Eric Clapton Challenged Jimmy Page to Play the Blues — What Happened Left Everyone Speechless D

Eric Clapton challenged Jimmy Paige to play the blues. What happened in that studio left everyone speechless. Atlantic Records UK held its end of year gathering in November of 1971 at its offices in Oxford Street. And the gathering had the specific quality of music industry parties that are genuinely celebratory rather than professionally obligatory.

The quality that arrives when the year being marked has been a good year in the specific terms that the music industry uses to measure goodness. Led Zeppelin 4 had been released the previous month. The album had no title, no band name on the cover, no photographs. It had sold in numbers that the label had not fully anticipated and that confirmed for the people in the room who needed confirmation that whatever Jimmy Page was doing and however he was doing it, the results were beyond argument.

He was in the room in the clothes he wore when there was no requirement to be anything other than present. And he was drinking and talking to the people he knew in the way that people drink and talk at these events when the event is not a performance. Eric Clapton was also in the room. Clapton and Jimmy had known each other for years through the London circuit and through the specific proximity that musicians develop when they are working in the same city in the same period and their paths intersect through studios and sessions and the social occasions that the industry produces. They had played on sessions together. They had a genuine mutual respect, the respect of two guitarists who had each heard what the other could do and who understood at the level of professional assessment that the other was operating at a level worth taking seriously. But respect is not the same as seeing

clearly. and Clapton in 1971 at the height of his own reputation and at a period in his career when the word God was still appearing on London walls next to his name had a view of Jimmy Page that was shaped by what he saw rather than by what he might have seen if he had been looking differently. He saw Led Zeppelin.

He saw the scale of the commercial success and the specific character of the music which was rock which drew from the blues tradition as its primary source and which had the weight and the feel of that tradition in everything it did but which was rock in the end building on the blues rather than being the blues. and Clapton had views about the distinction between those two things that were the views of someone who had spent years inside the tradition and who considered the distinction to have weight.

Jimmy Paige’s relationship to the blues was different from Clapton’s in the way that two people can have deep relationships with the same thing that are nevertheless different, shaped by different entrances and different understandings and different practices. Jimmy had found the blues through records, through the specific method of slowing them down and finding the notes with his hands until the music was in him rather than around him.

And he had found it as a teenager in H without formal guidance and without the specific community of musicians who were working in the tradition that Clapton had been part of through his years with John May. His relationship to the blues was private and accumulated and not visible to the people who knew him primarily as the guitarist of Led Zeppelin, as the person who had built the machine of the biggest rock band in the world.

The blues he carried was interior, practiced in rooms rather than performed in public, present in what he played without being announced. Clapton did not know this. He had no reason to know it. What he knew was what was visible, which was Led Zeppelin, and the enormous scale of what Led Zeppelin had become.

And from what was visible, he had constructed the understanding that he had, which was not wrong about what it was looking at, but was incomplete in the way that assessments are incomplete when they are based on what is shown rather than on what exists. He had not said this to Jimmy directly. He had the specific tact of someone who is not trying to create conflict but who has a view and who expresses it in the way that people express views in rooms where the context permits some degree of honesty without full explicitness. He expressed it in the way that he was expressing it now. Talking about the blues in terms that place the tradition beyond where he understood Jimmy to be standing. Jimmy had been listening from close enough to hear clearly. He had been listening with the specific quality of attention that people bring to conversations in which they are being discussed without being directly

addressed. The attention of someone who is receiving information about what others believe about them and who is deciding what to do with the information. The conversation had drifted in the way that conversations at industry parties drift. From the year’s commercial successes to the music itself, from the numbers to the question of what the numbers represented, from the question of what was selling to the question of what was good.

Clapton was in a group of five or six people when Jimmy drifted within earshot. And he was talking about the blues in the way that he talked about the blues when he was relaxed with the authority and the slight exclusivity of someone who considers his understanding of the subject to be more complete than the understanding of most people he is likely to be talking to.

Real blues, Clapton said, is not about technique. Technique is the beginning of it. What the blues requires is experience. You have to have lived something. The great blues men didn’t play what they had learned. They played what they had been through. That’s the distinction. That’s what most rock guitarists have never managed to cross.

The implication was present in the room the way that implications are present in rooms when the speaker is confident enough to make them without quite making them, available to anyone who wanted to draw it, and deniable if the drawing was contested. Jimmy set his glass on the table. Eric, he said, “Are you saying I can’t play the blues?” Clapton looked at him.

