Jimmy Page Was Asked to Name the One Guitarist He Could Never Figure Out—His Answer Shocked All S

The publicist who was in the room said she had never heard Jimmy Paige answer a question the way he answered this one. Not because of what he said, because of the silence before he said it. She had been in rooms with Paige dozens of times across the previous four years and had learned to read his silences.

The ones that meant he was calculating what to give and what to withhold. The ones that meant he was bored by the question and was finding the most efficient route to an answer that would end it. The ones that meant the question hadn’t landed anywhere interesting and he was waiting politically for the next one.

This silence, she said, was different. This was the silence of someone going somewhere they didn’t usually take people. The journalist who had asked the question was watching Paige’s face and not writing anything down. He said afterward that he had the sensation in those few seconds of having accidentally found a door that was usually kept closed.

Then Paige said a name and the journalist wrote it down twice. The interview took place in a hotel suite in New York City in November 1973. Led Zeppelin had just completed their fifth North American tour, a run of concerts that had, by any reasonable metric, confirmed what was already largely understood, that this band had moved beyond comparison, beyond the usual competitive framework of who was bigger than whom and by how much.

The tour had broken attendance records. The concerts had lasted 4 hours in some venues. The audiences had been the largest ever assembled for a rock act in several of the cities where they played. By November of 1973, Led Zeppelin was not competing with anyone for a position that anyone else occupied, which was either liberating or isolating depending on how you looked at it and on which member of the band you were talking to.

Jimmy Page gave very few interviews. This was deliberate rather than accidental. Paige had made a decision early in Led Zeppelin’s existence that his relationship with the press would be managed in the same way he managed everything else about the band’s public presence. Carefully with a strong preference for control over openness and with a clear understanding that what you said in interviews existed in the world permanently available to be quoted and misqued and taken out of context in ways that the original conversation never intended. He said what he meant to say. He did not say things he didn’t mean to say. The result was an interview subject who was by the standards of the rock press in the early 1970s unusually disciplined. Present in the conversation, engaged with the questions, but moving through the interaction along a path he had largely pre-mapped, which was what made the

silence before the name unusual. Paige going off map was something the publicist recognized instantly because she had been watching him stay on map for long enough to understand the difference. The journalist’s name was Philip Carver. He was 31 years old, writing for a British music magazine that was in 1973 one of the most widely read publications in the rock world.

He had interviewed Paige once before, two years earlier, and had found him, as most journalists found him, simultaneously more intelligent and more guarded than they had expected. He had prepared carefully for the November 1973 interview, knowing that preparation was the only tool that gave you any real chance with Paige.

That a vague question would receive a vague answer. That a lazy question would receive a polite but essentially empty response. And that the only way to get Paige somewhere interesting was to find a question interesting enough that his genuine intelligence overcame his habitual caution. He had been working through a list of questions for 40 minutes about physical graffiti which was in production at that point about the tour, about the band’s relationship to the recording industry, about the future. When he arrived at the question he had been holding back, he asked it simply without preamble. Which living guitarist had produced something that Paige genuinely could not explain? Not couldn’t copy, not couldn’t equal, but couldn’t locate the mechanism of could not even with all of his technical understanding and all of his years of listening to and analyzing guitar

playing identify how the thing being done was actually being done. The room went quiet. Paige reached for his glass, set it down without drinking. The publicist who was sitting to one side and whose job it was to monitor the interview and intervene if necessary found herself leaning very slightly forward.

She had been monitoring interviews for most of the afternoon. This was the first moment she had leaned forward. Paige said that’s a different kind of question. Carver said he understood that. He waited. Paige was quiet for another moment. Then he said, “Jango Reinhardt.” Philip Carver wrote the name down, looked at what he had written, wrote it down again on a clean line, more carefully, as if the first version might have been inaccurate.

Django Reinhardt, the Belgian-born Romani guitarist who had developed across a career that ran from the 1930s into the early 1950s, a style of jazz guitar playing that was so specific, so wholly derived from his own particular combination of physical circumstance and musical genius that it had never been successfully replicated in any complete sense by any player who came after him.

