How being banned from guitar playing made Jimmy Page a maestro
It’s the 1960s. A long-haired, tall, skinny schoolboy walks towards his school gates with a guitar in one hand and a school bag in the other. One of his teachers meets him at the gates, arm outstretched and hand open, into which the schoolboy places his instrument. He’ll collect it at the end of the day, as has become routine for Jimmy Page at this point, but looking back, he wouldn’t have it any other way.
When you speak to the guitarists who were making music at the dawn of rock, they all give a similar explanation as to why they became so infatuated with the instrument. This is usually because no other experience matches up to it. They would see their six-string as a portal into another dimension, something they could latch onto, and it would act as its own form of escapism. That’s an experience that can’t be taught.
Subsequently, Page was never bothered by having his instrument taken away from him at school; he actually looks back at that and thinks it helped him. “The good thing about the guitar,” he maintains, “Was that they didn’t teach it in school. Teaching myself was the first and most important part of my education. I know that Jeff Beck and I enjoyed pure music because we didn’t have to.”
It’s an interesting thought. Would the guitar players we know and love today still be the guitar players we know and love today if their experience with learning the instrument was more forced? If rather than hearing music they enjoyed and wanting to recreate it, they had to play guitar because it was part of the school curriculum, would they have continued playing?
Arguably, the only reason we begin playing an instrument is because we like what a musician is doing and want to contribute to it ourselves. The first step in that journey is imitation, as we start trying to play like the musician whose work we enjoy. Once we can see ourselves in their shoes, we continue playing, and that leads to developing our own style.
Replace the wanting to play with needing to play, and does the passion remain? Arguably not, at least, it certainly wouldn’t have for Jimmy Page. Playing guitar and making music was his escape, and the thing that drew him towards it so much was the fact that nobody was forcing him to play; he was doing it on his own accord and loving it.
Who would have thought? Jimmy Page is one of the greatest guitarists ever to apply pick to string, but if you go back in time and look at the origin of what would make such an exceptional guitarist, the first thing people had to do was take it away from him.