There was a moment of the specific recalibration that happens when a person who has been speaking for an audience finds that the person they were speaking about has been listening. I’m saying, Clapton said carefully that there’s a difference between playing blues influenced rock and playing the blues. They’re related traditions.

They’re not the same tradition. How much do you want to bet? Jimmy said. Clapton looked at him for a moment. And in the looking, there was something that was not quite amusement and not quite challenge, but was somewhere between them. The expression of someone who has been called and who is deciding whether to see the call.

Then he reached into his jacket and produced a 50B note. Then he produced a second one. 100, Clapton said. Done, Jimmy said. And I choose the room, not you. Fair enough, Clapton said. They went upstairs. Atlantic Records London offices occupied two floors. And on the upper floor, there was a recording studio that had been built into the space when the offices were established.

a studio that was used for demos and for occasional sessions, and that was currently staffed by a duty engineer named Michael, who had been monitoring the building systems that evening, and who was not prepared for 20 people to file through the door, asking him to set up a microphone. Jimmy looked at the room and said what he had to say.

“Don’t set it up behind the glass,” he said. “Set it up here in the control room with everyone.” Michael looked at him and looked at Clapton and looked at the 20 people who had followed them upstairs with the expressions of people who have decided they are witnessing something and who want to be present for all of it.

He pulled a cable from the rack and positioned a microphone stand in the center of the control room and brought a stool from the corner. Clapton stood against the wall with his arms crossed. If you’re doing this, he said, I get to choose the song. Go ahead, Jimmy said. Clapton thought for a moment. He chose with the specific deliberateness of someone who is not choosing randomly, but who is applying the knowledge of the tradition to the selection, picking the piece that will test the thing he is skeptical about rather than the thing he already knows his opponent can do. Robert Johnson, Clapton said, crossroad blues. The room absorbed this. The people who understood what was being requested understood that Clapton had chosen the hardest available thing. The song from the tradition’s origin point, the song that defined what the blues required, and that most professional guitarists

approached with the caution that genuine difficulty produces. Playing crossroad blues the way it should be played was not a question of knowing the notes. It was a question of the specific relationship between the player and the instrument and the tradition that the song came from. The relationship that takes years to develop and that cannot be faked in a control room in London on a November evening.

Acoustic, Jimmy said. However you need to play it, Clapton said. Michael brought an acoustic guitar from the equipment room and Jimmy took it and sat on the stool and adjusted it and spent perhaps 40 seconds tuning it with the automatic precision of someone whose ear finds pitch the way other people find words. The room watched.

Some of the people watching were smiling. The smiles of people who are anticipating something that may not be what they are anticipating and who have not yet adjusted their expectation. Others were simply still. Clapton was still. Jimmy closed his eyes and began. The first note established something that changed the quality of the room’s attention.

The way that first notes establish things when the player is fully inside the music rather than approaching it from the outside. He was playing slide, the technique of a glass or metal object on the strings that produces the specific singing quality of the Delta Blues style. the sound that Robert Johnson had made in the 1930s in Mississippi with a guitar and a bottleneck and the specific knowledge of someone for whom the music was not a tradition to study but a language to speak.

The slide technique requires a precision that is different from fredded precision. Requires the ear to make continuous adjustments that the fingers of the left hand translate into the contact of the slide on the strings. And what Jimmy was doing with it in the control room of Atlantic Records London offices on a November evening was not the studied application of a technique learned from records, but something that had the character of fluency of a person speaking rather than translating.

The people in the room stopped talking. The smiles disappeared in the way that smiles disappear when the thing being watched has exceeded the expectation that was producing the smiles. When what was anticipated as a demonstration of competence is revealing itself as something of a different category. A producer named Graham, who had been working with Led Zeppelin for 2 years, looked at the person next to him and then looked back at Jimmy and said nothing because there was nothing appropriate to say that was available in the volume that the situation permitted. Clapton had uncrossed his arms. He was watching Jimmy’s left hand, the hand that was controlling the slide, watching it with the specific attention of one guitarist watching another who’s playing is saying something to him about the instrument and the music that he is receiving technically and personally simultaneously. He was watching the VBR, the way Jimmy’s wrist moved to animate

the sustained notes, giving them the specific human quality that distinguishes blues playing from mere accuracy. The quality of a note that is not a fixed point but a conversation. He was watching the phrasing, the way the melodic statements related to the silences between them, the way the silences were as intentional as the sounds.

