“He Was Playing Outside the Window Where It Hung” — Jimmy Page Stopped 

November 8th, 2019. Denmark Street, London, 20 9 in the evening. Denmark Street is 12 shops long and has been the center of the British music trade for over a hundred years. The place where songs were published and instruments were sold, and musicians congregated in the specific way that people who do the same thing congregate when they find a street that will tolerate them.

 The Kinks rehearsed on Denmark Street. the Rolling Stones recorded there. A very young David Bowie came here looking for a publisher in the early 60s. It has changed over the decades in the way that such streets change when the industry around them changes. Some of the original businesses gone, some survived past all expectation.

 Some replaced by things that are adjacent to music rather than part of it. The guitar shops are still there. Most of them, the ones that have been there since the 70s and the ones that arrived later and found the streets specific gravity and stayed. They were locked at this hour, their contents visible through the lit windows, guitars in rows, necks pointing up, price tags hanging from the headstocks in the specific London way of things for sale that are not currently available.

 Denmark Street at 9 in the evening had the quality of a museum that has just closed. Everything visible, nothing accessible, the objects arranged and illuminated for looking at and for wanting. Ray Winters was sitting on the step outside number seven, which was a combined music dealer and pawn shop that had been on this specific site since 1971, and that was like Ry older than it looked and had survived more of the same kinds of pressure.

 He was 58 years old and had been playing guitar for 40 of those years in the serious workmanlike way of someone who had never quite become famous and had never quite stopped trying and had eventually arrived at the specific piece of someone who has accepted that the playing itself is the thing and that the rest is variable.

 He had a borrowed acoustic guitar across his knee, a cheap laminate dreadnot that belonged to his friend Marcus, who had pressed it into his hands that afternoon when Rey had told him what he was going to do. Because Marcus had said, “You’ll want something to play afterward, and had been right in the way that friends of many years are sometimes right about things you haven’t admitted to yourself yet.

” The borrowed guitar sounded the way cheap laminate guitars sound. serviceable, clear, but thin, without the warmth and depth that comes from a solid spruce top that has been played regularly for 40 years and has opened up to the frequencies that one specific player’s hands produce. Through the window behind him on the second row of the display rack was a 1962 Gibson J45 in sunburst finish.

 Its spruce top worn at the sound hole in the shape of 40 years of his right hand. its mahogany neck smoothed at the first and third positions where 40 years of his left hand had spent most of its time. A price tag hung from the tuning peg, the shop’s price, not the price they had given him, because those two numbers were different in the way that pawn shop prices are always different from what you were given.

 And the difference is the cost of the urgency. He had sold it to the shop at 5:00 that afternoon for the amount he needed, which was not what the guitar was worth, but what the situation required, which is a different calculation from market value, and one that had taken him approximately 4 days to complete once he had admitted that it was the calculation he was going to have to make. He was not performing.

 There was no open case, no sign, no hat on the pavement in front of him. He was not asking for anything from anyone on the street. He was playing because Marcus had been right and he had wanted something to play afterward. And because the night was cold and the step was hard and the guitar in the window behind him was the guitar he had played at every significant moment of his professional life for four decades, at recordings and at sessions and at late night pub gigs and at the kitchen table at home and in the van on the way to places.

and the specific combination of those facts had produced the impulse to sit here and play for a while before going home, which he did not want to do yet. He played quietly because the street was not asking for noise, and he was not making it for the street. The chord shapes his hands went to were the ones they always went to when he was playing without a purpose or a program.

 the shapes that had accumulated over 40 years of playing in every configuration the profession produced and had left him with a vocabulary of gesture that was specific to him and that his hands produced without being asked. He had played on sessions in the 70s when session work was available in a way it no longer was in pubs and clubs across North and East London over three decades at the occasional festival when the booking had come through.

 in the back of a van on the A1 at 2 in the morning on the way to a gig in Edinburgh, alone in the flat in Archway at 2 in the morning when something needed playing out that was not expressable in any other form, and the guitar was the only form available. This channel exists for the step outside the closed shop and for the person who stops on the pavement and understands what they’re seeing.