He was born in 1910 in a caravan near Liberty’s, Belgium into a family of traveling Romani musicians. And he grew up playing music in the way that children who grow up in musical households absorb music by proximity, by imitation, by the gradual discovery that the thing you have been hearing your entire life has a relationship to your own hands that you can develop.

He played the violin and the bandon before the guitar became his primary instrument. By his late teens, he was already, by the account of the musicians who encountered him in the jazz cafes of Paris, something unusual. A player whose relationship to the instrument seemed less like technique and more like a form of direct communication, as if the guitar were saying things that other instruments were incapable of.

And Reinhardt was the person who had learned to hear what it was saying. A guitarist who had lost the use of two fingers on his left hand in a caravan fire when he was 18 years old, and who had responded to this loss not by reducing his ambitions, but by developing from the two remaining functional fingers of that hand a technique of such speed and fluidity and harmonic sophistication that it remained decades after his death in 1953.

genuinely mysterious to musicians who studied it analytically. The fire happened in the autumn of 1928. Reinhardt was taken to a hospital where doctors considered amputating his right leg, which had also been severely burned, and were uncertain about the prognosis for his left hand. He survived with the leg intact, but with the ring finger and little finger of his left hand permanently contracted, pulled by scar tissue into a position that could not be straightened, and that conventional guitar technique had no framework for accommodating. What Reinhardt did with this limitation over the following months and years is one of the most remarkable stories in the history of any instrument. He did not work around the injury. He worked through it, developing a new technique from the ground up, using only his index and middle fingers for the majority of his fret work, finding angles of

approach to the fretboard that the injured fingers made necessary, and that turned out to produce sounds that functional-handed players approaching the fretboard from conventional positions could not naturally achieve. The technique that emerged was not a compensation for a deficiency. It was a new language, one that only Reinhardt spoke natively because only Reinhardt had developed it from within the specific physical constraints that had produced it.

Paige had encountered Reinhardt’s recordings as a teenager in Epsom. Not through any formal introduction, not through a teacher or a course of study, but through the same process by which he encountered most of the music that mattered to him, which was through listening.

He had been listening by his mid- teens to everything he could find. American blues and rock and roll primarily, but also jazz, also folk, also the orchestral music that came through the radio late at night when the daytime programming had ended, and the stations played things that didn’t have obvious audiences.

He heard a Reinhardt recording for the first time and experienced what he would later describe as a specific quality of arrested attention. The sensation of hearing something that required him to stop whatever else he was doing and listen more carefully because what was happening was not immediately accountable in terms of what he already knew.

He found more recordings. He listened to them repeatedly in the way he listened to things he was trying to understand. not passively, not as background, but with the active analytical attention of someone who was simultaneously trying to enjoy the music and to understand how it was being produced.

He could identify some of what Reinhardt was doing. He could hear the harmonic choices, could follow the melodic logic, could identify the moments where conventional technique was clearly being applied and where something else was happening. But the something else remained after extended listening, not fully visible.

He could hear that it was happening. He could not always hear how. Carver asked Paige to say more. Paige said that most guitar playing, virtually all guitar playing at a high level, including his own, was if you spent enough time with it, explicable. You could slow it down, isolate the components, understand the relationship between the physical movement and the produced sound, identify the technique being applied and the theory that informed the musical decisions.

This was not to diminish the achievement. Explaining how something works is not the same as being able to do it, but it was, Paige said, technically possible to account for most great guitar playing in terms that gave you access to its mechanism. Reinhardt’s playing, he said, resisted this. Not in every element.

Some of what Reinhardt did was technically analyzable in the ordinary way. But there was a quality in the sound itself, something in the relationship between the notes and the space between the notes, something in the phrasing that seemed to operate by principles that Paige had spent years listening for and had not been able to fully isolate.

