FlamingText

"What is it with you and Led Zeppelin?"

Part III

I Know That It's All A State of Mind

"And as I was watching this cloud formed into, like, a funnel shape,"
The stoners in the bus seat behind me were talking to each other about some kind of drug-related experience.
"...and started, I don't know, pouring itself into the second cloud and filling it up, like water pouring into a balloon and swelling it..."
And so on. I had known Saul and Boone since Junior High school but had never hung out with them much. They were alright as far as I could tell, but ever since Boone had come back from his summer in California he talked kind of like a cross between Spicoli and Carl Sagan. He and Saul were discussing hallucinations they'd had and trying to top each other, telling the sorts of stories that are fascinating to drug users but tedious and incomprehensible to everyone else. Still, at fifteen drugs still seemed pretty edgy and so the main gist of the conversation I heard was "Man, I sure take a lot of drugs!"
"Hey, really? Me too!"

  They both had long hair that fell into their eyes, and both wore jeans and concert jerseys, the stoner uniform of Central Ohio (and beyond.) Even though they looked the part, they didn't really fit the standard-issue stoner mold in many ways. They both were smart and did well in school. They liked their parents. Didn't listen to a lot of Judas Priest. Didn't commit a lot of petty crimes, other than the obvious. Less likely to steal your stereo than to paint a mural on an underpass. And they both played guitar -- well. At least by high school standards.

At the time, my friend Brooke and I had nothing but scorn for their stoner ways.

"That," I remarked as we walked home from the bus stop, "is something I will never be. Stoner dudes talking about shapes they saw in clouds like it was deep. They're living the stereotype."
"Man, that shit is hilarious. Those guys kill me. You gonna stop for a Pepsi?" He gestured with his thumb towards the Dairy Queen that marked the end of his block.
"No thanks."

   Brooke headed off down his street and I continued down High Street towards home. The bus route assigned to me dropped me off a mile and a half away from my house, and in spite of the fact that there was another bus that left from mere blocks away I had decided not to correct the error so I could take the same bus that Brooke took. We parted ways at the Dairy Queen and I continued down the final stretch towards home, past the movie theatre, past the drug store, past the gun store and the Presbyterian church, and lastly past the wooded ravine at the Eastern edge of Whetstone Park.

  I was not at that point quite as pure as the driven snow in the intoxication department. At fifteen, I had begun to get my feet wet with a little grass and a little furtive beer-swilling here and there, which along with some petty vandalism constituted the full extent of my early attempts at adolescent rebellion. ¿ Pretty tame stuff, all things considered, but the fact is my disdain for the long-haired classic-rock-listening stoner subculture had more to do with aesthetics and my teenage pretensions to hipness than any violated sense of propriety. As a child I had seen the inert forms of the quaalude casualties strewn about that very same Whetstone park (colloquially known as "Get Stoned Park") snoozing under trees or behind the wheels of their parked Camaros. I had seen their inarticulate and frequently racist graffiti scrawled on the underpasses and drainage culverts where I and my friends spent an increasing portion of our time as the need to be away from the prying eyes of the adult world grew from an occasional respite to a daily imperative. I had seen the Led Zeppelin lyrics scrawled in spray paint (always accompanied by the cryptic "Zofo" symbols) on concrete bridge supports and on bathroom walls as though the graffitists thought they were transcribing Rimbaud there as a favor to the uncultured masses who had yet to exquisite such rare poetic beauty.

"If you feel like you can't go on
And your wheel's sinking low;
Just believe and you can't go wrong:
In the light you will find the road."

  These sorts of empty promises as well as the numerous J.R.R. Tolkien references sprinkled throughout the lyrics always baffled me. It just seemed so hokey! And what was up with the quasi-Satanic undertones? Between Zeppelin's four symbols and the Rush Pentagram (another popular graffiti trope in the underpass galleries of my youth) it all just seemed like a cheesily transparent attempt to rile up parents with the threat of demon-worship and orgiastic sex. A gambit which, to all appearances, worked like a charm. It lent that music an "edge" that translated as pure undiluted coolness to the seventies stoners who worshipped at the altars of these bloated rock behemoths. So many solos; so much hair; so much high pitched screeching. So many science fiction and fantasy references! When will they ever learn, I haughtily wondered.

  Of course I was much too cool for all of that. I listened to music with witty lyrics about real things. Elvis Costello, motherfuckers! I hated noodly guitar solos and I could not for the life of me figure out why somebody would find Robert Plant's frantic yelping in the least bit musically interesting. It just seemed like so much flailing to me. And hadn't these people ever heard of a drum machine? Or a synthesizer? In the future, I told myself, machines will provide the rhythm tracks to everything. ¿ The days of stadium rock, of interminable drum solos, of quasi-mystical imprecations to climb this or that imaginary ladder into paradise -- all of that Spinal Tap bullshit belonged to rock's Neolithic past. That was the SEVENTIES, dude. Even that cornerstone of rock and roll, the guitar solo, had begun to shrink in the new era, and soon I had no doubt it would shrivel and fall off like a vestigial tail.

Posted by flamingbanjo at May 3, 2007 11:00 AM