Jimmy Page Found a 15-Year-Old Playing Alone in a Pub — What He Did Changed Rock History D

Jimmy Paige found a 15-year-old playing alone in a pub. What he did changed rock history. The Gold Hawk Social Club on Gold Hawk Road in Shepherd’s Bush had the particular atmosphere of a West London workingclass venue that has been doing the same thing for long enough that the thing has become a kind of institution without anyone consciously deciding it should be.

The building was not distinguished by its architecture or its decor which ran to dark wood and fixed seating and walls that held photographs of local football teams alongside posters for upcoming events. It was distinguished by the quality of its regulars who were the kind of people that Shepherd’s Bush produced in this period.

Skilled trades people and factory workers and small shopkeepers. people who had built lives in this specific part of London and who came to the Gold Hawk on Friday nights because the Gold Hawk on Friday nights was part of what that life contained. The Who had rehearsed here in their early days when they were still the high numbers and before anyone outside a small circle of West London enthusiasts had heard of them.

Various other bands who had become something or who had not become something but had possessed the ambition to try had passed through the Gold Hawks main room during the years when it had a reputation for hosting live music without too many conditions attached to the hosting. In March of 1968, it was a Friday night and the room was half full.

Jimmy Paige was sitting at the bar. He was 24 years old and the professional life that had been building since he was 16 was at a particular point of transition. The Yard Birds had effectively ended, though the legal and contractual dimensions of the ending were still being managed. He had been the most sought-after session guitarist in London for the better part of 3 years, which meant that he had played on more recordings than he could accurately count.

had been in studios with artists whose names would mean things for decades and had developed a professional competence that had exceeded what any of his peers had imagined was possible in the time frame in which he had achieved it. He was also looking for something he couldn’t quite name. There were conversations happening that would lead within months to Led Zeppelin.

There were names being mentioned. a singer from Birmingham, a drummer who people spoke about with a specific quality of awe, a bass player whose musical intelligence was said to be of a different order from the session work he was currently doing. Jimmy was at the center of these conversations in the way that people at the center of things are often at the center, aware of the energy converging without yet being able to see the shape it was converging into.

He had finished a session that afternoon at 3:00, a commercial recording for an advertising agency whose musical requirements he had met in one take, and whose payment rate was good enough that he had no particular complaint about the work. He had nowhere specific to be that evening.

He had walked toward the underground and then walked past it, choosing instead to continue on foot through streets that were familiar enough to walk without attention until he found himself on Gold Hawk Road and the Gold Hawk Social Club was in front of him. He went in. He ordered a pint from a landlord who did not recognize him, which was the default state of being recognized in 1968 for a session musician, even the best session musician in London.

Session players appeared on records without appearing on the sleeve. They were heard without being seen. Jimmy sat at the bar and looked at the room and drank his pint and let the week drain away from him into the general pleasant uselessness of a Friday evening in a pub where nobody knew who he was. There was someone playing guitar in the corner.

He became aware of this gradually. The way you become aware of background music when something in it pulls your attention without you having decided to pay attention. For the first few minutes, the guitar was simply sound, part of the room’s ambient noise alongside the conversations and the clinking glasses and the general motion of a half full pub on a Friday evening.

The conversations in the room were at a volume that made the guitar genuinely background and the guitarist was not doing anything to draw attention to himself. Then there was something in the fifth bar of the song that made Jimmy’s glass pause on its way to his mouth. He set the glass down.

Danny Clark was 15 years old and lived three streets from the Gold Hawk Social Club in a terrace house that he shared with his mother and his younger sister. He had been an apprentice at a printing shop on Oxbridge Road since the previous September. learning the mechanical dimensions of a trade that he found interesting without finding it compelling and which paid him enough to contribute to the household and to cover his expenses which were modest.

He played guitar on Friday evenings at the Gold Hawk because the landlord, a tolerant man named Brian, who had a general policy of goodwill toward local young people, allowed him to sit in the corner and play for 2 hours in exchange for the use of the corner. There was no money in the arrangement.

