The guitarist so good they left Jimmy Page in tears: “The music I play at home”
Music has a very special ability to connect with the innermost emotions and rattle them like a rollercoaster. You could be walking down the street, hear Jimmy Page on ‘Stairway to Heaven’, and in the blink of an eye, be transported to a moment of patriarchal guidance on a sunny March morning some three decades prior.
However, for the most part, in the world of rock and roll and that of the guitarist, the most common emotion elicited from a performance is a rebellious and raucous desire to get the party moving forward. But sometimes, those six-string icons can be so profound that they even conjure a tear.
What is it that separates a good guitarist from the rarified sort of player who can make you weep? Well, you could talk for hours about that, but John Frusciante certainly put his finger on the right fret when he proclaimed: “When you hear Jimi Hendrix play, it’s a pure expression of him as a person. You see him on stage and there’s absolutely no separation between him and his guitar—they’re completely one because he’s just putting every single bit of energy, everything in his whole psyche, and every single part of his body into his guitar playing.” Jimmy Page is another guitar hero who looks for stars who can extoll their soul via the medium of six strings.
With Led Zeppelin, he may well have invented a new type of heavy playing, but there was method beyond that innovation. “Let me explain something about guitar playing,” he once said. “Everyone’s got their own character, and that’s the thing that amazed me about guitar playing since the day I first picked it up.” In those early days, it was Link Wray and his ‘Rumble’ that first stirred him.
In the 2008 documentary It Might Get Loud, Jimmy Page risks the potential embarrassment of an air guitar to show just how enamoured he is with the track. “I would listen to anything with a guitar on as a kid, anything that was being played and all those different approaches and the echoes, but the first time I heard the ‘Rumble’, that was something that had so much profound attitude to it.”
But while that might be filled with a thundering “baaaad” energy, you can also load up a tune with tear-jerking beauty. “Everyone’s approach to what can come out of six strings is different from another person, but it’s all valid.,” he says. When it comes to pulling upon the emotions of a fully grown heavy metal guitar god, Joni Mitchell’s filigreed expression of the soul is the most valid of them all.
As Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon told Ameoba: “I read an interview with Jimmy Page once where he said he wept when he heard Joni Mitchell’s playing on ‘Song to a Seagull’. I always thought that was kind of interesting.” In fact, Page went a step further and said that Mitchell was pretty much the only guitarist in history who “could bring a tear to his eye.” In his weepy Rolling Stone confession, he added: “That’s the music that I play at home all the time, Joni Mitchell.”
Within that track, she is gorgeously able to transcribe the emotion of the lyric into the textured playing of her acoustic. In many ways, this was the inverse of the same coin that Page’s own music existed on.
With his output, he was looking at the crumbling literal heavy metal industry of Birmingham that surrounded him and thinking, ‘Should music really be so flowery when austerity and industry are making life in these parts anything but’. So, he reflected this with the brutal sounds of Led Zeppelin.
Joni Mitchell did the same from the opposite disposition. As she said when she first introduced ‘Song to a Seagull’ at the White Swan in Leicester – not far from Page’s hometown – in 1967: “Maybe if you were raised in a small town in the country, and you were suddenly uprooted and planted in a big city… at first it was wonderful and there were all sorts of things like escalators and elevators and supermarkets and the corner discotheque and buses and taxis and double-decker red buses.”
Adding: “But maybe one day you wake up and there’s soot on your window ledge and you’ve just dusted it off the day before and, I don’t know that this happens here, but I woke up one day and looked out my window down into the street and they’d put plastic plants in my planter. That was sort of the last straw so… being very romantic I said ‘well then I guess I’m just going to have to leave this city with its plastic plants and its dust on the window ledge. Maybe I’ll go off into the woods and become a hermit and be very independent and live off the land and eat wild raspberries and strawberries and Saskatoon berries, and be as free as a proverbial bird’.”
This transition from the rubble of the urban racket to the ritz of nature’s hum comes across gorgeously in her guitar playing on the track and exhibits her true skill on the instrument.
As David Crosby also said when speaking to Rolling Stone about the greatest guitarist of all time, amid the slew of names, he was quick to point out just how talented Mitchell was and how she needed no extra help in the studio. “The strongest thing I did for Joni as a producer on Song to a Seagull, from 1968, was keep everybody else off of that record,” confessed the Byrds man.
“She was a folkie who had learned to play what they call an indicated arrangement,” continued Crosby in his glowing assessment of a star like no other. “Where you are like a band in the way you approach a chord and string the melody along. She was so new and fresh with how she approached it,” he added. “It’s the reason I fell in love with her music. She was a fantastic rhythm player and growing so fast. She had mastered the idea that she could tune the guitar any way she wanted, to get other inversions of the chords. I was doing that too, but she went further.”
It’s a reminder to those who are picking up the instrument for the first time that the heroes of the instrument stretch far beyond those who intend to make your feet move or arms cheer. The guitar might well have been a battering ram for some, but Mitchell’s playing is like a gilded lily, captivating the audience as it earths itself in their soul, draining tears from their eyes for nourishment.