He was watching someone play Robert Johnson’s song the way Robert Johnson’s song was meant to be played. When the song ended, the room was quiet for several seconds. The quiet had the texture of a room that has been given something it was not expecting and that is receiving it before producing any response. Then the people in the room began to make the sounds of applause.

And the applause was the genuine kind rather than the polite kind. the kind that comes from having witnessed something rather than from having attended something. Clapton did not applaud immediately. He looked at Jimmy for a moment. Jimmy opened his eyes and looked back. Where did you learn that slide technique? Clapton said. Records.

Jimmy said. Slowing them down. Since I was 14. You’ve been doing this since you were 14. Playing the blues. Yes. Clapton was quiet for a moment. Then he took the £100 from his pocket and held it out. You won, he said. But it’s not finished. Jimmy looked at him. I want to hear something else, Clapton said.

Something that isn’t about technique, something that requires you to break. He paused. Elmore James. The sky is crying. The room reacted. The people in the room who understood the blues understood what Clapton was asking for and understood why he was asking for it, which was that the sky is Crying was not a song that tested technical ability in the way that Crossroad Blues tested it, but a song that tested something else, something that was harder to develop and easier to fake badly and almost impossible to fake well, which was the quality of vulnerability, the quality of opening ing genuinely into the emotional content of a piece of music rather than rendering it accurately. Jimmy took the£100 and put it in his pocket and settled back onto the stool. He closed his eyes. What came next was not what anyone in the room had been

expecting, including the people who had just heard crossroad blues and who thought they understood what Jimmy was going to give them. The opening of the sky is crying was quiet in the way that certain blues performances are quiet at their beginning, gathering themselves before they expand, drawing the listener close before the full weight arrives.

And the guitar was doing something in the first few bars that was different from what it had done in the Robert Johnson song, something more interior and more exposed. the guitar not as an instrument being played, but as a voice finding its way into a statement it has been holding in.

Jimmy’s approach to the song was the approach of someone for whom the emotional content was not something to be conveyed through technique, but something that the technique had to get out of the way of. And the specific thing that he had to do with his hands to play the song well was different from what he had to do with the rest of himself, which was to allow something true to come through without protecting himself from it.

The blues does not allow the performer to remain at a safe distance from what the music is about. This is what Clapton had meant when he said it required experience. When he said, “You had to have lived something.” What he had not understood until this evening was that Jimmy Paige had lived something, had been carrying it in the way that people carry the things they have been through, and that when the music required it, the carrying was available to him.

The phrasing had a quality of breakage that was not accidental. The sustained notes broke slightly at their upper edges. The VAB carrying them to a place where the control was still present but was no longer the dominant quality. Where what was dominant was the feeling that the control was serving. Several people in the room who had not been visibly moved by the first performance were visibly moved by this one.

A woman who worked in the label’s artist relations department pressed her fingers to her mouth. A session musician who had been watching with the analytical attention of a professional found himself looking at the floor. Clapton stood against the wall with his arms at his sides. His face had undergone the specific change that faces undergo when they are processing something that requires a position to be revised.

A change that is not dramatic but that is total. The change from one state of understanding to another. He was watching Jimmy play the sky is crying with the attention of someone who has been proven wrong about something important and who is in the process of taking the proof seriously rather than looking for ways to qualify it. His eyes were fully present.

His body was fully still. The final notes of the song did not complete themselves. They faded in the way that certain blues endings refuse closure, leaving the last phrase in the air as a question rather than resolving it, and the room received the incompleteness in the silence that followed as something that was part of the performance rather than an accident at its end.

12 seconds passed before anyone moved or spoke. Clapton stood up from the wall. He walked across the room to where Jimmy was sitting on the stool. He stood in front of him and the room was watching and Clapton seemed aware of the room watching and seemed to have decided that the room watching was appropriate for what he was about to say.

“Jimmy Paige is not a rock guitarist who plays the blues,” Clapton said. He said it at a volume that carried clearly to everyone in the room. “Jimmy Paige is a blues guitarist who also plays rock. I have been wrong about the distinction between those two things for longer than I should have been. He extended his hand.