 Subscribe and turn on notifications before we go any further. Jimmy Paige was walking on Denmark Street at 20 9 because he had been at a dinner in Covent Garden and had decided to walk to the cab rank on Charring Cross Road rather than have one called and had taken the route that brought him past the guitar shops, as he often did when walking in this part of London, because it was the route that brought him past the guitar shops, which was a habit formed so long ago that it had ceased to require a decision, and had become simply the way he walked between

Covent Garden and Charring Crossroad. He wore a dark coat and had his hands in his pockets and was walking at the pace of someone who has eaten well and is in no particular hurry and is glad to be outside in the London night which was cold and clear in the specific way of London in November when it isn’t raining and the air has the quality of something recently cleaned. He was 76 years old.

He had long silver white hair. He had been walking past Denmark street guitar shops for more years than most of the people currently employed in them had been alive. And he had the specific relationship with this street that forms when you have bought things here and sold things here and come here to look when you weren’t buying or selling.

 And the shops were lit at this hour in the way they always were. and he glanced at the windows in the automatic way of someone who has been looking at guitar shop windows since before the price tags had more than two digits. He saw the guitar in the window of number seven. He stopped.

 Not because of the guitar in the window exactly, though the J45 was a good J45. He could see the quality of the top aging from the pavement, the specific color of a solid spruce top that has been played regularly for decades. He stopped because of the man sitting on the step below the window with a cheap laminate dreadnot across his knee, playing quietly and looking at nothing in particular. He looked at the man.

 He looked at the guitar in the window. He looked at the price tag which was visible at this distance if you knew what you were looking for. He understood the sequence of events without being told. He stood on the pavement for a moment. The way you stand when you have processed enough of a situation to know that it requires a response and are deciding what the response is.

 Then he walked to the step and stopped beside the sitting figure who had still not looked up. “That’s yours,” the man said. He said it the way you say a thing when it is clearly true and you don’t need to be told. He was looking at the guitar in the window, the one in the second row. Ray looked at him, the dark coat, the silver hair, the face that appeared with a slight delay in the specific way that faces appear when you encounter them outside the context in which you know them.

 He said the name in his mind before he said it aloud because he needed to check it once before committing. He said it aloud. The man looked at him without the expression of someone receiving a compliment and without the expression of someone managing recognition. He looked at him with the expression of someone who has asked a question and is waiting for the answer. “Is it fixable?” the man said.

Ry looked at the guitar in the window. “It’s not broken,” Rey said. “It’s in good condition. I just He made a gesture that was not quite a shrug and not quite something else. I needed the amount. The man nodded. He had the specific understanding of someone who has been around musicians long enough to know what the amount means and not to require further explanation.

How much did they give you? He said. Ry told him. The man looked at the guitar in the window for a moment. He looked at the price tag. The markup’s significant, he said. He said it without judgment. It was the observation of someone who knows how this transaction works. He looked at Rey.

 Has it been sold or just taken in? Taken in? Rey said, “They don’t sell at this hour. It’ll go in the stock tomorrow morning.” The man was quiet for a moment. Rey had the feeling of someone watching a calculation being performed without being able to see the working. “Stay here,” the man said. He walked to the door of number seven and knocked.

The lights were still on inside. The shop had closed, but someone was still in the back. After a moment, a figure appeared at the glass and made a gesture about being closed. The man held up a hand, patient, not aggressive, and said something through the glass that Rey couldn’t hear.

 The figure inside looked at him for a moment and then opened the door. Are there moments when someone has done something practical and unhurried at exactly the moment you had given up expecting it? Tell me in the comments. I read everyone. Ry sat on the step with the borrowed guitar across his knee and did not know quite where to look.