There had been a brief period when people had dropped coins in a jar that Brian had put out, but the coins had been sufficiently rare that the jar had been removed and not replaced. Dany played because the arrangement gave him somewhere to practice that was not his bedroom, and because playing in front of a room, even a room that was paying him no attention, was different in some way from playing alone.

and the difference was useful to him, even if he could not have explained precisely why he played original compositions. This was unusual for a 15-year-old in a pub in 1968. The standard approach for a musician of his age and experience would have been to play the songs that people knew, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Kinks, the songs that might generate the occasional moment of recognition from someone in the room who happened to be listening.

Dany played things he had written himself, which generated no recognition from anyone in the room because nobody in the room had heard them before and nobody in the room was listening. He played with his eyes closed. This was partly a habit developed from practicing alone where there was nothing to look at and partly a genuine preference, a way of going further into the music than open eyes allowed.

His technique was rough in the specific ways that self-taught technique is rough. The right hand not quite positioned for optimal efficiency. The left hand sometimes choosing a fingering that was getting the job done, but at an unnecessary cost in effort. A few habitual patterns that had developed early and would need to be unlearned before better habits could replace them.

But the music, the music was something else. Jimmy listened through four songs. He listened with the trained attention of a session musician who had spent eight years evaluating musical material at speed, learning to identify in a few bars what was worth taking seriously and what was not.

What he was hearing in the corner of the Gold Hawk social club was a 15-year-old with inadequate technique and compositional intelligence that was substantially in advance of his years. The melodic idea in the fifth bar of the first song he properly heard was the thing that had stopped his glass. It was a modulation that a more technically proficient player would have been less likely to attempt because a more technically proficient player would have known that it was unusual and would have either used it deliberately with awareness of what it was doing or avoided it for the same reason. Dany had arrived at it naturally without knowing what it was because his ear had told him it was right. The result was a moment of harmonic sophistication in the middle of an otherwise straightforwardly competent song that had no business being there and was completely compelling. The next three songs showed the same pattern. technical roughness throughout and

moments of compositional intelligence that suggested a musical mind working at a level considerably ahead of where the hands currently were. Jimmy had encountered this combination before in himself. He had been a technically rough player before he was a technically excellent one and the roughness had coexisted with something that the technique had eventually caught up to rather than the other way around.

He recognized what he was hearing. He moved from his seat at the bar and walked to the corner. Dany was playing with his eyes closed, moving through a chord progression, and did not register the approach until the song ended, and he opened his eyes and found a man sitting in the chair across from him.

“How old are you?” the man asked. “15.” “Who taught you?” “Nobody.” The man was looking at him with an attention that Dany was not accustomed to receiving in this room. He was perhaps in his mid20s, dark-haired, wearing clothes that were ordinary without being particularly ordinary. The kind of clothes that someone wears when the clothes are genuinely not something they are thinking about.

Those are your own songs. Yeah. How many have you written? Dany thought about it. About 30, maybe a few more. Play me another one, the man said. Everyone else is just I’m not asking about everyone else. So Danny played another one and it was different from the previous songs he had played that evening.

Not because the song was better or worse, but because someone was listening and playing for someone who is listening is a different physical act from playing for a room that is not. And the difference expressed itself in the quality of what came out. The man listened without moving, without reacting, without giving Dany any signal at all about what he was hearing.

He simply listened with the total attention that Dany associated with teachers who were actually interested in whether you understood something, which was a quality he had encountered rarely enough to recognize it clearly when it appeared. When the song ended, the man said, “What do you want to do with this?” Dany looked at him.

What do you mean with the guitar? the songs. What do you want to happen? The question was not one Dany had been asked in this form. People asked him how long he’d been playing or whether he’d had lessons or whether he knew such and such a song. Nobody had asked what he wanted to happen. I don’t know. Play, I suppose. That’s not enough of an answer.

Make records. Do you want to be famous or do you want to make music? Danny looked at him. What’s the difference? The man was quiet for a moment. That’s a more important question than you might think, he said. Famous is a consequence, he continued. Sometimes it happens. Often it doesn’t.

It depends on things you can’t control. Making music is the work. The work is the only thing you actually control. So, do you want to do the work? Yes, Dany said. He said it without hesitation, which surprised him slightly because he had not known the answer until the question was asked. And then the answer was obvious.

“Good,” the man said. “Who are you?” “Danny.” “Danny Clark.” “Who are you?” Dany asked in return. “Someone who does the work.” “What’s your name?” “Jimmy Paige.” The name meant nothing specific to Dany, who was 15 and whose musical reference points were the artists on the records he owned rather than the session musicians who played on them.

