Eric Clapton DESTROYED Jimmy Page in Front of Everyone — What Jimmy Did Next Left London in Tears D

Eric Clapton destroyed Jimmy Page in front of everyone. What Jimmy did next left London in tears. London in 1966 had a hierarchy and Eric Clapton sat near the top of it. This was not a controversial position. The graffiti had appeared on the walls of Islington and Notting Hill in the previous year.

Two words that had become the kind of shorthand that cities use when they need to say something quickly and completely. Clapton is God. It was hyperbole, obviously. The hyperbole of people for whom the emotion exceeded the available vocabulary. But it was hyperbole built on something real. Eric Clapton at 21 years old was playing the blues with the specific combination of technical precision and emotional depth that the tradition required.

Playing it with a fidelity to its sources and a personal expressiveness that made the listening feel like witnessing rather than simply hearing. John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers had put the playing on record and the record had done what records do when they are genuine, which was to change the understanding of what was possible.

Clapton was now forming Cream with Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker. The formation of Cream was an event in the London music scene in the specific way that certain events are events. Anticipated and discussed and assessed before they occur because the people involved have enough of a reputation that their next move is worth following.

Cream was going to be a power trio, volume and virtuosity, and the specific space that three musicians create when there is no fourth person filling the gaps. And the London music world was watching with the attention that it gives to things that might be significant. Jimmy Page occupied a different position in the same world.

He had been playing professionally since he was 17. Had accumulated more studio hours than most musicians would in a full career, had played on hits that people remembered without knowing his name. He was now in the Yardbirds, which had been one of the important bands of the British blues scene, had been the band that Eric Clapton himself had played in before leaving to pursue the purity that the Yardbirds’ increasingly commercial direction did not permit.

Jeff Beck had been in the Yardbirds after Clapton. Now Jimmy was there, the third of that particular succession, navigating a band that was moving further from its blues roots and toward a commercial sound that the music press was beginning to notice and to discuss in terms that were not always complimentary.

The distance between where Clapton stood in the London music world and where Jimmy stood was not a distance of ability. People who paid close attention to what Jimmy could do with a guitar understood that the ability was not in question. The distance was a distance of reputation and of the specific kind of cultural capital that accrues to musicians who are seen to be doing something artistically uncompromising, who appear to be making the music they need to make rather than the music that the market has indicated it wants. Clapton had that capital. The Bluesbreakers record and the graffiti on the walls of Islington were its evidence. Jimmy, working in the session circuit and navigating the Yardbirds’ commercial evolution, had the ability without the reputation, which is a different kind of position. He was used to this position. He had occupied it for most of his professional life, contributing something essential that the final product required, and

then disappearing from the acknowledgement. The session musician’s role is definitionally that of someone whose value is known in private and invisible in public, and Jimmy had inhabited that role with the patience of someone who understands that the work itself is the point, that the public acknowledgement of the work is a different thing from the work, and not necessarily the more important of the two.

The Savoy Hotel in November of 1966 was not the kind of place where session musicians were typically prominent guests. But Jimmy had been in the Yardbirds long enough that the industry’s acknowledgement of him had shifted from the private knowledge of studio professionals to the more general awareness of the broader music world, and he had received an invitation to the evening that put him in the same room as Eric Clapton for the first time in any sustained way. This was not nothing.

The Yardbirds had been one of the important bands of the British blues scene, had provided launching pads for Eric Clapton himself, and for Jeff Beck, had accumulated a catalog that contained real and significant music. Jimmy was now the band’s lead guitarist, having joined in 1966, and he was applying to the role the same intelligence and technical ability that had made him one of the most in-demand session musicians in London.

But the Yardbirds in 1966 were in transition, moving away from the pure blues approach that had defined their early work toward something more commercially oriented. And this movement was being noted by the people in the London music scene who cared about such things, which was most of the people in it. The party at the Savoy Hotel in November of 1966 was one of those music industry events that occupied the territory between professional obligation and genuine social occasion.

The kind of gathering that people in the entertainment business attend because the network it maintains is the network that careers depend on. And because declining to appear carries its own costs. The room contained most of the people who mattered in London’s music world that autumn. The musicians and the producers and the journalists and the label people who together constituted the environment in which decisions about what music got made and who got heard were produced.

Jimmy arrived with the understanding that his role at such events was essentially background, which was the role he had occupied most of his professional life. The session musician’s role is definitionally background. You show up, you play what is required, you contribute something essential that the final product would lack without, and then you disappear from the credit.

Jimmy had been doing this since he was 17. He was used to rooms in which he was present and not particularly noticed, and he did not experience the not being noticed as a loss. He crossed the room to where Clapton was standing with a group of musicians and producers and journalists, the kind of group that forms around the person in a room who has the most energy directed toward them.

