Rating My CD's: The Universal White-Boy Unconscious

36. Led Zeppelin -- IV/Zoso/Runes/Old Fart With a Bunch of Sticks/The One With "Stairway"/Whatever


I chose to open this Rating My CD's death-march series with a one word review of Back in Black because coming up with something to say about Back in Black that hadn't been said a thousand times already proved insurmountable. Basically, I owned Back in Black because it was a well-loved hard-rock record by a well-loved hard-rock band, and suburban doughboys like myself like them some hard-rock. It may as well have come in the mail with the Pennysaver.

I'm rather tempted to kick the same punt right now. I mean, this is freakin' Zeppelin IV we're talking about here. What the hell am I gonna do, make stupid guesses about what "bustle in your hedgerow" actually means? Thunderously declaim that I will never tire of "Rock and Roll"no matter how many car commercials it appears in? Issue the "One of us! One of us!" chant at Robert Plant on behalf of anyone that's ever played Dungeons & Dragons, for "The Battle for Evermore"? How do you write about something ubiquitous?

Rating My CD's: Alchemy

35. Led Zeppelin -- III


Bands are a product of human alchemy, of a group of individuals offering their talents to make a unified sound. Sometimes, that alchemy mixes individuals who work well together and survive decades of the grind of rehearse-record-tour. The Rolling Stones are still around because Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have an unshakeable chemical bond. In other cases, such as the Sex Pistols, the mixture was inherently unstable, in fact deliberately designed to combust.

Combustion was more or less what Zeppelin was selling on it's first two albums, or more properly combust-a-bility (Bust-a-bility!), as John Adams would put it. Which is why III has always been their head-fake record; their pastoral yawp from the Welsh hill country. They were the biggest band in the world at this point, and they made what's basically an acoustic-electric-folk record. Because they felt like it.

Dude! The Song "Houses of the Holy" isn't on the Album "Houses of the Holy"

Houses of the Holy isn't the only Zeppelin album I don't have. I don't have any of the ones after Physical Graffiti, either. But HoTH may be the only one I still might want, since III arrived by Amazon yesterday.



My dad had Houses on eight-track; I remember seeing it as a kid. Maybe it was the naked kids on the picture that threw me off. But I'm seriously considering throwing down for it on iTunes.



For that matter, I don't think I've ever seen "The Song Remains the Same." No one can fault the guys in Zeppelin for making a movie about being the biggest band in the world. Otherwise, we'd have to throw out Hard Day's Night, wouldn't we? But I never felt the need to see it. that might mean something, but I suspect it doesn't.



Here's the thing about this band: the first time I ever listened to "She's Crafty" from License to Ill, I knew they were sampling a Zeppelin riff. I didn't know the album or even the name of the song ("The Ocean") until just now. But I knew who it was.



And now I'm debating whether this would be worth owning on vinyl. I shall have to consider the matter most carefully and thoughtfully. In the meantime, You should buy this, even if I haven't.

UPDATE: I went with Amazon MP3. It was totally worth it.

Rating My CD's: British Blues

34. Led Zeppelin -- II


Will Durant once wrote that Christianity did not destroy the ancient pagan world; rather, it was the last great creation of it. To me, Led Zeppelin fulfills a similar dynamic with regard to the mid-to-late 60's British Blues scene that spawned it. So I don't care what Lester Bangs snarked from a fictional future about Zep in the midst of giving praise to the Yardbirds:

The Yardbirds, as I said, were incredible. They came stampeding in and just blew everybody clean off the tracks. They were so fucking good, in fact, that people were still imitating 'em as much as a decade later, and getting rich doing it I might add, because the original band of geniuses didn't last that long. Of course, none of their stepchildren were half as good, and got increasingly pretentious and overblown as time went on until about 1973 a bunch of emaciated fops called Led Zeppelin played their final concert when the lead guitarist was assassinated by an irate strychnine freak in the audience with a zip gun just fifty-eight minutes two-and-a-half-hour virtuoso solo on one bass note.

Behold, For it is Time to Get the Led Out.

I actually thought I could knock out at least one of my CD categories in a year. It's been a year and a half, and I've gotten through 31 albums. But it's okay, as I'm now getting to one of my favorite bands, which happens to be one of everyone's favorite bands.

So this week is Zeppelin Week at Genre Confusion. All posts will be Zeppelin-related. I've got 4 Zep CD's to praise with my spoon-edged wit. You're all going to gorge on Page, Plant, Jones, and Bonham until you're ready to puke like you'd done this:

You thought I was going to make a Bonham joke, didn't you?

So strap on your Les Paul, ready your Tolkein references, and get ready to party like it's 1969. Which is to say, like this:

What a Difference a Name Makes

I'm probably not going to buy Graham Colton's Pacific Coast Eyes . Nothing discussed with approving references to Counting Crows (I can learn tolerance for lots of things, but not "Mr. Jones") is going to get my hard-earned cash. But as an example good album art and good album names, it can scarcely be bettered.

The colors are right, the focus is right, and the name "Pacific Coast Eyes" suggests a pun without actually being one. Far too many album and band names get them to a punnery and go no farther; this is an improvement.

Rating My CD's: God Save Strawberry Jam

33. The Kinks -- The Kinks are the Village Green Society


The Kinks are a bunch of dorks. This album proves it.

That's not just me talking. The aforementioned Rock Snob's Dictionary sums this album -- supposedly a "lost masterpiece" among Rock Snobs (whoever the hell they are) -- as "pastoral Victorian whimsy" released a year too late to cash in on it.