What do you play? Guitar. Are you any good? Jimmy smiled at this in a way that was not quite a laugh and not quite nothing. A bit, he said. He asked to borrow Dany<unk>y’s guitar. Dany handed it over. Jimmy held it for a moment, feeling its balance and weight. then played a few notes to establish where it was and how it responded.

He made a small adjustment to one of the tuning pegs. “Your right hand,” he said. “Here.” He repositioned his own right hand to demonstrate the angle. “Feel the difference when you try it.” Dany took the guitar back and tried it. The first chord he played was cleaner than what he was accustomed to.

He played it again, cleaner still. “That’s the same chord,” Jimmy said. different efficiency. Every note you’ve been fighting to play with your current position with this angle, you’re not fighting. The note is still the note, but you’re not spending anything you don’t have to spend to get to it.

He showed Dany several other things over the next 40 minutes. the structural dimension of his songs which had ideas but did not yet have shapes which meant that the ideas appeared and then did not know where to go which was a specific and correctable problem. The relationship between melody and harmony in two of the songs where slight adjustments to the underlying chord choices would give the melodic lines more room to express what they were trying to express.

the question of economy, of what happened when you removed a note rather than adding one, which was a concept that Dany had not encountered before, and which opened something in his understanding of how music worked. And then Jimmy played something himself. It was not a long piece, perhaps 45 seconds of a composed idea, something that had the quality of being complete, of having been thought through from beginning to end, where every element was in the right relationship to every other element, and nothing was fighting anything else. Dany listened to it the way he almost never listened to music with the full forward attention of someone receiving something new and understood hearing it what technique in service of composition actually sounded like that’s what happens when both things are working. Jimmy said, “When the piece ended right now, you have the ideas, the technique will come. It always does if you put in

the time, but you need proper instruction or you’ll spend years correcting bad habits that become harder to correct the longer they persist.” He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a card. It belonged to a guitar teacher named Albert Lewis in Hon, who had been Jimmy’s own teacher in the years before the session work had given him the foundation he needed to develop his own approach.

Go and see this man, Jimmy said. Tell him I sent you. He’ll know what to do with you. How much does he charge? Dany asked. Don’t worry about that. Who’s going to pay for it? It’s handled. Dany looked at the card and then at the man across from him who had arrived from somewhere and sat down and paid attention to him for the better part of an hour in a pub where nobody else had paid attention to him in 2 years of Friday evenings.

Why are you doing this? Jimmy was quiet for a moment long enough that Dany thought he might not answer. Then he said because someone did it for me. not in exactly the same way. But someone took the time. I was younger than you and someone told me that what I was doing was worth continuing and told me what I needed to do to continue it properly.

If they hadn’t, I don’t know where I would have ended up. He paused again. That kind of thing should be passed on. He wrote another address on a second card and gave it to Danny. Come to this address next week, Wednesday at 2:00. Bring that cassette recorder if you have one and whatever cassettes you have recordings on.

What’s there? A recording studio. I’ll be working there. You want to record my songs? I want to hear them properly in a room built for listening. Then we’ll have a better picture of what we’re working with. He finished his pint, which had been sitting untouched on the small table beside him for the past 40 minutes.

He stood, put on his jacket, and said good night to Danny Clark, who was sitting in the corner of the Gold Hawk Social Club with two business cards in his hand, and the specific sensation of someone for whom the coordinates of the future have just shifted without warning. Dany went to see Albert Lewis the following Tuesday.

Lewis, who was a retired orchestral guitarist of considerable accomplishment, who had been teaching in H for two decades, looked at Dany for perhaps 30 seconds before he played anything and said, your friend was right to send you. He’s not my friend. I met him once. Well, Lewis said, you may find that changes. The lessons began.