Clapton at this point had that quality, the specific magnetism of someone who has recently done something significant and whose next move is being anticipated. The group around him had the loosely attentive quality of people who are genuinely interested in what the center of the group is saying. Jimmy approached to offer a greeting.

He knew Clapton. The London circuit was small enough that musicians of their level knew each other through the accumulated intersections of studios and venues and the shared social geography of a scene. They had not spent significant time together. They moved in different directions. Jimmy through the session work and the Yardbirds increasingly commercial trajectory.

Clapton through the blues purist world that he inhabited with the conviction of someone for whom the purity was not a pose, but a genuine moral position. Clapton saw him coming, and his expression shifted in a way that Jimmy registered, but did not immediately interpret. “Ah,” Clapton said, “Jimmy Page.

” He said it with the specific inflection that tells a room something is coming, that the speaker has something to do with the name they’ve just said, beyond simply identifying the person. The Yardbirds man.” The group turned to look. Jimmy raised a hand in acknowledgement, the minimal gesture of someone who is being introduced to a room they already know is watching them.

“I heard your new single,” Clapton said. He picked up his drink and took a sip in the way that people take sips when the pause before what they are about to say needs to be a specific length. Very accessible. “Thanks,” Jimmy said. “That’s what you do, isn’t it?” Clapton continued. The tone was not quite friendly and not quite hostile.

It was the tone of someone who is making an observation they consider accurate, and who has decided that the accuracy justifies the saying. You find what people want to hear, and you give it to them. Very efficient, very professional. The group around Clapton had the quality of a group that understands it is watching something and is not sure yet what the something is.

“I suppose,” Jimmy said. He was still smiling. The smile had the quality of someone who has detected a direction and is deciding whether the destination it leads to requires them to change course. “I wonder sometimes,” Clapton said, “and his voice had that particular edge in it now, the edge that Clapton’s voice took when he was saying something he had been thinking about and had now committed to saying, whether you ever play something because you have to, because it comes from somewhere real.

Not from the market, not from what’s going to work on the radio, but from somewhere that you’d play it whether anyone was listening or not. The group was very quiet. “The thing is, Jimmy,” Clapton said, looking at him directly now, “you’re a brilliant guitarist. Everyone in this room knows that.

But brilliant isn’t the same as necessary. Some music you play it because if you don’t play it, you’ll die. You’ll actually die. Something inside you that has to come out will just accumulate until it kills you. I wonder if you’ve ever felt that, or whether it’s always just” He paused, and the pause had the quality of a man who has arrived at the sharpest part of what he wants to say, and is deciding whether to say it.

“Whether it’s always just what the market needs.” The silence that followed was the silence of a room that has witnessed something that is worse than what it expected. The silence of people who were watching what they thought was a needle, and have found it is a blade. Jimmy Page stood in the middle of that room and said nothing for a moment.

He looked at Clapton with the expression of someone who has heard something and is receiving it fully, not defending against it, but actually taking it in, feeling the specific weight of it. Then he smiled. It was not a forced smile. It was not the smile of someone managing the situation. It was a quiet and slightly sad smile.

The smile of someone who understands what is happening, and has decided that what is happening does not require the response that the person doing it is looking for. “Good luck with Cream, Eric,” Jimmy said. “I mean that.” He turned and left. The room watched him go. Clapton stood at the center of his group with his drink in his hand and said nothing.

Someone nearby tried to restart the conversation. Clapton was not quite present for it. The morning after the party, Clapton was in his flat in that particular state of the morning after that arrives when you have done something the previous evening that you are not entirely certain you feel good about.

It was not regret yet, not quite. It was something more like the presence of an unresolved question. The specific discomfort of having said something in public that you know was designed to perform rather than to communicate and that you know the person it was directed at understood was designed to perform rather than to communicate.

He had told Jimmy Page that his music was brilliant but not necessary. He had done this in a room full of people who mattered in the London music world in the specific public way that makes the saying into a kind of statement, something the room would remember and carry and discuss. He had done it because the room was there and because having a sharp thing to say and the willingness to say it publicly was a kind of authority in the world he inhabited and because Jimmy Page had walked toward him at a moment when that authority felt available and worth deploying. He had thought Jimmy would respond. Most people would have responded. The situation had been constructed to produce a response, to provoke the defense or the counterattack that would have made Clapton the person who had landed something and stood firm while someone else scrambled. Jimmy had not scrambled. He had smiled with the specific quality of a sad and genuine

smile and said good luck with Cream and walked away and the not scrambling had left the room in a silence that was not the silence of Clapton having won but the silence of the room understanding that something had happened that was not what they had expected. He was thinking about this when the post arrived.

