who take music seriously. And this confidence was grounded in actual ability, rather than in the posturing that sometimes substitutes for it. Jimmy Page was there with the musicians who would eventually become Led Zeppelin, playing a set that was, in the context of that evening, the opening act in the practical, rather than the complimentary sense. They were not yet Led Zeppelin. The name did not yet exist. The album did not yet exist. They were a group of musicians who had assembled around what Jimmy heard in his head as the music he wanted to make and who were in the process of finding out whether what he heard in his head was actually possible to produce in the world. The set they played at the Marquee that evening was evidence that it was, but evidence that had not yet

had time to accumulate into the kind of record that changes how musicians are perceived. After the show, the two bands occupied the shared backstage space with a general civility and the occasional exchange that the proximity required. Ritchie Blackmore knew who Jimmy was. The session circuit was small enough that musicians of a certain level knew each others names and approximate reputations.

Blackmore’s assessment of Jimmy was the assessment that the London music scene had generally arrived at by 1968, which was that Jimmy was reliable and capable and had been in the Yardbirds and was presumably doing something new. Capable, not exceptional, not the word Blackmore would have used for himself. Jon Lord, Deep Purple’s keyboard player, had studied at the London College of Music and approached the guitar in the way that formally trained musicians approach instruments they have not studied, with the analytical respect of someone who understands what the instrument is technically capable of and who has views about what playing it properly requires. His view on that evening was that the relationship between classical technique and rock guitar was a relationship of mutual exclusion. That the precision and the formal discipline of the classical tradition and the energy and the

physical directness of rock guitar were things that coexisted badly. That a musician who was genuinely fluent in one was likely to be diminished in the other. This was not an eccentric view. It was the dominant view among musicians of a certain type in London in 1968. The view that seriousness about music required the acknowledgement of boundaries rather than their erasure.

That knowing what was difficult and what was possible within a tradition was the mark of someone who understood the tradition. And that the cross-pollination that some people were beginning to claim was achievable between classical and rock music was more aspiration than reality. The conversation moved in this direction in the backstage room as the evening wound down and the energy of the performances was replaced by the specific energy of musicians talking about music after playing it, which is different from all other conversations about music and produces things that other contexts do not. Someone mentioned Paganini. This was not unusual in a room that included Jon Lord. The discussion of whether the technical demands of certain classical compositions could be met by a rock guitarist, Whether the precision and speed that those compositions required was achievable without the formal training that classical technique was built on was the kind of discussion that

was available to them and that Jon Lord was qualified to lead, which he did with the authority of someone who has thought carefully about a question and arrived at conclusions he trusts. “The left-hand technique for the Paganini Caprices requires years of formal training,” Jon Lord said, or something to that effect, in the manner of someone stating a fact rather than beginning an argument.

“You can approximate it. You can approach it, but to actually execute it the way it requires to be executed, you need the kind of foundation that formal study provides. Rock guitarists don’t have that. They have other things, very valuable things, but not that.” Ritchie Blackmore agreed with the specific quality of agreement that comes from someone who has formal training and who therefore agrees not from theory, but from knowledge, who has experienced from the inside what the development of classical technique requires and who understands why the route to it cannot be shortcut. He had opinions about this and had expressed them before and he expressed them now with the confidence of someone whose expertise was genuine and whose confidence in that expertise was justified. The room settled into consensus, not unanimously, because rooms of musicians rarely settle into complete

unanimity about anything, but in the general way that conversations settle when the most authoritative voices in the room have aligned. Jimmy Page had been sitting in a corner for most of this conversation. He was holding a drink. He was listening. He had said perhaps three things in the previous hour that had required more than a word or two, which was not unusual for him.

He had the quality that George Harrison had had in rooms with John and Paul. The quality of someone who is fully present and fully attentive, and who has decided that the conversation does not currently require his voice. He was not bored. He was listening with the complete attention of someone who is interested in what is being said, and who is deciding, on the basis of what he is hearing, whether he has anything to add.

He picked up a guitar. Nobody paid specific attention to this. Jimmy was always picking up guitars. In rooms where guitars existed, Jimmy’s relationship with the nearest available instrument was the relationship of someone for whom a guitar in hand was simply the natural state. He adjusted the tuning of the instrument he had picked up.

The automatic adjustments of someone whose ear is sufficiently precise to hear the small deviations, and whose hands correct them before the correction is consciously decided. Then he played. What happened in the room in the next 2 minutes was described afterward by the people who were present with a consistency that suggests they were all experiencing the same thing, which is not always the case when people describe the same event, but which happens when the event is clear enough and significant enough to leave the same impression in different minds. He played a passage from Paganini’s Caprice No. 24. Not approximately, not in the spirit of it, or in the general direction of it, or with the energy of it while excusing the technical precision. He played it the way it was meant to be played, with the speed it required and the clarity it required, and the specific relationship between the notes that the composition required.

Each note in its correct position, the passages flowing from one to the next with the fluency of something that had been practiced until the practice was invisible. The room changed. Not dramatically, not all at once, in the way that rooms change when something enters them that reorganizes the assumptions that had been operating.

The individual recalibrations that happen in each person when what they have just heard cannot be reconciled with what they thought was possible before they heard it. Ritchie Blackmore stopped talking. Jon Lord’s expression shifted, the specific shift of a formally trained musician who has heard something that requires him to revise an assessment he had considered reliable.

He said nothing. He looked at Jimmy. The others in the room were making the adjustment that people make when the thing they have just witnessed does not fit the category they had assigned it to, and they are determining what category does fit, which is a process that takes a moment and that produces a specific quality of silence, the silence of people who are thinking rather than people who have nothing to say.

