The Sunday Ishmael 14/02/21

 Here's an oddity. You don't have to listen to it all - I think it is ear-bleedingly unpleasant, a product of the desire of musicians to keep on making music during lockdown, despite regulations designed to stop them; as if there wasn't enough recorded music already in existence to overwhelm the most dedicated listener. I offer it in the spirit of  Samuel Johnson's precept: "Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." What a lad, eh?

This lot have been brought together by Tony Rogers, in his Covid Cello Project. To be fair, it was always going to sound diabolical, but that's because the tune they are sawing away at is Kashmir by Led Zeppelin. It is certainly better than the original - see? Again, you don't need to listen to it all - indeed, I would strenuously advise against such an endeavour.

God-awful noise. mr ishmael had things to say about them:

 

 

Messrs Led Zeppelin,  

a hugely over-rated rock four-piece from the 'seventies,  an ensemble whose off-stage, brutal, degrading  debauchery was and is widely known but indulged, bless, as is that of so many and yet none of Rock's household names has attracted the attention of the BeastPolice. Still, like Zepp, many will have low friends in high places, might even be knighted.

As well as competing among themselves  to photograph the largest head of celery inserted in a teenager, Led Zeppelin are the most comprehensively larcenous people in show business, having stolen  nearly all of their  material and impudently claimed it as their own, even the massively lucrative Whole Lotta Love was lifted lyrically, musically and stylistically from Steve Mariott of the Small Faces.  There are channels on YouTube dedicated to exposing Zeppelin's thievery but as yet their star still shines, surviving members recently filling the Albert Hall with ageing fuckwits.

 
  As we see at the PBC, it is the silent approval of others which makes all  these things possible, a conspiracy of men, generally men, being true to their selves,  their careers,  their almost certainly baseless idea of who they are.

And at the end of the 'sixties so-called Blues Boom, from the squabbling ruins of Page's awful, pretentious  Yardbirds came the clunking, sybaritic behemoth that was Led Zeppelin, managed by the loathsome bullyboy and racketeer manque, Peter Grant,

 a twenty-stone fuckpig and dyed in the wool moron who would nevertheless  guide Zeppelin to Devil-worship, to orgiastic, underage rough sex, to fatal drug overdose and to fortunes almost beyond the dreams of avarice. 

 

I never went for that androgyne stuff, so popular back then, David Bowie and  Lou Reed were at the head of it, so to speak,

I thought it was unwholesome, nothing to do with me, gender benders,  can't stand them, one thing or the other, anything else endangers the spacecraft, nothing to do with rock and roll, nothing to do with music, even, dragging-up and queening all over the shop. Buddy Holly never did shit like that, that'll be the fucking day and maybe Phil Spector did wind-up shooting folks and taking our childhoods to jail with him but he never dressed up  as a  woman.  The great Little Richard is as bent as  a nine-bob note - or a forty five pence piece - but you wouldn't ever catch him faking fellatio on his guitarist.  Bowie hanging out in Berlin, acting as if he was Isherwood on amphetamine, he and his mental Mrs,  banging the same poxed-up rentboy,  what a load of old shite, pretentious art school wanker. And while I could understand young women  being turned-on by  Led Zeppelin's vulgar, bombastic,  ostentatious and meaningless cock-rock, I could never figure out why so many young men in greatcoats had a hard-on for Robert Plant.  Although the biggest hard-on in town is the one he has for himself. Even by the abysmal, pathological standards of show business, Plant,  the great rock god and cock-waving numbskull, is almost uniquely self-obsessed, seeing himself as, I dunno, rock catalyst, Svengali, mover and shaker  but mainly as just, well, great,  his greatness being the vocal icing on the dodgy battenberg of Page and Jones and Bonham, his co-Zeppers,  them all being great together,  their greatness, collectively and independently, greatness, like Handel or Beethoven, really, truly great.

