Jimmy Page Sat Next to a Crying Boy on a Flight — The Pilot Was Left in Tears D

Jimmy Page sat next to a crying boy on a flight. What he did for the next 3 hours left the pilot in tears. British Airways flight BA177 departed London Heathrow at 10:10 on a Tuesday morning in March of 1977, bound for Los Angeles with a full complement of passengers and the particular atmosphere of a long-haul flight.

At the beginning of a decade in which long-haul flying had become sufficiently normalized that people had begun to develop their personal rituals for it. The books they brought and the meals they pre-ordered and the specific positioning of the neck pillow and the strategies for sleeping in a space that was not quite designed for sleeping.

First class on the BA177 to Los Angeles offered a version of comfort that was genuinely comfortable by the standards of what was available. The seats wider and the service more attentive and the passengers separated from each other by the particular arrangement of the cabin that allowed a degree of privacy proportional to the fare premium.

Jimmy Page, who had been traveling at this level for years and had developed his own relationship with the experience, sat in the window seat with a hat pulled low and dark glasses and a jacket whose collar could be turned up if required, which together produced the desired effect of someone who might be anyone rather than someone who was specifically himself.

He had booked the adjacent seat as well. He did this when he could, when the tour logistics allowed it. The absence of a neighbor was worth the additional cost. He could sleep or read or simply look at the sky, which at 40,000 ft was a specific kind of sky that he never tired of. The agent had said the adjacent seat was confirmed empty.

The boarding gate information had suggested the flight was not oversold. These facts contributed to a reasonable expectation that the flight from London to Los Angeles would be exactly what he needed, which was several hours of not being required to be anything. He was settling into this expectation when the cabin crew member appeared at the front of first class, moving with the slightly accelerated purpose that indicated something was being managed, and beside her a boy.

He was 12, or somewhere near 12, at the specific age where the difference between 11 and 13 was visible in ways that would stop being visible in another year or two. He was wearing a jacket that was slightly too large, the sleeves ending half an inch past where sleeves should end, the kind of jacket that someone had bought with room to grow into it.

He had a canvas bag on his shoulder, and a tag attached to his jacket with a clip, the unaccompanied minor identification that airlines used for children traveling alone, and he was looking straight ahead with the specific expression of someone who has decided in advance that they are not going to show anything. He sat down in the seat next to Jimmy.

The cabin crew member said several things to him quietly, the standard information about the flight duration, and what to ask for, and where to find her if anything was needed. The boy nodded with the minimal movement of someone receiving information they do not fully need at this moment. The cabin crew member smiled, checked something on her clipboard, and moved on.

Jimmy looked out the window. He had not turned to look at the boy. He had noted his arrival peripherally, in the way that you note things in your immediate environment as a matter of ambient awareness, and he had returned his attention to the window and the tarmac and the gray morning that Heathrow was offering to the departing aircraft.

The engines changed their frequency. The plane began to move. England in March from a taxiing aircraft had the quality that England in March usually had when viewed from any sufficient distance, a gray-green dampness that was not without its own beauty, but that was clearly the landscape of a country that had made its peace with the absence of sun as a permanent condition rather than a seasonal inconvenience.

Jimmy looked at it without feeling anything in particular about it. He had left England and returned to England more times than he could count, and the leaving and returning had become a simple factual rhythm of his working life. The boy beside him was looking out the same window. Jimmy became aware of this not because he was looking at the boy, but because the quality of what was happening beside him had a particular quality that entered his peripheral awareness without requiring him to look directly at its source. The boy was very still. The stillness was not the stillness of someone who is relaxed, but the stillness of someone who is holding themselves together. The plane lifted from the runway. The tarmac disappeared and the gray sky surrounded them, and England fell away below. The motorways and the housing estates and the industrial zones and the patches of green that persisted between them, and England became small and then

became the impression of England, and then became cloud. The boy wiped his face. A single quick movement, left hand to right eye, the gesture of someone catching something before it became too visible to ignore. Then the hand back in his lap and the stillness reasserting itself and the forward gaze returning.

Jimmy had seen it. He sat with what he had seen for a moment, the way you sit with information that has arrived unsolicited and must be processed before you decide what, if anything, to do with it. The boy was 12 and crying on a plane and trying not to cry and trying not to let anyone know he was trying. Jimmy had been 12 once.

He had not flown alone at 12 because that had not been the kind of life his family led, but he had held himself together in the specific way that 12-year-olds hold themselves together when the adult world requires more of them than 12-year-olds should be required to produce. And he recognized the posture. He did not look at the boy.

