Hallberg will be joining author Renea Winchester at the Hudson Library on Oct. 30 at 12:30 p.m. to reminisce on the journey and how it became her debut novel.
Think about your favorite celebrity and what you would do given the chance to meet them.
That’s exactly what author Christy Hallberg did when she learned in 2005 that she would get such an opportunity if she flew to London and attended a guitar competition being judged by Queen guitarist Brian May and Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.
She then used her quest to meet Page, one of classic rock’s greatest legends, as the basis of her new novel, “Searching for Jimmy Page.”
Led Zeppelin was formed by Page in the spring of 1968 after he spent two years playing in the Yardbirds with fellow guitarist Jeff Beck. Page’s new band was meant to be a reboot of his former group called the New Yardbirds.
But the band would later get its name from a comment made by The Who drummer Keith Moon, who said the group would go down like a lead balloon. Page, disappointed in the punitive nature of a small balloon, was the one who decided they should use Zeppelin, the largest balloon of all. With its frontman Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin has dominated the airwaves with hits such as “Heartbreaker,” “Kashmir,” “Immigrant Song,” “When the Levee Breaks,” “Rock and Roll,” and “Whole Lotta Love.”
It seems poetic that Hallberg’s book was released weeks before the anniversary of one of the band’s most famous albums.
“Led Zeppelin IV,” which was released on Nov. 8, 1971, is about to celebrate its 50th anniversary. That album features hits such as “Black Dog,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Misty Mountain Hop” and “Four Sticks,” which gets a reference in Hallberg’s book.
Hallberg, a professor of literature and writing at East Carolina University, had never been overseas, but she said she wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to meet her idol, the guitarist for iconic rock band Led Zeppelin.
As The Clash would say, London was calling, and Hallberg answered. Meeting the legendary Page became an obsession.
Her journey was much like the opening lines to “Four Sticks,” which she said is her favorite song by the band: “Oh baby, I got to fly away. Got to try to find a way. Got to try to get away.”
She flew to London and worked her way backstage at the Hammersmith Palais and took with her an envelope that included a personal letter, a photo she hoped he would autograph and part of the book she started as her master’s degree writing thesis.
Her mother died in 2003, she abandoned the manuscript, only to pick it up again and weave it into a memoir in 2014 after her husband, Bill, died.
“I had a difficult time after my mother passed away and realized I needed to do something out of character to sort of shake myself back into the land of the living,” Hallberg said. “Just somehow, I knew that if I made that journey and made that connection with him somehow then maybe I would have the strength to get my life back together again.”
Although things did not go exactly as she hoped, she said she spoke to Page, and he spoke to her, and so she counts that as getting to meet him.
“That, in my mind, qualifies as an introduction,” Hallberg said.
Ever since her encounter with Page, Hallberg has used that trip as the basis for her new book, which was released on Oct. 20. She will be joining author Renea Winchester at the Hudson Library on Oct. 30 at 12:30 p.m. to reminisce on the journey and how it became her debut novel. Winchester is the author of “Outbound Train,” which is set in Bryson City.
“Set largely in the winter of 1988, ‘Searching for Jimmy Page’ is about 18-year-old Luna Kane’s journey from her rural North Carolina home to London,” the book’s synopsis said. “Luna wants to track down Led Zeppelin’s enigmatic guitarist in the hope of solving an old mystery.”
Her deceased mother, who loved to use Tarot cards and healing crystals, set the wheels of the mystery in motion when Luna was a child: is Jimmy Page her father? Luna’s journey to London will force her to come to terms with her mother’s death and accept the power of myth and art as well as manipulating memory to create a personal narrative.
Start to finish, Hallberg said the novel took her 15 years to write and she said it had seen several incarnations during that time. Her master’s thesis was the first incarnation, a novel called “And When the Owls Cry,” which is a lyric from “Four Sticks” and a motif in all versions of the book.
When it came time to pen the book, she said she had the first chapter and the last line of the book in her head. In the beginning of the novel, Luna’s great-grandfather was going to die and make an off-hand reference to “Four Sticks.”
“He doesn’t call out the name of the song, but he does mention owls crying in the night, and that’s a motif in that song,” Hallberg said. “I knew that was going to spark the repressed memory of her mom’s suicide and that would kick everything in motion.”
But getting from point A to Z was a mystery to her, and she said she doesn’t outline because her story is mostly character driven.
Hallberg has been a fan of Led Zeppelin since she was 15, when she saw the band’s first concert film, “The Song Remains the Same,” on MTV with her mother and older brother Steve, who was also a fan of the group.
“I’ve been such a fan of Jimmy Page and Led Zeppelin that it was sort of a no brainer that he would wind up in a book,” Hallberg said. “There’s so much mysticism in the book, and it’s fitting that he be the sort of character, the sort of musician that Luna and her deceased mother would have been interested in.”
Livingston Press accepted the book for publication in April 2020, and for most of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hallberg was working on edits and proofreading typeset copies while also stepping up her online author platform and actively promoting the novel.
Hallberg already has plans to write a sequel, but that book is in the early stages of development.
For more information about the novel and to purchase a copy, visit christyalexanderhallberg.com.
- By Michael O'Hearn/Crossroads Chronicle