Among the letters and cards was an envelope with his name written on it in a neat and somewhat formal hand. There was no return address. He opened it. Inside was a single sheet of notepaper written in the same neat hand. Eric, your playing in John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers changed how I thought about the guitar. I don’t say this because of last night.

I’ve thought it since I first heard the record and I’ve carried it with me through everything I’ve tried to do since. The way you play the blues is something I’ve tried to understand technically and cannot quite. It’s yours in a way that I find genuinely remarkable. Cream is going to be extraordinary. I believe that.

I hope it gives you everything you’re looking for in the music. JP Clapton read the note. He read it again. He set it on the table and looked at it. There was no mention of the Savoy. No reference to what he had said or the manner in which he had said it or the room that had been present for both. The note existed entirely in the space of what Jimmy actually thought offered without any relationship to the events of the previous evening as if the previous evening had not occurred and this was simply a communication between one musician and another about the things that matter to musicians. He picked it up and read it a third time. The specific feeling that arrived was not easily named. It was something in the territory between admiration and shame. The specific version of shame that arrives not from having been caught or punished but from having had the

measure of your own behavior held up by someone who chose not to make use of it against you. Jimmy had not written the note to shame him. The note was not designed to shame him. It was genuinely kind and the kindness was the most disorienting thing about it. More disorienting than any response that would have used the previous evening’s behavior against him.

He sat at the kitchen table with the note and his tea and felt the specific weight of someone who has done something they cannot take back and who has been given, by the person they did it to, a model of how to be that they did not expect to receive. Cream’s first major London concert was at the Royal Albert Hall, 6 weeks after the party at the Savoy.

The evening had the specific quality of anticipation that attended everything Cream did in that period. The audience gathered with the focused expectation of people who believe they are about to witness something important and are prepared to give it everything the occasion requires. Before the band played the first number, Clapton walked to the microphone alone.

The audience settled. “I need to say something before we start tonight.” Clapton said. His voice had the quality that it had when he was being entirely direct, without the performance of directness that public speaking sometimes involves. Simply saying the thing. “A few weeks ago, at a party, I said some things to a fellow musician. I was showing off.

I was being the kind of person I don’t particularly want to be. And I said things that were unkind and that I didn’t mean or didn’t mean in the way they came out.” The Royal Albert Hall was completely silent. “His name is Jimmy Page.” Clapton said. “And he’s a finer musician than I suggested that evening. More than that, he’s a finer man than I was in that moment.” He paused.

“The morning after I was publicly unkind to him, he sent me a note. Nothing about what happened, just something kind, something genuine. I’ve thought about that note every day since then.” He looked down at the microphone. “So, Jimmy, if you’re somewhere where you can hear this, I’m sorry. Publicly, genuinely.

I “I wrong about what I said and I was worse than wrong in how I said it. You deserved better, and I knew it while I was doing it, and did it anyway, which is its own category of failure.” He stepped back from the microphone. Then he looked out at the audience. “Right,” he said. “Let’s play.” What Clapton did not know, because his assistant had made the arrangement without telling him, was that Jimmy Page was in the third row.

He had arrived quietly before the show and taken the seat that had been reserved for him, and he had been sitting there during the entire introduction, listening with the complete stillness of someone who is receiving something they did not expect, and who is giving it the attention it deserves. Clapton saw him halfway through the set, during a quieter passage, when the lights shifted and the third row was suddenly visible in a way it had not been during the louder numbers.

He saw the face he recognized, and for a moment he stopped playing. Just for a moment, half a bar of something turning into nothing before his hands found the music again and continued. At the end of the show, Clapton walked to the edge of the stage. He looked down at the third row. Jimmy stood. Clapton reached down and Jimmy reached up, and their hands met, and Clapton pulled him into the kind of embrace that two people share when something has been said and received, and when what the words created is being confirmed by the contact. The Royal Albert Hall made the sound that audiences make when they have witnessed something real. When they separated, Clapton was crying. He was not performing the crying. He was simply crying in the way that things that have been held in for long enough eventually find their way out.

“Thank you for coming,” Clapton said. “Thank you for saying it,” Jimmy said. Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page were friends for the decades that followed. Not the constructed friendship of two famous people who find mutual association useful, but the kind that is built from a specific shared history, and from the respect that develops when one person has shown another something about how to behave that the other person needed to see.