Jimmy stood and took it. “I’ve been underestimating you,” Clapton said. “You’ve been underestimating the blues,” Jimmy said. “It doesn’t care who plays it. It only cares if it’s true.” The room produced the kind of applause that musicians produce for other musicians. When the applause is not for a performance in the ordinary sense, but for the recognition of something real, the deep acknowledgment of people who understand what it costs to do what they have just watched being done and who are acknowledging the cost without being asked to. In the weeks and months that followed the November party, the story moved through the London music world the way that stories move when they are the kind of story that says something people needed to hear. Clapton mentioned it in interviews, not as an anecdote exactly, but as a correction, the specific kind of public correction that honest people

make when they have been wrong about something important. He said that Jimmy Paige had taught him something about the blues, which was that the blues was not protected by the credentials of the person playing it and was not withheld from anyone whose feeling for it was genuine, regardless of the label they had been given or the genre they were primarily associated with.

Jimmy Paige said nothing about the evening publicly. He said what he had always said about Eric Clapton, which was that Clapton was one of the finest musicians he had ever encountered. and he said it with the consistency of someone who means what they say and who has not adjusted what they say on the basis of what has happened between them.

A producer named Graham who had been in the room that November gave a brief account of the evening to a journalist in 2006 35 years after it had occurred. And what he said was not about the technical achievement of the performances, which he described as extraordinary, or about the specific dynamic between Clapton and Jimmy, which he described as complex and real, but about something simpler.

The box that people put you in, he said, is never as big as you are. Every person in that room had a box for Jimmy Page, rock guitarist, a cultist, commercial, not the blues. and he sat down on a stool in a control room and played Robert Johnson and then Elmore James and the box was gone. Just gone.

And what was left was just what he actually was, which was considerably larger than any of us had understood. In November 1971, Eric Clapton told Jimmy Page in front of 20 people that rock guitarists don’t really play the blues. Jimmy Page asked how much he wanted to bet. He played Robert Johnson and he played Elmore James in a control room in London.

And Clapton said, “I was wrong about you. The blues doesn’t care who plays it. It only cares if it’s true.” Jimmy Paige knew this. He had known it since he was 14 years old, slowing down records in a room in H and finding the notes with his fingers until the music was inside his hands rather than inside his head.

He had simply been waiting for someone to ask. The story of the November evening at Atlantic Records London offices passed through the music world in the months that followed with the specific momentum of a story that says something true about people that the people who know them needed to hear. Musicians who had worked with both men heard it and revised their understanding of one of them.

Journalists who received partial accounts of it from people who had been in the room wrote around the edges of it without being able to write about it directly because Jimmy Page did not confirm the story in any interview and Clapton discussed it only obliquely in the way that people discuss things that matter to them personally and that they have not fully decided how to make public.

What Clapton said in the various forms in which he said it across the years that followed was consistent in its substance, if not in its words. He said that his understanding of Jimmy Paige as a musician had been revised by something that happened between them and that the revision had required him to reconsider what he had believed about the relationship between the blues and the people who play it, which is that the blues cannot be protected from anyone whose feeling for it is genuine, regardless of what genre they are associated with or what box the industry has put them in. He said in one interview conducted several years later that he had told Jimmy he was a rock guitarist who played the blues and that Jimmy had shown him the distinction was wrong. “I was thinking about credentials,” Clapton said. About who has the right to the tradition, but the blues doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t

ask for credentials, it asks for truth. And Jimmy Paige is one of the truthful ones. Jimmy Page said nothing publicly about the November evening. He spoke about Clapton in the terms he had always used, the terms of genuine respect and genuine affection, without addition or amendment, as if nothing had changed between them, which was in one sense true, because what had changed was not between them, but within the understanding of the people who had been watching.

The box that people construct around a musician based on the music they make publicly is never as large as the musician. This is always true and is almost never understood until something happens that makes the disproportion visible. What happened in a control room in London in November 1971 made it visible to 20 people and through those 20 people eventually to rather more.

Jimmy Paige had been playing the blues since he was 14 years old. He had been doing it in rooms where no one was watching, with records slowed down to the speed at which the notes became findable and the patterns became learnable. Absorbing the tradition in the specific way that people absorb things that matter to them completely and without concern for whether the absorption would ever be witnessed.

when someone finally asked him to play it in a control room in London with 20 people watching and 100 pounds on the line. He played Robert Johnson and he played Elmore James and the room understood something it had not understood before. He had simply been waiting for someone to ask. The blues doesn’t care who plays it.

It only cares if it’s