Yet it remains beloved of critics and nerds, who love nothing so much as trying to convince people that excessively wrought glockenspiel solos are the greatest thing since Elvis wandered into the Memphis Recording Service.

Now, I haven't a thing against glockenspiel solos, or expressions of pastoral Victorian whimsy. So I don't mind The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. In fact, I'll admit that some of these songs have a wonderful knack for infecting your brain. "Picture Book" probably wrote the bible on what it means for a song to be "jangly", but it's got a nice shuffle to it. "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains,"
a rather kitschy blues, is better for the solo, which bursts out of the melody into something resembling a rock song. "Wicked Annabella" also satisfies the craving for rock, but it seems odd and out of place, a desperate reminder of what the Kinks were doing a few years previously. And I'm almost prepared to forgive "Johnny Thunder" for the opening line "lives on water, feeds on lightning."

But there's plenty on here that's simply irritating. "Monica" sounds like the Ventures rewritten as Muzak." "People take Pictures" is a tedious diptych of "Picture Book" that undermines the first song. And the requisite Floydish hippy silliness appears, apropos of nothing, on "Phenomenal Cat."

As a microcosm of what's wrong with this record, I choose "Big Sky," a rather dopey expression of 60's Romanticism, without any of the threat or sense of taboo violation that makes Romanticisim interesting. Dave Davies' guitar, which livened up "Steam Powered Trains" so nicely, gets buried underneath orchestral arrangements. In fairness, the stuffing also does much to obscure the rather banal lyrics about "big city lies." But not enough.

It takes some careful pop melodicism to make this kind of Little-England bigotry sound transgressive, and Ray Davies certainly brings that. But I'm afraid, like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, this album gets by more on it's minted status as a flower-power curio than repeated listenings.

Then again, it does have oompahs.


Grade: OK     

Post-Punk Lo-Fi Alt-Country Power-Trio

These and other terms I have absorbed over the course of weekend with The Rock Snob's Dictionary, a book I'm almost positive was intended as a joke platform to snark at bands and musicians that the artist's don't like. It's useful, in that I learned a few things, such as the existence of people who plume their elitism by referring to Bob Dylan as "Zimmy." And the combination of this book and Keith Richards' autobiography has actually made me want to give Gram Parsons' music a listen. I probably won't, though, because I already spent my music budge for the month on a Black Angels CD.

Somehow, I'll manage

If you haven't noticed...

The radio show I write for, Rock'n'Roll Archaeology, is linked at the top of the next column. We "explore the musical mysteries of the Rock'n'Roll era," which means we drop knowledge on the heads of fools who don't know anything about anything before the 1970's. We can be heard at midnight on Saturdays on 88.1 WYPR in the Baltimore/Washington area.

For those of you not so fortunate as to live near these Meccas of culture, here's the link to the podcast of our first episode. What is the first Rock'n'Roll song? There will be a test.

Heavy Rock

Over at Fast N' Bulbous, Fester makes a strong argument for putting proto- and 1st generation-punk, early heavy metal, early 70's funk, and a few other hard rock noise merchants into a super genre called Heavy Rock. Not only did Lester Bangs and such use the term back in the day, but it moves away from having to slice finer and finer microgenres for each subculture. It would be unifying.

Plus, the first album on the list is Fun House. What's not to love?

Talking Back to Punk Rock #13

"So you're saying you DON'T want to be an intellectually disabled citizen of your home country? What a bold, transgressive statement. You have shocked us all again, Billie Joe, and we're totally going to forgive you for Warning!

By the way, why don't you age? Do you mainline collagen or something?"

-Green Day "American Idiot" 

Hugh Laurie a Bluesman?

Yes. Yes he is. And by Hear, Hear!'s standards, a fine one:

Give the album a chance and you’ll be converted. By the time Let Them Talk has played out in its full glory, you’ll have forgotten this is a blues album by an actor. It’ll be more “where’s this guy been all these years?”

I always wondered why House always had guitars on the al of his apartment. I thought it was just good TV writing.

Bleh

Long weekend, summer cold, and I can't concieve of an activity less appealing to me than listening to Jamie XX's (Because he had his identity stolen by the White Man, twice?) new single.

So I'm going to review that Red Sammy CD I mentioned, and I'm going to review Village Green Preservation Society. I just can't decide when.

Lemme be Honest...

I like Andrew Earles a lot. He's funny, and he's forgotten more about popular music than I'll ever know. But I can't pretend that I have the slightest idea what he's talking about in this piece, because he's forgotten more about popular music than I'll ever know. And I'm pretty sure I'm older than he is. Hell, I still think it's kinda funny that the Feelies covered "Everyone Has Something To Hide 'Cept for Me and My Monkey." My record collection is abysmal compared to the "perfect" one he's been building. Here it is, in it's entirety:

Actually, I think the whole song is pretty funny...

So I can't claim claim the kind of authority that's necessary to denounce other people's tastes as objectively ridiculous. And I'm not sure I even want to. Sure, damning the folly of others hasn't stopped being fun, and there's certainly a fair bit of pretentious hipsterism that I will hold as a sacred task to slap around like the proverbial red-head stepchild. But I can't possibly say that the stuff I review here is truly, objectively, good. Or bad. Or indifferent. This is all about me, and what I like. I will never be an expert. Just a fan.