“She Priced It at a Fiver” — Jimmy Page Had Already Seen the Label D
February 8th, 2020. Islington, London. The Oxfam music shop on Essex Road. The shop had been on this stretch since 2007, squeezed between a letting agent and a dry cleaner. Its window dressed in the particular style of places that depend on the generosity of strangers.
A rotating display of donated albums, instruments, books, and cassette tapes whose cases no longer match their contents. The bell above the door made a sound that was slightly different each time depending on how fast you pushed it and what the temperature was doing outside. On cold February Saturdays, it made a note that was almost musical.
Inside, the organization was elaborate but not immediately apparent. Clothes on rails along the left wall, sorted by color in a system that had clearly been started by someone who cared deeply about it, and then handed to several people who cared slightly less. Books on shelves to the right, paperbacks interled with hard covers in a way that suggested they had been alphabetized at some point, and then gradually relaxed back into the order in which they’d arrived.
In the back section, behind a low partition made from a bookcase turned sideways, the instruments, a corner that had been Oxfam Music’s particular contribution to this branch since 2011, where donated keyboards, violins, and the occasional guitar came to wait for someone who needed them. The lighting was warm and slightly amber, not by design, but by the age of the bulbs and the yellow walls behind them.
It smelled of old paperbacks and something faintly floral, which was the fabric softener of the donated jumpers, and underneath that very faintly the particular smell of old wood that has been kept in a case. By 10 on a Saturday morning, there were three volunteers and perhaps a dozen customers.
One volunteer was sorting a bin bag of donations behind the counter with the focused calm of someone who has done this many times and has made their peace with the unpredictability of what arrives. Another was reorganizing the books by color because the color system had spread from clothes to everything in the mind of whoever had started it.
The third was Jade. Jade was 22 years old and had been volunteering at Oxfam every other Saturday for 4 months. fitted around a part-time job at a coffee shop and a degree in graphic design she was completing at UAL. She had a good heart and an attention span divided between approximately five things at any given moment.
She wore the orange volunteer bib over a dark sweatshirt, her dark hair in a ponytail, and she moved through the shop with the energy of someone whose body was present while her mind was largely somewhere else. This channel exists for the moments that nearly get lost between one thing and the next. Subscribe and turn on notifications before we go further.
Margaret Holt arrived at the shop at 20 10. She was 71 years old and she had been trying to do this for 6 weeks. The first two times she had driven to within a street of the shop and then driven home again. The third time she had parked, walked to the door, stood there for perhaps 2 minutes, and turned back.
Today, she had walked from the bus stop with the case in both hands and her mind made up, and she had gone through the door before she could change her mind again. The case was old, dark brown leatherrett, the kind of case made in the 1960s when cases were still made to last rather than to be replaced.
The latches were original tarnished brass, and one of them required a specific downward pressure before it would open. Her husband, Frank, had shown her the trick the year they met, 1974, in a flat in Hackne, where he’d been living with two other musicians who were trying to make it and never quite did.
Frank had made it, though not in the way he’d expected. He had become a teacher instead, secondary school music. 31 years, hundreds of students who played because he had shown them what playing could mean. He had never considered this a lesser thing. He had considered it quietly and without announcement the most important thing he could imagine doing with his life and his instrument.
The guitar had come with him to the flat in Hackne and to the house in Finsbury Park and through three decades of marking and parents evenings and summer concerts and evenings in the kitchen. and it had been in the spare room for the six years since he died because Margaret couldn’t bear to sell it and couldn’t bear to look at it and couldn’t bear to throw it away.
She had decided that someone should play it. That was the thought that had finally got her through the door, not stored, not collected, not kept behind glass somewhere with a price tag on its history. Played. Someone should sit with it in the evenings the way Frank had sat with it and play it for themselves because they needed to and that needed to be enough.
She set the case on the donations counter and looked at Jade, who was in the middle of sticking price stickers on a set of donated wine glasses and looked up with a particular smile of someone who is genuinely glad to see you but is also in the middle of something. Guitar, Margaret said, I’d like to donate it. It was my husband’s.