He signaled to the cabin crew member who was moving through the cabin, and when she reached him, he asked, quietly, for two hot chocolates. She looked slightly surprised by the specificity and then moved on to fulfill the request. Jimmy took a magazine from the seat pocket. He opened it without looking at what it was, the way you open a magazine when the magazine is not the point.

The pages fell open to a photograph that filled most of the spread. Four men in the kind of lighting that rock photographers of the period used to suggest something larger than the physical reality of the subjects, dramatic and slightly abstracted. He heard the boy beside him make the small sound of someone who has registered something before they meant to.

“That’s Led Zeppelin,” the boy said. He said it the way you say something that you have identified automatically before you have decided whether to say it. The information arriving at the mouth before the filter had time to operate. Jimmy looked at the page. He looked at it with the expression of someone seeing something for the first time.

“Is it?” he said. “You don’t know Led Zeppelin?” The boy’s voice carried the specific note of incredulity that Led Zeppelin’s absence from someone’s cultural awareness reliably produced in people of his generation and younger. “They’re the best band in the world. Tell me about them, Jimmy said. The boy looked at him for a moment.

In the looking, he was doing the rapid assessment that children do when they encounter adults who are behaving unexpectedly, determining whether the unexpected behavior is threatening or simply unusual. The man beside him seemed to be genuinely asking. There’s Robert Plant, the boy said. He’s the singer.

His voice is like He searched for a description. Like something you haven’t heard before. That’s a good description of a singer. And John Bonham plays drums. He’s the best drummer in the world. Not the fastest, but when he plays, it goes through you. Through you how? Like your heart is beating differently for a bit.

Like it knows there’s something better it should be doing. Jimmy was quiet for a moment. That’s very precise, he said. John Paul Jones plays bass. He’s the invisible one, but if you take him away, the whole thing falls apart. The invisible one. The one you can’t hear not being there. And the fourth? Jimmy Page. He plays guitar.

The boy was looking at the photograph. He plays like the guitar is talking. Talking about what? The boy thought about this with the seriousness that children bring to questions they recognize as real questions, rather than testing questions. About things that don’t have words, he said. Like when you feel something that you can’t explain to anyone, and you just have to feel it.

Jimmy looked at the photograph. That’s very precise, he said again. The hot chocolates arrived. The cabin crew member set them on the tray tables with the particular care of someone managing a situation they do not fully understand. The boy looked at his with mild surprise. I got it wrong, Jimmy said. I ordered two.

I wasn’t sure if you’d want one, but if you don’t, I’ll have both. The boy wrapped his hands around the cup. Something in his posture changed. The very slight relaxation of someone who has been given something warm and has decided, without quite deciding, to accept it. His name was Daniel. He was 12. He was from Manchester.

His father had moved to Los Angeles 2 years ago for work. Sound engineering, recording studios. The world that didn’t announce itself, but made everything else possible. His mother had put him on the plane. He had been brave through the check-in and the security and the waiting and the boarding. And he had been brave through the taxi and the lifting and the first 10 minutes of flight.

And then England had gone and there had been nothing between him and the 11 hours that remained, except the seat and the window and the man beside him who had inexplicably ordered him hot chocolate. “What does your dad do exactly?” Jimmy asked. “Records music with musicians.” Daniel looked at his cup. “Famous ones sometimes. He doesn’t say who.

” “That’s probably right. Some people in the music world understand discretion.” “He works hard. Mom says that’s why he left.” A pause that contained more than the words around it. “She says it differently sometimes.” Jimmy did not press this. He waited. “I think he left because he and Mom weren’t working.” Daniel said.

He said it with the specific matter-of-factness of someone who has processed something enough times that they can state it without it breaking them. “But that’s okay. They’re both fine. I’m fine.” “You don’t have to be fine.” Jimmy said. Daniel looked at him. “On a plane.” Jimmy said. “Nobody is tracking whether you’re fine.

The score doesn’t count at altitude.” A small laugh, Real, this time. “What do you do?” Daniel asked. “I work with music.” “Are you famous?” Jimmy considered this question. “I have a first-class seat.” he said. “I might just be very tall.” Daniel laughed properly. “That’s not how that works.” “Isn’t it? I always thought first class was for tall people.” “And rich ones.

” “Rich tall people. There’s probably a cut-off.” They talked. Not about anything in particular, which is the best kind of talking. The kind where the subject moves as the conversation needs it to, and nobody is steering. Daniel talked about Manchester United, about which he had strong feelings that the current season had not been kind to.

He talked about mathematics, which he liked in the way that people like things when the liking is genuine, and they have learned to apologize for it, because the people around them find it surprising. “People think if you like music, you can’t like maths.” Daniel said. “Music is maths.” Jimmy said. “Or maths is music, depending on how you look at it.

