Part V, concluding.
Mellow is the Man Who Knows What He's Been Missin'
Rumor has it that Robert Plant's inspiration for the crying, singing guitar-playing muse portrayed in "Going to California" was none other than Joni Mitchell, with whom the young Plant had developed his own fixation. He would certainly not have been alone among her fans to be so awestruck by her remarkable musical gifts as to elevate her to the status of musical goddess. Perhaps there was a trace of envy as well, a recognition that his own emphatic baby-baby-babying could never hold a candle to her subtle, intricate wordplay and insightful portraiture. Certainly he must have envied the position she held among critics, who declared her a poet laureate of pop whose star was rivaled in brightness only by Dylan's in the lofty firmament of songwriters whose words Meant Things. In spite of being the biggest rock band in the world, Zeppelin was no darling of the critics, and Plant in particular was often singled out for derision for his"adolescent" and "puerile" lyrics, as if either of those descriptions were unqualified negatives in the context of Rock and Roll music. ¿
Let me stress that I have absolutely no evidence to support the belief that Plant's admiration for Mitchell was anything more than one artist's admiration for another, but it pleases me to imagine that the biggest rock star in the world, the same man who famously posed for this photograph on the balcony of his suite in L.A.'s Continental Hyatt House Hotel with arms spread wide to encompass his domain and proclaimed "I am a Golden God!" * , was in at least one instance just another lovestruck sap. I continue to hold the following treasured scenario in my head: I picture the two of them meeting at a high-powered gathering of rock-and-roll glitterati in some Marin County mansion, Plant awkwardly telling Mitchell what a big fan he was, fumbling over his words before slinking off in embarrassment, the bemused Mitchell turning to her friends and mocking his tight pants the moment he was out of earshot. Although that scene probably never transpired, the fact is that it doesn't really matter one way or the other, so that's the version I'm sticking with.
I am fairly certain that "Going to California" was intended as a commentary on the California folk rock scene that was enjoying great popularity in those days, a conscious attempt to incorporate its signature dreamy acoustic style into their own world of bigger-than-life rock theatrics and blistering guitar sorcery. Zeppelin pioneered the concept that a hard rock band could display a more sensitive, folksy side -- the hammer-dulcimer of the gods, if you will. And it is telling that, viewed from the vantage point of a country lad from the Black Country of Western Britain, California becomes an otherworldly realm of magical beauty straight out of Tolkien. Ordinary beauty is most easily elevated to mythic Beauty in the eyes of an outsider who doesn't properly understand what he is seeing, and for my money Zeppelin's portrait of the mythic California captured the seductive illusion of that time and place more effectively than any of the music actually being made there ever could. Of course, now I have been to California and find that description of it pretty hilarious, but I still recall my childhood illusions of the place and those beautiful misconceptions continue to hold a cherished spot in my heart. ¿
As far as my own pie-in-the-sky teenage dreams, they were alas not meant to be. Noel and Boone ended up together after a year of nursing their own mutual crushes, consummating months and months of smoldering, longing looks that were necessarily volleyed over my head, situated as I was directly in between their two studio spaces. That she would choose him over me (and the many other would-be suitors who shared in my admiration) was a painfully obvious outcome to anybody but myself -- Boone was, as previously stated, a gifted artist as well as a handsome, gregarious and jovial guy, and also pretty clearly held the position as ringleader of our little group. His band had already entertained audiences at various school functions, regaling the crowd with such home-grown works of rough-hewn new-wave brilliance as "Refrigerator Love." I don't think there was ever any doubt in Noel's mind who she wanted to be with. Did the inevitability of this outcome prevent me from keeping myself awake night after night, lost in strange reveries and grandiose scenarios, imagining a beautiful future spent arm-in-arm with my beloved? Did it prevent me from staring out the window of many a classroom wistfully while a teacher droned on about some subject that would no doubt prove crucially important later in life? Did I not somehow manage to find myself in the places where I knew Noel would be on a daily basis, seemingly be pure chance? * Were there innumerable awkward overtures, perhaps even an abortive attempt at a good-night kiss? I'm sure I don't remember. It's all a blur.
