Who's No. 1?

Jimmy Page has a favorite finger -- his left ring finger. Page broke his in 1975 while getting off a train in England and said it was especially unfortunate to break the left ring finger because it's "the most important finger for a guitarist ... the one that does all the leverage and most of the work."

I'm not sure I agree with Page's premise. If there is an El Supremo among a guitarist's fingers, speaking as a right-hander, it most definitely would be on the left hand, the one doing all the fretting. Let's face it, any finger or fingers on the right hand can do the strumming and picking work. That job often gets sub-contracted out to a piece of plastic anyway.

If you're going to pick a most valuable finger on the left hand, I would start by ruling out the pinky, just because it's so puny. But I'm not willing to choose a favorite among the index, middle and ring fingers. Call me a wild-eyed, Kenyan-born socialist but I like to think of those three fingers as equals, part of a collective working for the common good of the guitar and sharing the resulting glory.

If I played before audiences, though, my middle finger would take on greater importance because I'm sure I would have to use it frequently in response to hecklers. And I guess I shouldn't marginalize my right thumb because of the key role it plays in pulling credit cards from my wallet when I go into a guitar store.

For the record, despite that broken No. 1 finger in '75, Page went on tour with Led Zeppelin as scheduled, altering his technique a bit to let the unbroken fingers pick up the slack of the bum ring finger. But in 2007, as Led Zeppelin was about to start a much-awaited reunion tour, Page again broke a finger in a fall in his garden (must have been startled by a bustle in a hedgerow) and the tour had to be delayed for two weeks.


Which finger did he break? The runty little pinky.