I was thinking I may have written about Zeppelin IV before. Turns out I almost did, but not quite. Anyway, before I do something new on that album, here is a little essay I did in 2013, probably on The Record Room. Enjoy (or mock) "How Led Zeppelin Stopped Sucking and Became Cool."
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Introduction: Led Zeppelin Sucks.My sister, as I've said before, meaning either that it's a really important moment in my musical upbringing or that I'm a tedious, repetitious bore (or both), introduced me to a lot of '60s and '70s classic rock when she would return from college, delivering to me--her guitar-obsessed youngest brother--dubbed cassettes of albums. Plenty of Hendrix, the Doors, some early Corrosion of Conformity (not '60s or '70s, admittedly, I'm just saying I remember it as being among the stack o' tapes).
Among those tapes were a few Led Zeppelin albums. I didn't like those much at first because I liked great guitar players.
Let's give it a moment or two so everyone can think that one through.
The 10-year-old whose tastes focus on finger-tapping and whammy bar dives buried in saturated distortion, reverb, and digital delay doesn't respond well to audible fret or pick noise. "Hot Dog" or "Heartbreaker" were horrible, just
horrible, to those ears. No, it's just good guitar players for me, thank you. I'll take my Joe Satrianis and Eddie Van Halens. (Hell, let's be honest, I took my CC DeVilles, Ritchie Samboras, Warren DiMartinis, Mick Marses, and John Sykeses.)
Times changed.
Junior high was transformational. Parties, drinking, sexual experimentation began … for other kids. And I started playing MERP.
MERP? you ask.
Middle Earth Role Playing. (I didn't play D&D … what do you think I was, a nerd?)
Bear with me.
Part I: What Made MERP Cool.I had read all the Narnia books half a dozen times each by the time I was out of elementary school and so I needed some new material. First, my brother recommended JRR Tolkien, but I remembered two things: the Hobbit, which I had read already, several years ago, and hated. Hated. Second,
the Minstrel of Gondor.But I gave this vaunted trilogy a shot and had to admit, it was pretty fucking amazing to that tween (before there was such a word) brain.
Like the obvious cult candidate, I was asked to get together with some guys, via the Tolkien-introducing brother, to play "Middle Earth." Now I don't have time for kid stuff, I'm a grown man of 12 years old. I'm trying to impress girls. I didn't buy this Coca-Cola t-shirt or these Guess jeans for nothing. I'm sorry, but did I have the barber shave lightning bolts into the side of my head for my own sake? No, idiot: it's for girls. So no, I will not play "Middle Earth," whatever the hell that means.
Except it turns out some older kids--sophomores, juniors, a senior!?, some of whom are actually cool--are playing. This, it turned out, would be like when Daniel Desario joined Sam, Neal, Bill, Gordon, and Harris for D&D, except cooler, because we weren't playing (lame) D&D, we were playing Middle Earth, bitches. Fuckin' MERP.
We roll up characters (I was a mage--and a damn good one, I recall) and get together on some weekend day or (get crazy) night for marathon sessions of soda-and-chips binging. And these older kids, they were also musicians, something I fancied myself to be as well. After all, by this point I could handle the KISS catalog and knew my way around the occasional Poison tune. So there's the older guitar player talking about the Stones. There's the older drummer who, cool as shit, likes … Zeppelin? Why!?
Part II: What Made MERP Cooler.Hey, hey, mama, said the way you move
gonna make you sweat
gonna make you groove…Thunderous heaven ensues.
Those caffeinated and sugared marathons involved a lot of strategizing, some epic battle scenes, more 2-liters of Mountain Dew or Dr. Pepper than anyone should ever imbibe, and one hell of a music lesson. These songs from this Led Zeppelin I'd dismissed off-hand a year or two earlier (i.e. an eternity or so ago to someone my age, a year being almost a fucking tenth of my entire existence) had a new context.
The easiest lesson to learn were the first ones pointed out.
it was in the darkest depths of Mordor
I met a girl oh-so-fair.
But Gollum, the evil one,
crept up and slipped away with her.And better still:
The pain of war cannot exceed the woe of aftermath
The drums will shake the castle wall, the ring wraiths ride in black.Um … I'm sorry, are we talking about the Nazgul? We're talking about the Nazgul.
This. Is. The. Best. Band. Ever.
Now our breaks included trading our notes and dice for guitars and chord charts (when we had them). Tapes (I don't think we had CDs yet, or at least not many). Decoding other real or imagined Tolkien references. And practicing these songs that it turns out were fucking amazing. (The older-kid-drummer could do a mean Robert Plant; I'd almost literally kill to have the old tape we made of us performing "Stairway to Heaven" just to hear his spot-on "does anybody remember laughter?")
Part III: Therefore Led Zeppelin Became Cool. MERP was cool. MERP included Led Zeppelin. Therefore Led Zeppelin was cool. I think that comes from math or something. (I never learned much in math.) But in a mathless world, the premise still holds, because they were cool in the same way. These two things, MERP and Led Zeppelin, teased with and in some sense delivered on the fantastic world outside the reach of someone who was a good student, a mediocre-to-bad athlete, and interested in (but terrified of) those remarkable creatures we called girls. My character was a mage. But in reality I wasn't even a mage. While average height for my age, I felt like a fucking hobbit who just wanted to be an elf. Just an elf, not a warrior. Just an elf would be great.
Some of us got together sometimes outside the MERP games to play music. Nobody was writing songs. OK, nobody was sharing whatever songs they may have written: I had begun writing around then, but fuck if I would share anything with anybody else--my Pageian machismo didn't go that far, even amongst the geeks. So we played AC/DC songs, Hendrix songs, and yes, Led Zeppelin songs. We practiced for nothing, played for nobody, and in some cases (let's not point fingers, here) inserted Van Halenesque solos into each and every song regardless of its style. (C'mon, everybody loves finger-tapping and whammy bar dives. Everybody!)
Those days together with those guys, talking about those things, playing those songs on the stereo or even on our instruments, elf seemed doable. Totally doable.
Part IV: The EndAt Part II above, I put in
IV. Now "Misty Mountain Hop" (fittingly) is blasting; I turned it way up. I could be 12 years old, in the older-kid-drummer's living room, exuding the kind of sexual and social confidence a guy only has when he's a young teen banging his head to a strong riff and there isn't a female within a block. That was part of Led Zeppelin, finding these cartoonish ideas of manliness.
Luckily or naturally (or both), those male-but-not-masculine geekfests (I say that lovingly) tapered off over the next couple of years. I met girls. Hell, I even found some amazing trickery that allowed for kissing, dating, and all such similar wonders! But for a few years--OK maybe 10, to be honest--I also kept finding new sides to and lessons from Led Zeppelin. For example, my first real concepts of production came from them (and the Beatles) in those years, realizing how amazing the combinations of sounds, arrangements could be, complex or subtle decisions pushing the ear here or there.
Having already written a (subpar) novella above, I won't bother boring anyone with anything else I learned from Led Zeppelin. So I'll just leave it as it is: the story of how Led Zeppelin stopped sucking and became cool.