Jade smiled again. Brilliant. Thank you so much. We love instruments. She set the wine glasses aside and came to the counter. I’ll just put a price on it. Do you mind if I have a quick look? Of course, Margaret said. Jade unlatched the case. First latch fine. Second latch requiring the specific downward pressure she didn’t know about.
Requiring two attempts and opened it. The guitar lay in its original red velvet lining darkened at the points of longest contact. A semihollow body dark natural finish aging to a deep amber in the center binding along the edges cream colored and slightly yellowed. Two humumbbuckers, a long neck with bound fretboard.
The headstock bore a logo that anyone who knew guitars would have read in under a second. The inside of the body, visible through the F hole on the right side, held a paper label, serial number, year. Jade looked at it. She saw an old guitar. She saw the kind of old guitar that arrived in charity shops sometimes and sat in the instrument section until someone bought it for 30 or 40 to learn on.
She picked up the price gun. “Is5 okay?” she said. We tend to start low with instruments and let people make offers. Margaret nodded. She didn’t know what the guitar was worth. Frank had never discussed it in those terms. He had discussed it in the terms of what it could do, what it felt like to play it, what it had meant to him.
Value in the monetary sense had never been part of that conversation. Jade pressed the price gun to the headstock, and it made its small mechanical sound. A sticker appeared on the wood. If you want a receipt for your donation, Jade started. No, thank you, Margaret said. She looked at the guitar in the case one more time.
She thought about Frank coming home on evenings, taking it out, playing quietly in the kitchen while she made dinner, not performing, just playing for himself the way he always had. Then she closed the case and turned and walked out of the shop. What she didn’t see as she left, what she had no reason to turn back for, was the man at the far end of the shop, who had been browsing the vinyl section since just before she arrived.
He was tall, slightly stooped at the shoulders, wearing a dark charcoal long coat over a black shirt. His hair was long and silver white. He had reading glasses on the bridge of his nose, and had been working through the folk and blues section with the specific pleasure of someone who had once owned many of these records, and was re-encountering old companions.
He was 76 years old, and he had been in this particular section of this particular shop twice before, once in 2015, once in 2017. because it was the kind of shop he was drawn into on Saturday mornings when he was in London and walking and had no particular plan. Record sections in charity shops were their own particular archaeology.
You never knew what someone had decided to let go of or what it had cost them to let it go or what the thing was worth now that it had been released from the life that had held it. The letting go sometimes produced things that shouldn’t be findable by ordinary means, and finding them required someone who knew what to look for.
He stood where he was for a moment, holding the Bert J record he’d been reading the sleeve of, listening to the sound of the price gun. Then he set the record down and walked to the back section. He stood at the donations counter where the case was sitting, waiting to be moved to the instrument’s corner.
He looked at it for a moment. The dark leatherrett, the tarnished brass latches, the specific proportions of a guitar case from this era. He had held cases like this one since the early 1960s. He set his reading glasses more firmly on his nose and opened the first latch, and then the second first latch fine. Second latch requiring the downward pressure that his hands found on the first attempt, as if they already knew.
He lifted the lid. He looked at the guitar for a long time without speaking or touching it. Then he very carefully lifted it from the red velvet lining and held it in both hands. A 1963 Gibson E 335T original finish. Original humuckers both covers intact. The neck had been refed once carefully not recently mid80s perhaps. The frets well worn since then.
The tuning machines were original clusins. The nut was bone. The F holes were clean. He could see the label through the right F hole. He read the serial number against the knowledge he’d been carrying for 55 years of knowing exactly what these instruments were. He carried the guitar to the small wooden stool in the instrument corner and sat down.
He tried a chord open D and listened to what it gave back. The semi-hollow body resonated in the way that these guitars do when they are original and undamaged. A warmth that is partly the wood and partly the air chamber and partly somehow the accumulated presence of 57 years of being played by someone who loved it. He adjusted nothing.
