Jimmy Page Entered a Guitar Contest Under a Fake Name — Judge Said "Work On Your Technique"

October 2005. Dorking, Surrey. A village hall. Sixty people in folding chairs. An amateur guitar competition in its twenty-eighth year.

A tall man in a grey anorak sits down on a stool.

He plays a twelve-bar blues.

The judge leans into his microphone.

"Decent feel. But the phrasing is imprecise, and there's a looseness in the technique that suggests you've been playing by ear rather than from a structured foundation. This kind of feel-based approach was fashionable several decades ago. I'd strongly recommend finding a proper teacher."

The man in the grey anorak nods. He says thank you. He walks back to his seat in the fourth row.

He laughs into his sleeve the entire way.

His name, on the entry sheet, is James Fox. Fifty-six. Retired. Guildford.

He is Jimmy Page.

And he has just been told that his technique is imprecise by a man who has been judging this competition for twenty-eight years and who has no idea he is talking to the guitarist of Led Zeppelin.

What happens in the next two hours is one of the best stories in rock history.

What makes this story legendary:
In October of a Saturday night in New Jersey, Ace Frehley entered an amateur guitar competition under a fake name. The judge told him his vibrato was all over the place and he should work on his scales. Then a sixteen-year-old girl named Ruby Kaminski played something she had written herself, and it was the only performance that made the room go quiet. The judge told her she was leaning on emotion to cover her technique. Ace took off the ball cap. He played the solo from Shock Me. He told the judge: "Someone told me that in 1974. Guitar Magazine said I was sloppy. That solo they called sloppy is number 50 on the greatest guitar solos ever recorded." Then he played with Ruby, entirely in the background the whole time, so she could be heard over him.

In October 2005, the same story happened in Surrey.

Jimmy Page entered as James Fox. The judge told him his technique was loose and his phrasing dated. A fifteen-year-old named Emily played something she had written, and the room went quiet for four minutes. The judge told her she was leaning on emotion to cover her technique.

James Fox took off the flat cap.

He played Stairway to Heaven.

Arthur Briggs's pen left his fingers and rolled off the table.

Then Jimmy picked up Ben Howarth's guitar and played with Emily for eight minutes without once taking the lead. A man who had spent forty years being the most significant musical presence on every stage he stood on, deliberately playing small so that a fifteen-year-old girl could be heard above him.

She made three mistakes getting there and didn't stop for any of them.

Because somebody had just shown her that the ceiling was higher than she'd been told.

"The feeling they told me to fix," Jimmy said to Arthur at the judges' table, "was the thing that made everything else work."

Arthur Briggs still teaches in Dorking.

He tells the story to every new student who arrives convinced that scales are the whole job.

Emily Marsh is a working musician.

She tells the story at every show she plays.

And the ceiling has been higher for her ever since.

Have you ever been told that the thing you were best at was the thing you were doing wrong? Tell us in the comments.

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