” “Really?” “The intervals between notes are mathematical ratios. The reason a chord sounds right is because the frequency of one note relates to the frequency of another in a ratio that the human ear resolves as harmonious. The reason two notes sound wrong together is because the ratio doesn’t resolve cleanly.” Daniel was quiet for a moment.

“Nobody ever told me that.” “Most people don’t think about it, but every time you hear something that sounds right, something mathematical just happened.” Daniel opened his bag and produced a school exercise book, the kind with the ruled lines and the plain covers. He had a pencil. “Can I draw something?” he asked. “It’s your book.

” “Can I draw you?” Jimmy looked at him. The drawing request from a stranger was usually a thing he managed carefully, the way you manage things that are related to being recognized. But the boy asking it was 12 and on a plane and had been crying and the request was genuine. “If you want,” he said. The drawing took perhaps 20 minutes.

Daniel drew with a focused care that was different from casual sketching. His pencil moving in the deliberate way of someone who has taught themselves by looking carefully at things and thinking carefully about what they see. Perspective was present in the result. Proportion was considered. When he showed it to Jimmy, the face on the page was recognizable as someone looking out an airplane window, not posed, simply occupying a moment.

“You’re good at this,” Jimmy said. “Mom says it’s just a hobby.” “Your mom might be wrong about that.” Daniel looked at the drawing, then at Jimmy. “When did you start playing guitar?” “12,” Jimmy said. Daniel stared at him. “Same age as me?” “Same age and someone told me it was just a hobby.” “Were they wrong?” Jimmy said nothing, which was a sufficient answer.

He asked the cabin crew for a pen and took a napkin from the tray table. He drew a chord diagram, the six strings indicated, the fret positions marked. E minor. The first chord he had learned from a record and from an old musician in his neighborhood who had spent Saturday mornings showing him where to put his fingers.

“If you get a guitar,” he said, “start here. This is the first chord I ever learned.” “What does it sound like?” “Like a beginning.” Daniel took the napkin. His left hand moved to the position indicated in the diagram, fingers finding the shape in the air above his knee. Jimmy watched. Your left hand goes naturally to the right place, he said.

That’s not universal. It matters. Does that mean I could play? It means you could learn. There’s a difference, but it’s a small one. The turbulence arrived 2 hours into the flight without particular warning, as turbulence tends to arrive. The plane moved in the specific way that reminds everyone inside it that they are inside a metal object inside an atmosphere that has its own intentions, and several passengers made the small involuntary sounds of people whose confidence in the stability of their situation has been briefly disrupted. Daniel gripped the armrest. Look out the window, Jimmy said. Why? What do you see? Daniel looked. Clouds, and the bumps. Look past the clouds. A pause. Stars. It’s dark enough up here. Yes. The stars don’t move. The bumps don’t reach them. The turbulence is in

the clouds. Above the clouds, everything is still. The clouds are just the weather. The weather isn’t the whole picture. Daniel considered this. Is that supposed to help? Is it helping? A bit, Daniel admitted. It’s mostly helping because it’s strange enough that I stopped thinking about the bumps.

That’s a valid mechanism, Jimmy said. The turbulence passed. The plane settled. The stars remained where they had been. What if he’s different? Daniel said, a few minutes later. The shift in subject was abrupt, but intelligible. The he was clear from the context. People change, Jimmy said. That’s allowed. It’s actually necessary.

But what if he’s too different? What if 2 years in LA has made him Daniel searched for the word. Someone else? He kept all the Led Zeppelin albums, Jimmy said. Daniel stared at him. How do you know that? You said he had all of them at home. That’s why you know them. Oh. A pause. Yes. People who keep those albums are keeping something specific.

A feeling about what music can do, about why it matters. That doesn’t live in geography. It doesn’t change address when you do. Daniel looked at his hands. The napkin chord diagram was in his notebook now, folded once. What if he doesn’t have time? The question was specific in the way that questions from children can be specific, aimed at the actual thing rather than the circumference of it.

Then you make the time you have matter, Jimmy said. Short and real is better than long and somewhere else. You don’t need the whole flight. You need the hours you actually get. The lights of Los Angeles appeared below the cloud cover as the plane began its descent. The specific sprawl of the city visible in the way that no other city quite manages.

The grid extending in every direction to the visible limits of the geography, lit with the particular intensity of somewhere that runs later and brighter than most places. Daniel was looking at it with an expression that had changed over the 3 hours since Heathrow. Had changed incrementally and not dramatically, but had changed.

I don’t know your name, he said. Jimmy. Jimmy what? Just Jimmy, for now. Like Led Zeppelin, Daniel said, not quite a question. Renowned with? Jimmy looked at the lights of Los Angeles. Something like that, he said. Captain David Morrison came back from the cockpit during the gate arrival process, which was not standard, but was not unprecedented.