Dany had technique that needed to be dismantled and rebuilt, which is always harder than learning from the beginning. But he had compositional instinct that Lewis recognized as something that did not come along with any predictable frequency. And the combination of these two things, the difficulty of the technical work and the quality of what the technical work was in service of produced in Lewis, the specific engagement of a teacher who understands they are working with material worth working with. The recording session on Wednesday was a revelation of a different kind. Jimmy listened to the cassettes in the studio control room with the focused attention that Dany was beginning to understand was simply how he listened to things and then listened to Dany play the same songs live and made notes in a small notebook that Dany could not read from where he was sitting. “Better than I expected,” Jimmy said when Dany had finished, which is

unusual. Usually, it goes the other way. He arranged for Dany to meet Peter Grant, who was Led Zeppelin’s manager and who was not in the market for a 15-year-old guitarist from Shepherd’s Bush, but who was a man who understood talent in its early stages and who remembered names that were given to him with a recommendation attached.

“Keep an eye on this one,” Jimmy told Grant. on your say so,” Grant said, which was the most substantive form of agreement he offered. Danny Clark studied with Albert Lewis for 3 years. He spent those years dismantling the habits that had formed naturally and replacing them with habits that were the result of deliberate thought, which is uncomfortable work, but not impossible work, when the material that the habits are in service of is worth the effort.

By the time he was 19 and the lessons with Lewis had run their course, the technique had arrived at a place where it was no longer something he thought about, where it had become the invisible infrastructure through which the compositional intelligence could express itself. The session work began. The production credits followed.

By the time Danny Clark was 25, there were songs on the radio that had his name on them. songs that people knew without knowing his name, which is the session musicians and the writer’s experience of recognition. They were good songs, the kind that demonstrated in their construction a way of thinking about melodic line and harmonic structure that had been audible in rough form in the fifth bar of a song in the Gold Hawk Social Club in 1968 and which had developed in the years since into something that people who understood these things recognized as genuine. In interviews over the years, when journalists asked Dany about how he had started, how he had found his way from a printing apprenticeship in Shepherd’s Bush to where he was, he would tell a version of the story that included a Friday evening in a pub and a man who sat down and listened and then gave him two business cards and told him

to keep going. The journalist always asked who the man was. Dany always said he was someone who took the time. He had never named Jimmy Paige. He understood from the way Jimmy had handled everything that followed that Friday evening that the name was not something Jimmy wanted attached to the story in any public way.

The thing had been done without announcement and it did not require announcement after the fact. Jimmy Paige had formed Led Zeppelin by the end of 1968 and had found the thing he had been looking for when he sat in the Gold Hawk Social Club on that March Friday without anywhere particular to be.

The band that formed around him in those months was the shape that the converging energy had been looking for and what they made together was the thing that the session work and the years of deliberate craft had been preparation for. He did not speak about Danny Clark. This was not because the story was hidden, but because it did not require speaking.

The thing had been simple. He had heard something in a pub, had recognized it, had done what he could to give it the direction it needed, and had moved on. That there were songs on the radio 20 years later that carried some trace of a Friday evening in 1968 was not something that required acknowledgement.

It was simply what happened when you paid attention to what was in front of you and responded to it honestly. Albert Lewis died in 1981 and left behind notebooks that contained meticulous records of the students he had taught and the progress they had made. In the entry for Danny Clark dated March 1968, Lewis had written in the careful handwriting he used for everything sent to me by James Page, a natural composer.

The technique will take 2 years minimum. The composition needs nothing from me. That was all. It was enough. When Jimmy Paige was asked in later years whether there were things about the pre-Led Zeppelin period he missed, he mentioned the sessions and the rooms and the specific quality of a time when things were beginning without anyone quite knowing what they were beginning into.

He said that in rooms like that in that period, you could hear things starting that hadn’t started yet and that this was a privilege and that you didn’t always know what you were hearing, but you could tell when something was real. He did not say anything else about that specifically. He did not need to.

the Friday evenings in the Gold Hawk social club and the 15-year-old in the corner with the rough technique and the compositional intelligence and the two cards and the instruction to keep going and everything that followed from all of it. These things existed in the world independently of whether anyone knew about them. The music was real.

The songs were real. The career that grew from the seeds of that March evening was real. Jimmy Paige walked into a pub in Shepherd’s Bush because he had nowhere particular to be. He heard something that had nowhere particular to go. He stayed long enough to give it a direction. Then he went home.

Then he went to work building Led Zeppelin, which was where he was supposed to be going all along. That in the end is all it was. A man with nowhere to be on a Friday evening, and a boy playing guitar in the corner of a room where nobody was listening. and the specific privilege of an ear trained well enough to hear something real before it had become visible to anyone else.

That is what it was and it was