The guitar was in tune. Did you ever hold something that belonged to someone you never met and feel somehow that you understood something about them? Tell me in the comments. I read everyone. Then he played the opening of While My Guitar Gently Weeps. Not the famous electric version, the original acoustic one, Spare and Searching, written in a Scottish farmhouse in 1968 and recorded once quietly before it became the thing the world knew.
on a 1963 Ease 335 in the back section of an Oxfam shop in Islington on a cold February morning. It sounded like something being confessed rather than performed. Like music played not to be heard, but because not playing, it was no longer possible. The volunteer sorting the bin bag behind the counter stopped sorting. A woman browsing the clothes rail near the door stopped browsing.
Jade, who had returned to the wine glasses, set the price gun down. The music moved through the chord sequence with the unhurrieded certainty of someone who has understood this song for 50 years, who has heard it become famous and remained on speaking terms with the version that existed before fame arrived.
His eyes were not closed, but they were turned inward toward something only he could find. His left foot marked a pulse against the floor that he didn’t know it was marking. His right hand moved across the strings with the economy of someone who has spent decades removing everything from their playing that wasn’t necessary until what remains is only the truth of the thing itself.
When it ended, the shop was quiet for a long moment. Then Jade spoke. Her voice was different from a minute ago. Something in it had changed. What is that guitar?” she said. He looked up at her over his reading glasses, not unkindly. The expression of a teacher who has been asked a question they were waiting for. It’s a 1963 Gibson E 335.
He said, original throughout, one refactory. He set the guitar carefully on the stool. It’s worth approximately £42,000. Jade looked at the price sticker on the headstock. She looked at the guitar. She looked at the price sticker again. The woman who brought it in, the man said. Did she leave a name? Jade was already at the till pulling up the donations log. Margaret Holt, she said.
An address in Finsbury Park. He nodded. He reached into the pocket of his charcoal coat and set a business card on the counter beside the till. not his own, but a card for a specialist instrument dealer on Denmark Street he had known for 30 years. On the back of it, in his handwriting, a single sentence, “This guitar should be properly valued before any decision is made.
” “Would you telephone her?” he said to Jade. “Before you put the guitar on the floor, let her decide what to do with it, knowing what it is.” Jade nodded. She was looking at the man now with the specific expression of someone who has just realized they have been not looking at something for several minutes.
Can I ask who? She started. Just someone who stopped in, he said simply. He picked up the two records he’d chosen from the folk and blues section and paid for them at the till. He looked at the guitar on the stool one more time. Then he reached into his coat pocket and placed a guitar pick on the donation counter beside the card.
For whoever plays it next, he said, “Whoever that turns out to be.” Then he was through the door and the bell above it made its slightly different February sound and he was on Essex Road in the cold walking south. Jade phoned Margaret Holt 35 minutes later. The conversation lasted 8 minutes. Jade cried a little, which she hadn’t expected. Margaret did not cry.
She sat in the kitchen of the house in Finsbury Park and held the phone with both hands and looked at the chair where Frank used to sit when he played in the evenings. Then she asked Jade to hold the guitar for her until she could make some inquiries. She contacted the dealer on Denmark Street the following week.
The valuation confirmed what had been written on the back of the card. Margaret did not sell the guitar. She loaned it to the music department of the secondary school where Frank had taught for 31 years on permanent loan on the condition that it was played by students, not kept in a case, not displayed, played.
The head of department, a woman in her 30s who had been one of Frank’s students in 2001, wept when she heard what the instrument was. The guitar is still there. It has been played by approximately 400 students since 2020. It has not been kept in its case once. The pick is in a small dish on Jade’s kitchen table where she keeps things she wants to remember.
She doesn’t know whose it was. She knows what it means. If this story found something in you, subscribe and turn on notifications. This channel exists for the moments between one thing and the next when someone pays attention and everything changes. What was the most valuable thing you almost let go of not in money but in meaning? Tell me below.
I read every single comment. Jimmy Paige once said, “The best music in the world is music that touches you somewhere you didn’t know you had.” Frank Holt played guitar for 31 years and never knew his guitar would go on playing after him. Somewhere today, a student who wasn’t born when he died is learning a chord on a 1963 Ease 335 in Finsbury Park.
That’s not nostalgia. That’s how music stays alive. See you in the next one.