When Clapton’s addictions made his life difficult in the 1970s, Jimmy called. Not with advice, not with lectures, just with the regular presence of someone who has not concluded that a difficulty constitutes a reason to withdraw. When the years after Led Zeppelin were years of stillness and uncertainty for Jimmy, Clapton’s calls had the specific quality of calls from someone who understands what the end of a large thing feels like, and who knows that the understanding is more useful than any particular thing they might say. In a 1975 interview, Clapton was asked about the musicians he most admired. He answered with several names, and then said something about Jimmy Page that the interviewer had not anticipated. “There was an evening,” Clapton said, “when I was publicly unkind to Jimmy in a room full of people. I was performing a version of myself that I’m not proud of. The next morning he sent me a note.

Just kind, just genuine, no reference to what I’d done.” He paused. “I’ve tried to be that kind of person since then. I haven’t always managed it, but I know what it looks like now. Jimmy showed me.” Jimmy Page has never spoken publicly about the evening at the Savoy Hotel or the weeks that followed it.

He has spoken about Eric Clapton with the consistent warmth of someone who means what they say. He has said that Clapton’s playing is among the finest he he ever encountered. He has said this the way he says things he believes, without elaboration or performance. In 1966, someone in a London hotel told Jimmy Page that his music was brilliant, but not necessary.

That his playing served the market rather than the soul. That he had perhaps never felt the urgency that genuine music requires. Three years later, Led Zeppelin’s first album arrived. Then the second. Then four more symbols on a cover with no name and no title. And 37 million copies. And the most played song on American radio for a decade.

Some music, it turns out, you play because if you don’t play it, you’ll die. Jimmy Page had been feeling exactly that since he was 14 years old. He simply did not feel the need to say so in a hotel ballroom in November. That, as it turns out, was the point. The friendship that developed between Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page in the years that followed the Royal Albert Hall concert was not the constructed friendship of two famous people who find mutual association useful, or who have publicists that see value in proximity. It was built from the specific foundation of a shared history that included something true on both sides. The truth of what Clapton had said at the Savoy, and the truth of how Jimmy had responded to it, and the truth of what Clapton had done at the Royal Albert Hall, and what Jimmy’s presence there had meant. When Clapton’s addictions made his life in the 1970s a version of itself that he

would later describe as barely survivable, Jimmy called. Not with advice. Not with the specific kind of concerned guidance that people offer when they want to be seen offering help. Just with the regular presence of someone who has not decided that a difficulty constitutes a reason to be absent. The calls came and continued, and Clapton received them the way that people receive things that are given without condition.

When the years after Led Zeppelin were years of a different kind of difficulty for Jimmy, years in which the momentum of what had been had stopped, and what came next had not yet declared itself, Clapton understood something about that particular experience without needing to have it explained.

And his understanding was visible in the specific quality of the contact he maintained. In a 1975 interview with a music journalist who was asking about the musicians Clapton had learned the most from over the course of his career, Clapton gave several names and then said something about Jimmy that arrived in the interview from a different direction than the journalist had been expecting.

There was an evening, Clapton said, when he had been publicly unkind to Jimmy in a room full of people. He had been performing a version of himself, he said, a version he had inhabited often enough in that period that it had begun to feel like him rather than like a character. He had said things that were designed to be clever at someone else’s expense, and that had landed in the room the way those things land, with the specific satisfaction of a sharp thing said in public and received by an audience that appreciated the sharpness. The next morning, he said, Jimmy had sent him a note. Nothing about what had happened, just something genuine about Clapton’s music, and something genuine about what he believed Cream was going to be. The kindness of it, Clapton said, was the most disorienting thing he had received in his professional life up to that point. He had expected a response to the Savoy. He had expected either the

confrontation or the wounded withdrawal that public humiliations tend to produce. He had received neither. He had received a note about the Bluesbreakers album. I’ve tried to be that kind of person since then, Clapton said. I haven’t always managed it, but I know what it looks like now.

Jimmy showed me what it looks like. Jimmy Page has not spoken publicly about the evening at the Savoy or the weeks that followed. He has spoken about Eric Clapton with the consistent warmth of someone who means what they say and who has no need to perform the meaning. He has said that Clapton’s playing is among the finest he has ever encountered.

He has said this with the simplicity of a considered opinion offered without elaboration. In 1966, someone in a London hotel told Jimmy Page that his music was brilliant but not necessary. That the playing served the market rather than the soul. That he had perhaps never felt the urgency that genuine music requires. Three years later, Led Zeppelin’s first album arrived.

Some music, it turns out, you play because if you don’t play it, you’ll die. Jimmy Page had been feeling exactly that since he was 14 years old in a bedroom in Heston with a record player and a guitar and the specific urgency of someone who has found the thing that makes the rest of everything bearable and who will spend the rest of their life with it regardless of what anyone says in a hotel ballroom in November.

He simply did not feel the need to say so. That, as it turned out, was the point.