Jimmy finished the passage. He set the guitar back against the wall. He picked up his drink. He did not look around the room to register its response. He did not say anything about what he had just played. He behaved exactly as he had behaved before he had picked up the guitar, which was as someone who was present in the room and had nothing in particular to perform for its occupants.

Ritchie Blackmore said something. The accounts of what exactly he said differ slightly in their wording, which is normal, but agree in their substance. “I didn’t know you could do that,” Blackmore said. Jimmy looked at him. “Do what?” he said. “Play like that.” “I’ve been playing it since I was 15,” Jimmy said.

He said it without emphasis, without the inflection of someone scoring a point. He said it as information, the factual answer to the implied question of how the playing had come to exist. Blackmore looked at him for a moment. He had the expression of someone who is revising something he had been confident about and who was doing it honestly, rather than defensively.

The expression of a musician who is capable of recognizing in another musician something that the musician’s reputation had not prepared him to find there. “Where did you learn classical technique?” John Lord asked. “Records.” Jimmy said, “and a lot of time alone.” “Which composers?” “All of them.

” He said, “or as many as I could find.” This was the answer and also the explanation, though it took a moment for the room to receive it fully. Jimmy Page had spent the years between 14 and 20 in a room in Heston with a guitar and a record player and no teacher except the recordings themselves, doing what George Harrison had done in Liverpool, what Ritchie Blackmore had done differently with formal instruction and a conservatoire, which was to understand music from the inside by spending enough hours with it that the inside became available. The method was different. The result was not inferior. He had slowed records down and found the notes with his fingers, one by one, until the pattern was inside his hands, rather than inside his head. He had done this with blues records and folk records and jazz records and, yes, classical records. The recordings of

guitarists and other instrumentalists who had demonstrated what was possible with the right technique and the right devotion. And he had followed them as far as he could follow them and then further into the places that the recordings pointed toward but could not fully show. Nobody had been in the room with him during those hours.

Nobody had given him marks or assessments or qualifications. The playing was the evidence, and the evidence was what he had just provided in the backstage room of the Marquee Club without planning to provide it and without making anything of the providing. Ritchie Blackmore spent the years that followed making sure that the record was corrected, not because he felt guilty about an assessment that he could not have known was incomplete, but because the correction was accurate and because accuracy mattered to him as someone who cared about what the guitar was capable of and who wanted the people who cared about the same thing to understand the full picture. He was not a man who found admissions easy, and this was not an admission of failure, but a recognition of something he had simply not had the information to see. In interviews across the decades of his career, he returned to Jimmy Page with a consistency that suggested the evening

at the Marquee had settled something in his understanding of what was possible. He said that Jimmy was among the most technically accomplished guitarists he had encountered. He said that what Jimmy had demonstrated that evening was something that formal training does not automatically produce, that the years of isolated practice had built something that he had not anticipated finding because he had not known the practice was happening.

He said that the mistake he had made was the mistake of assuming that the path he had taken was the only path that led to the destination, and that Jimmy had taken a different path and arrived at the same place by a different route, and that the arrival was complete. Jon Lord, in a conversation in the later years of his life, was more analytical about what the evening had meant to him.

He said that it had disrupted an assumption that he had held with the confidence of formal training, which was that what formal training made possible was a reliable guide to what was possible altogether. The assumption was not wrong, exactly, but it was incomplete, and the incompleteness was significant.

What Jimmy had demonstrated was that the dedication to the music itself, the thousands of hours in rooms with recordings and instruments and no teacher except the music, could produce something that the formal curriculum was not the only gateway to. He said that after that evening, he had listened to Jimmy Page’s playing with different ears, hearing in it what he had not been equipped to hear before, which was not just the results of the practice, but the specific quality of someone whose relationship with music had been formed entirely through the music itself, rather than through the institutions built around it. That quality had a particular character, something that the formally trained ear learned to recognize once it had been pointed toward it. “The most dangerous person in the room,” Blackmore said much later, “is not the loudest one. It is the one who has been spending the hours you don’t know about doing the work you didn’t think was being done.”

What Jimmy Page played in a backstage room in 1968 was not a performance. It was a response, the way that George Harrison’s playing in the London flat had been a response to a conversation about what was possible that had not included the correct answer. He had the correct answer in his hands because he had put it there, alone, over years, with the consistency of someone for whom the alternative to the music was not an alternative at all.

He went back to his drink. The conversation continued, though it was not the same conversation that it had been before he picked up the guitar. Ritchie Blackmore was quieter than he had been. John Lord was thinking. The room had the quality of a room that has been given information it needed and is working out what the information changes.

Led Zeppelin’s first album was released in January of 1969. The people who had been in the backstage room at the Marquee, who had heard what Jimmy could do in the specific conditions that produce honest assessments of what musicians are capable of, heard the album and recognized in it something they had already been given a private preview of.

The playing of someone who had spent a decade in rooms alone with the music and who had emerged from those rooms with what the rooms had to offer. Ritchie Blackmore did not laugh at Jimmy Page after that evening. What he had was the specific respect that musicians have for other musicians whose ability is genuine and whose commitment to the music is total.

The respect of someone who takes the same thing seriously and who recognizes seriousness when he encounters it, even when it arrives in a form he had not anticipated. “The most dangerous person in any room,” he said much later, “is not the loudest one. It is the one who has been spending the hours you don’t know about doing the work you didn’t think was being done.

” In 1968, in a room in London, Jimmy Page picked up a guitar. He played what he had been playing since he was 15. He put the guitar down. He went back to his drink and the room was never quite the same again.