I have a particularly brutal commute this year. The up side is more listening time.
So this week I dusted off the old warhorse Led Zeppelin IV. I haven't turned to this for the greater part of the decade. It's both iconic and overplayed, like most of Zep's catalog, and really, there is nothing to say about it that hasn't already been said, somewhere anyway.
It is still a monster of a hard rock album, and the band fires on all cylinders. The big impression this time around: Bonham. The guy never lets the music get boring, not to these ears anyway. (Not to say that over-familiarity can't scrub the shine of his playing, but like I said, it has been a while.) Having read Ginger Baker's slagging off Zep, I decided that the old man can go fuck himself. It may not be Ginger's thing, but it is a thing that kicks as much ass as anything in the '70s, and Bonham was doing the kicking.
I'm sure some folks will jump on this thread just to take the piss out of this album, because nothing can really sustain the sheer amount of veneration this album has commanded. That's fine. However, any band who went for a heavy sound would be under this thing's shadow, and not without reason. IV showed that Zeppelin could sustain its heavy sound, despite their acoustic meanderings on the previous album.
Back near the turn of the millennium, I had an idea called The IV Project, that I never pursued. The idea is an anthology of nonfiction of people telling stories in which the album, or its music, plays a part. There has to be millions of the out there, and of those some must be remembered clearly, and of those there has to be some good ones.
I lost my virginity to this album. It was a wholly unexpected affair, and me at the tender age of 13. It was playing on a cassette deck with a perpetually reversing head, so the album just played over and over, side one - click - side two - click - side one again, etc. kind of like an eight-track. I fumbled ineptly, and neither I nor her brought things to a conclusion before we stopped. I couldn't sleep afterward, I was too consumed with what it all meant. So I just lay there, next to her, listening to IV play over and over until the sun rose.
However, the album doesn't really bring me back there, and hasn't for a long-long time. There are far too many other memories that include the music. It became a ubiquitous part of my adolescent soundtrack, and I still had most of my adolescence left to live.
Bookmarks