FlamingText

"What is it with you and Led Zeppelin?"

Pt IV

In the Darkest Depths of Mordor...

   In spite of my disdain for his chronic overuse of the word "totally" and my vague and wholly unwarranted feelings of superiority, Boone and I became close friends in the following years. We were both enrolled in the Advanced Art program at the crazy alternative high school we attended. Being in Advanced Art meant getting a desk for "independent study" in the art room, packed in with a bunch of like-minded freaks who, like us, spent just about every free minute of the day fashioning odd and frequently ill-considered art projects and feverishly socializing in more or less typical high school fashion. Day in and day out I sat there at the grey metal worktable stacked high with innumerable papers covered in my obsessively detailed scrawling, and there I divided my time between filling in even more blank pages (and the odd canvas) with more of the same and chatting with my friends. In the space directly to the right of mine was Boone, the undisputed star of the art program. His paintings had won numerous state competitions, and since our school was given to touting the awards its students garnered as justification for its continued existence, he was provided with the resources he needed to keep making art and his obvious subversive tendencies were mostly overlooked. As long as you keep bringing in those accolades, the teachers and administrators seemed to be saying, we'll keep pretending you are not the stoner reprobate that any damn fool can see you are.

  For my part I never won any awards in Art in spite of years of attempts, perhaps in part due to the fact that, as my skill developed, my pen strokes seemed to shrink in size and a disturbing graphomania began to take over. My proclivities were obviously pulling my in a direction away from "fine art" and towards a future either drawing schematics of drive trains for owner's manuals or else towards being a cartoonist. Neither of these was particularly valued in the fine-arts world of my youth (¿ ) Those who judged the art we made seemed greatly concerned with the Statement made by a given piece of Art, and also with the piece's potential value as a one-of-a-kind precious object, something which might look appropriate hanging on a wall in a gallery with a price tag next to it, the more digits the better. My dog-eared sketchbooks didn't qualify. Even so my presence in the program was tolerated and I was given free reign to compose endless "projects" that generally didn't amount to much.

Seated to my immediate left was Noel.

  For most of my Junior year Noel's studio space was dominated by a 6" X 8" wooden frame to which a life-size plywood cut-out of her own body was affixed with a sort of plastic umbilical. Covering the cut-out body was a grid of hand-colored Xerox copies created on numerous furtive trips to the school office during off-hours wherein she laid various portions of herself across the glass and made copies while a friend stood watch to avoid discovery. The work was progressing slowly. Commenced in October of the school year, it still required a burst of fevered activity come April to be completed in time to be entered in the State art competition upon which the entire legitimacy of our artistic efforts seemed to hinge. The piece seemed fraught with some profound metaphorical significance to Noel, although precisely what its significance was I must confess eluded me. It didn't matter. Everything she did was interesting to me.

Find a Queen Without a King, They Say She Plays Guitar and Cries and Sings

   We were all sitting around in a circle in the living room of Boone's house. His was the default place to hang out, as his parents were of that rare breed who will let their children's friends come over and hang out and possibly get up to no good as long as it didn't get too out of hand. They had mastered the subtle art of pretending they didn't know what we were doing while simultaneously keeping an eye on us to make sure we weren't bringing destruction and ruin down upon ourselves and, in the process, them. Considering that in the absence of a sanctuary such as Boone's house we generally seemed to locate our activities in a variety of gravel quarries, abandoned factories and other similarly remote and dangerous locales, their practice of letting a little bit of stupid teenage behavior slide in exchange for the payoff of knowing where their kids were seemed like a smart bet. They also let Boone's band practice after school in his attic room, which qualifies them for sainthood in my book. They were out.

  So we were gathered around in this living room -- another weird thing about Boone's house was that there was no TV. As a result of this the normal semicircular seating arrangement of the standard American living room had been replaced with a circular one, and during the hours that normal families spent watching television they sat around talking to each other. The walls were covered in painted canvases created by Boone and Boone Sr., pictures of his sister Christine's dance performances, press clippings about Lucia's (Boone's mother) performance art pieces and at least one picture from a Southern Oregon paper showing Boone Sr. grinning for the camera while holding a nearly three-foot long steelhead. The combination of bohemian freakiness and Midwestern wholesomeness was so alien to me that I had no frame of reference for it, and secretly suspected that there must be a hidden, seething underbelly that I wasn't seeing. ¿ -- We were gathered around the living room, a group of maybe eight of us, the clan of art-room kids that I had fallen in with, and we were listening to music on a cassette player while we were, quite naturally, smoking dope.

  We were listening to a mix tape Noel had made. I'm not sure what all was on it -- some current music, some older tunes, some stoner comedy -- and then the song "Going to California" came on. Up to this point, my impression of Led Zeppelin had been formed by their heavy-guitar-based cock rock, songs like "Whole Lotta Love" and "Black Dog." But this was something entirely different. The acoustic guitars and mandolins were delicately interwoven, the vocals wistful and reverb-soaked, the entire effect lush and gorgeous. The room seemed to be suffused with a warm, rosy glow as I fell under the music's spell. Robert Plant's vocals entered in an uncharacteristically subdued croon as he explained that after an unfortunate experience with a woman unkind (who smoked his stuff and drank all his wine -- the nerve!) he'd made up his mind to make a new start. He was going to California, he said, with an aching in his heart.

  At this moment I turned and looked at Noel, noticing the faintly golden hue that seemed to be emanating from her. It was all over for me in the space of about half a second, but that moment seemed to stretch into an eternity and remains to this day pristine in my recollection, a moth trapped in amber, wings poised in mid-flap. I was as sure as I've ever been about anything that I saw in her curling blonde locks and green eyes the very personification of the mystical allure of California embodied by that song. ¿ A switch flipped in my brain, releasing a veritable tidal wave of endorphins, pushing the needle into red. I felt like I'd been hit with a brick -- pot was small potatoes compared to this stuff. I was completely transfixed in a manner known to sixteen-year olds throughout the ages and instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever been sixteen, but at the time completely novel to my experience. Surely this vision was showing the way towards my destiny, illuminating for me the face of my One True Love. For some unexplained reason fate had chosen the music of Led Zeppelin as the vessel for this revelation. Stranger things have happened, I told myself. How else to account for the nimbus of unearthly light that seemed to be gathering itself around the object of my affections at this very moment? I must have stared for an awkwardly long interval. Had someone thought to snap my picture at that moment, I'm convinced that photograph would reveal that I was staring with my mouth open.

Posted by flamingbanjo at May 8, 2007 11:48 AM