He said that when he was a teenager teaching himself guitar in his bedroom in Epsom from records, he had spent more time with Reinhardt’s recordings than with almost anything else. Not because Reinhardt was playing the style of music Paige was most drawn to, but because there was something in the recordings that he needed to understand and kept not being able to understand completely.

He had made a kind of peace with this incomprehension. He said it was the kind of incomprehension that kept him listening. Carver asked whether this was a question of the physical limitation, whether part of what made Reinhardt’s playing mysterious was that it had been produced by hands that were different from other hands, and that the specific compensation Reinhardt had developed for his injured fingers had resulted in a technique that was, in a fundamental sense, unreplicable.

Not because no one was skilled enough, but because no one else had the same physical starting point. Paige considered this. He said it was part of it. The two-fingered technique on the fretting hand produced angles of approach to the fretboard that no conventional left hand position would naturally generate.

And these angles produce sounds, the specific qualities of vibr notes bent and resolved that were a direct consequence of the physical limitation. To fully replicate the technique, you would need to either sustain the same injury or teach yourself to play as if you had. But Paige said it was not only this. There were players who had studied Reinhardt for decades, who understood the physical mechanics better than almost anyone alive, and whose playing, while extraordinary, remained distinctly their own, rather than an approach to Reinhardt. The mystery was not entirely in the hands. Some of it was in whatever Reinhardt heard when he played. The musical mind that was directing the hands, that was making the choices about where to go and when to go there and how long to stay. Carver asked if Paige had

ever met anyone else in his years in the music world, who heard something in Reinhardt that they also couldn’t explain. Paige said yes. He named several musicians, some well-known, some less so, who had, in conversations he’d had across his career, expressed some version of the same bewildered admiration.

He said the people who loved Reinhard most tended to share a specific quality of relationship to the recordings. They never felt finished with them. They returned to them year after year, still hearing things they hadn’t noticed before, still unable to fully account for what was happening. The interview continued for another 20 minutes.

Carver asked about the upcoming album, about the American market, about the band’s plans for 1974. Paige answered these questions with his usual discipline precision. The publicist sat back. The moment was over in the sense that it had returned to its ordinary register, but it had been there. That few seconds of silence before the name.

That quality of going somewhere he didn’t usually take people. The name written down twice on a page. The piece that Carver published in the magazine two weeks later contained three paragraphs about the Django Reinhardt exchange. It generated more reader correspondence than any other section of the piece.

Some of the letters were from musicians who wrote to say that they understood exactly what Paige was describing. Some were from Reinhardt fans who were surprised and moved that one of the biggest names in rock music had identified this specific incomprehensibility as a central feature of their heroes playing.

Several were from people who had never heard of Reinhardt and immediately went looking for his recordings. Paige never repeated the conversation in quite the same form. He mentioned Reinhardt in subsequent interviews, briefly in the context of influences, in the way that influential figures get named and passed over without full examination.

but the specific quality of what he said in that hotel suite in November 1973. The acknowledgement that there was something in another player’s work that he could not fully reach that had kept him listening for 20 years and would presumably keep him listening indefinitely belonged to that room to that silence before the name to the journalist who wrote it down twice and the publicist who leaned forward and didn’t know why.

Django Reinhardt died in 1953, 20 years before that interview. He never knew that the guitarist who was in 1973, considered by most of the music world to be the most significant and original player alive, had been trying to figure out what he was doing since he was a teenager in a bedroom in Epsom. He didn’t know, but in some way that is difficult to articulate precisely, the recordings knew.

They had been doing what they had always done. keeping people listening, resisting full explanation, remaining available for another session with someone who needed to understand something they were going to spend the rest of their life not entirely understanding. Jimmy Paige understood a great many things about the guitar.

That was one of the things he couldn’t. If this story of what it means to encounter something genuinely beyond your reach moved you, hit that like button and subscribe. We share these stories every week. and tell us in the comments what’s the piece of music you’ve returned to for years and still can’t fully explain.