 He looked at his hands. He looked at the Denmark street pavement. He looked at the laminate dreadnot across his knee which was Marcus’s guitar and which sounded like what it was and not like what he needed. He looked at the lit window of number seven where the J45 was visible on the second row of the display rack. He looked at the street where a few people passed without looking at him.

 8 minutes is a surprisingly long time to sit on a cold step outside a closed shop on Denmark Street in November when you don’t know what is happening inside. He played a few chords on the borrowed guitar and stopped. He counted the guitars in the window display and stopped. He looked at the price tag on the J45 and looked away.

 The door opened. The man came out. He had the J45 in one hand by the neck. Carried with the automatic care of someone for whom guitars are carried correctly without thinking about it. He held it out to Rey. Ry looked at it. He looked at the man. What did you? He started. The difference between what they gave you and what they were asking.

 The man said, “It’s a fair guitar. It was worth the asking.” He looked at the J45. Play it. Ray took it. The weight of it was familiar in the way that nothing else is familiar. The weight of something your hands have known for 40 years. He set the borrowed guitar aside against the step and held the J45 the way he held it. He played one chord.

 The sound of a solid spruce top that has been played for 40 years in the specific frequencies that this player’s hands produced was immediately and completely itself. He played for perhaps 3 minutes there on the step in the Denmark street evening. The man in the dark coat stood on the pavement and listened.

 When Ry stopped, neither of them said anything for a moment. Then the man reached into his coat pocket and held out a guitar pick worn to an asymmetric thinness on one side. “For the J45,” he said. “The angle will suit the bass strings.” “Ray took it. He looked at it. He looked at the man.

” “I don’t know how to,” he began. “Play it well,” the man said. “That’s how.” He put his hands in his pockets and walked on down Denmark Street toward Charring Cross Road where the cab rank was and was gone into the London night in the way that people disappear into London nights when the city absorbs them back. Ray sat on the step for a while longer with the J45 across his knee.

 The borrowed laminate guitar was leaning against the step beside him. he would give it back to Marcus tomorrow with an explanation that was going to be difficult to give and that Marcus was going to find difficult to believe. He called Marcus from the tube to say he was coming to drop off the borrowed guitar.

 Marcus answered and asked how it had gone. Ry said he would explain when he got there. Marcus said all right. Neither of them spoke for a moment. Ry said it was fine, actually. Marcus said he was glad. He plays the J45 every day. It is not a different guitar from the one he sold at 5:00 on the afternoon of the 8th of November.

 It is the same guitar, and his hands know it the way hands know instruments they have been playing for four decades, in the way that is not knowledge exactly, but something more continuous than knowledge. a relationship between the hands and the object that has been built through daily contact across so many years that it is no longer separable from how the hands understand themselves.

The worn patches at the sound hole and the first and third position are the map of 40 years that belongs to him and to no one else. It is correct for this guitar to be in his hands. It was always correct. The intervening hours of November the 8th were the exception. The pick is in the case pocket where he keeps the picks he uses.

 He plays with it because a pick should be used, which is what the man said, and because the asymmetric wear on one side, a different angle from his own, the record of someone else’s 60 years at the instrument is gradually pick by pick becoming his own angle. He thinks about this sometimes. He thinks it is the right thing for a pick to do.

If this story found something in you, subscribe and turn on notifications. This channel exists for the step outside the closed shop and for the 8 minutes. What if you had to let go of that came back to you or what do you still carry waiting for the right moment to let it go or to get it back? Tell me below.

 I read every single comment. The J45 is a guitar made in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1962. It has been in at least three pairs of hands that we know of. It is currently in the correct pair. Jimmy Paige once said, “The instrument teaches you.” The J45 has been teaching Ray Winters for 40 years.

 It taught him things on the step of a closed pawn shop on Denmark Street on a cold November evening. 3 minutes of playing that contained a different quality from any of the minutes before, which was the quality of something returned that had not been certain of returning. The instrument teaches you. Sometimes it teaches you what it means to get it back. See you in the next one.