Captains occasionally making their way through the cabin for various reasons related to specific passengers or specific situations. He had been flying for 12 years and he had carried a great many people between a great many cities and he had developed a specific perspective of someone who has watched human beings at altitude for long enough to understand that the altitude changes things, makes people more themselves or less themselves in ways that the ground tends to flatten.

He saw the boy first gathering his canvas bag, the unaccompanied minor tag still attached to his jacket. Then he saw the man who had been beside him for the duration of the flight and he saw the face and he registered it with the specific quality of recognition that comes when a face that exists in a particular context appears in an unexpected context and requires a moment to locate correctly.

He said nothing. He watched the man help the boy check that nothing had been left under the seat. “You didn’t leave anything?” the man was saying. “No.” Daniel checked his notebook. The napkin was in it. “No, I have everything.” “Good. Go ahead. He’ll be there.” “You don’t know that.” “I know that.” They moved toward the door.

Captain Morrison watched them go and stood for a moment in the aisle before turning back toward the cockpit. He would tell his wife that evening. He would tell her that Jimmy Page had spent 3 hours looking after a 12-year-old boy on the flight to Los Angeles and had not mentioned who he was at any point.

He would discover, telling her, that something about this made him emotional in a way he had not anticipated and could not entirely explain. She would look at him across the kitchen table and say that she knew why, that it was obvious why, but she would let him arrive at it himself. He would arrive at it himself around midnight sitting in the kitchen after she had gone to bed, thinking about his own children who were 11 and 9, and who he had been meaning to spend more time with for the past several years.

At the gate at Los Angeles International Airport, a man was waiting with the slightly anxious posture of someone who had been checking the arrivals board and had confirmed the landing and was now in the final minutes before the thing happened. Daniel came through the doors. The man opened his arms in the way that parents open their arms when they are not thinking about anything except the fact of the child who is moving toward them.

And Daniel stopped being 12 and composed and brave and ran the last 20 ft. Jimmy watched from the distance that felt appropriate, which was enough distance to give the moment its privacy while remaining close enough to confirm it. The father looked up over his son’s shoulder. He saw a man in a hat and dark glasses standing perhaps 30 ft away, watching with the expression of someone who has delivered something and is confirming its safe arrival. He nodded.

The man nodded back. The man turned and walked toward the terminal exit and the Los Angeles afternoon. In the spring of 1978, a letter arrived at a music school in Heston. The school had been operating in the same building since the early ’60s, had changed teachers twice, and had the particular atmosphere of a place that has been used for its intended purpose long enough to have absorbed something of that purpose into the fabric of the building itself.

The letter was in a 12-year-old’s handwriting. The letters slightly larger than they would become. The words chosen with the care of someone writing to an unknown recipient. My name is Daniel. I’m 12. A man on a plane told me to write to this address. He He if I practice the first chord and wanted to know what comes next, someone here would help.

I’ve practiced the chord. It sounds like a beginning. What comes next? A reply was sent the following week. It was brief and unsigned. It said, “Come on Saturday morning at 9:00. Ask whoever is teaching. They will know what comes next.” Daniel came the following Saturday on the coach from Manchester, arriving at the school 15 minutes early and waiting on the step until someone arrived to open the door.

He was told what came next and the thing after that, and the thing after that. Jimmy Page has never mentioned a Tuesday morning flight to Los Angeles in March 1977. He has never mentioned a 12-year-old boy, or a napkin chord diagram, or 3 hours above the Atlantic. He has said, when asked about travel, that he has made a great many flights and that all of them are interesting if you pay attention.

Captain David Morrison retired in 1993 and told the story to his daughter when she asked him, “What was the most unusual thing he had seen in 30 years of flying?” She asked him why it made him cry. He told her he didn’t know entirely, but that it had something to do with the fact that kindness at altitude is still kindness when you land.

That the altitude doesn’t explain it or excuse it or make it something other than what it is, and that watching someone choose to use 3 hours well without any audience for the choice was the kind of thing that stayed with you. The chord was E minor. It sounds like a beginning. Daniel Harris has been playing for 45 years, and the napkin is in a frame on the wall of his studio.

He doesn’t know whose handwriting is on it, or he knows and has chosen to know it the way you know things that are better held lightly than grasped. The stars above the clouds don’t move. The turbulence is in the clouds. That was the whole lesson, or the first part of it. The rest took 3 hours and a cup of hot chocolate and a drawing of a man looking out an airplane window and a chord diagram on a napkin and the steady accumulation of small things that add up over time to something that cannot be named but can be felt. Like a beginning, he had said. Like exactly that.