What I do remember is that a general change in attitude seemed to accompany this period. Having suddenly been made painfully aware of the existence of my own heart, this newfound discovery heralded a subtle shift in perception, away from the impenetrably smug cynicism that was my preferred defense mechanism and towards a more direct enjoyment of the world around me. All the clichés held true: Flowers smelled better, the sky was more blue, and music -- music transformed utterly. Suddenly there became such a thing as a song that could make me cry. I started delving into music from bygone eras with more fervor, even into the verboten flower-power era that the punk ethos held in utter contempt, and found that there was much there to enjoy. Gradually the Beatles replaced the Sex Pistols in heavy rotation on my stereo. I found myself for the first time appreciating Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd. And I finally got Led Zeppelin. The sheer exuberance and technical ability of that band, the seemingly never-ending supply of searing guitar riffs, the supercharged adolescent self-confidence that allowed them to deliver a song as patently ridiculous as "Stairway to Heaven" without so much as a smirk of self-consciousness -- surely, I told myself, this was Rock and Roll fulfilling its true purpose: Soundtrack to youth and freedom, with all the stupidity and self-destructiveness that implies.
Contrary to the wisdom imparted by every pop song since the beginning of time, I now realize that the rush of emotions I was experiencing was not exactly True Love. With the benefit of hindsight it now seems clear to me that the vision I had of Noel probably had more to do with Led Zeppelin than it had to do with her.¿ Although she had (and to my knowledge, continues to have) many fine qualities, she was in fact human and not some fairy princess. I had not at that point learned to differentiate between things so magical that they radiate an aura of glamour and my own tendency to magically project such an aura around things that hold some fascination for me. I now see that I am at times like a magpie, paralyzed by the sight of each newfound shiny object, its tiny little bird-brain incapable of looking away for an instant or discerning doubloon from candy-wrapper. As for beauty, I still thought of it as an inherent quality that I merely recognized, with no thought to the idea that I was participating in its creation and not simply seeing what was there. ¿ Also, I had not yet at that point experienced for myself the sensation of having someone else adore you based on a complete fantasy of what you actually are, and how oddly flattering and yet off-putting that can be -- I had yet to glimpse the other side of the sweet-creepy divide. *
While I am generally much relieved to be free of the hormonal insanity that holds teenagers in its grips (bred into our species through untold generations of acting on those feelings and the consequences of doing so) I must confess to a certain nostalgia for that portion of my life where the world seemed to explode into Technicolor. There is a reason pop music is so keyed into the teenage experience; It is the period in our lives where we are most susceptible to its simplistic appeal, the hearts and flowers and magical stairways and other assorted bullshit that we will laugh at as adults. But if it is a relief to be freed from the tyranny of all that adolescent melodrama, there is a tyranny of age as well, of correcting too far in the opposite direction. A little teenage stupidity, taken in controlled dosages, can be quite a bracing curative for the ravages of time. And if infatuation is not the true substance of love, perhaps it is more like icing on a cake. If wolfing down spoonful after spoonful of cake icing until your hands shake like a sugarbuzzed sixteen-year-old sounds unappealing, even so you'd have to admit that a cake with no icing whatsoever can be a little bland.
If all of this seems like a roundabout way of saying I like Led Zeppelin because it reminds me of happy moments from my youth, I suppose it is. * More simply put, I like it because it makes me feel good.
Been a Long Time Been a Long Time Been a Long Lonely, Lonely, Lonely, Lonely, Lonely Time
I have never agreed with the poet that said truth is beauty and beauty truth. In my experience the truth is often downright grotesque and beauty, for its part, is as often as not nothing more than a pack of wretched lies. A little of either goes a long way, and concentrated doses can prove devastating. But still, it is hard to deny that there is more to life than making it through to the end without ever once going completely to pieces.
I was again walking home with Brooke.
"You feel like playing a couple games of Defender?" I asked, nodding towards the Dairy Queen.
"No thanks. I've got a report to write and I need to get it done now so I can go out with Kelly later tonight."
"Okay. See you later. Have fun!"
I continued on my way, past the movie theatre, past the drug store, past the gun store -- and there in the space between the gun store and the Presbyterian church I noticed a new store had opened, a music shop. The display window was full of guitars. I peered through the window and looked at all of them, nervously eyeing the price tags. My eyes fell on a cheap Japanese copy of a Stratocaster with tobacco sunburst finish, sporting a price tag of $100. A little over a month's worth of newspaper delivery profits.
"Hmmm." I said to nobody in particular.
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.
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.