I wouldn't have gone to see them if they were playing in my back garden,

but I heard a few of the albums, back then, histrionic rubbish, noisy, vulgar and flashy, twin-neck Gibsons, guitars  played with 'cello bows,

wow, man,  and drug-crazed, interminable drum solos where a couple of bars would have done,  and Planty, bare-chested, shrieking and howling, a cucumber down his kecks, a study in pointless homoerotic excess.

His Zeppelin drummer, wotsisname, Bonham,  had been his mentor, had got him the gig and so, when the stupid fuck had drugged himself to death,  he and Pagey and the other clown just couldn't, you know, couldn't....

And so Stourbridge's greatest son has  proudly gone his own, irrelevant way, forming  bands and closing them down, disappointing legions of poor Zeppheads, all bleating for a reunion between Plant and the ridiculous Page and the other one.  Doctor Bob Dylan has been unable for forty of his fifty career years, to  carry a tune and is the sort of out of tune, out of time, wrong key  player who, if he wasn't who he is, nobody in their right mind would want in their ensemble, not even if he was playing outside in the carpark and yet he is never short of sidemen and women.  Plant's career highlight has been howling lonely lonely lonely lonely lonely lonely with all the finesse of that other great entertainer, Tom can you  lower your voice to a shriek, you fucking moron, Jones. And he, too, seems able to at least brush shoulders with people whom you wouldn't suspect of giving him houseroom, much less of sharing a stage or a studio with him. He has had several bands of often competent and original players but none have lasted. He's tried the African connection, too, both with Page and without him, but to no effect; greater talents, proper musicians, rather than cock-waving shriekers, people like Maestro Ry Cooder and the ever accomplished and tasteful Paul Simon have made fabulous albums with local musicians, Cooder with Mali's Ali Farka Touree and Simon with loads of them,  South Africans, notably Ladysmith Black Mombasa;  Nick Drake went to Morocco and came back with a feast of new tunings, novel arrangements  and an album still highly regarded;

Plant's adventures have resulted in video clips of him waving his hair around rhythmically, man, and of a Moroccan  ensemble busking along, for the cameras, bemusedly,  with Whole Lotta Love.  It's a sign of his greatness, perhaps. 

Plant's latest project, however, his new Band of Joy, is to recruit a load of grizzly,  boringly competent, sixty-year old players, like himself, and crunch out a few limp covers;  their concert of the album, at the Roundhouse, featured songs by Richard Thompson, Townes van Zandt, fragments of early  Bob Dylan  interpretations and a typically shamefully unacknowledged version of an Incredible String Band arrangement of I Bid You Goodnight. We finally found  the perfect song to close the show, he smirked, never mentioning that the Incredible String Band, often an inspiration to the creative desert which was Led Zeppelin, had arranged that piece to close their own concerts, way back in the nineteen sixties.  Man's a cunt.

As well as the white-haired old guys in woolly hats, with banks of expensive instruments, there's a desolate looking bint, too, Patty Griffin, a harmonising country singer and songwriter, Jesus, how many are there, but in the perfectly predictable solo breaks, where she should properly be doing a bit of coloured girl bump and grind, Planty himself is, after a fashion, dancing vainly around the stage, flexing his OAP arse, but mainly standing, rocking cross-legged, in his cowboy boots, like some gross  chanteuse naive ancien, his snuffler's beard not quite hiding the jowls, the turkey neck, Christ, he's revolting. Nothing wrong with being old, it's just his being old and acting young. Never mind rock god, more like a nightmare Kylie Minogue. The industry, of course,  loves it and will probably "award" the album a score of Grammies, just like it did with  Raising Sand, the truly great,  handclapping  extravaganza he recorded with  the great Allison Kraus and  the great T-Bone Burnett. Just all great people, great musicians, doing greatness together. If you saw a bunch of old geezers doing this down the pub, you'd say, well,  fair play to them, it's not half bad.  But as full-price, new music it's shit, really it is.

The BBC has all sorts in its archive and increasingly enjoins us to celebrate anew the joys and mysteries of popular  entertainment. Amongst them is a concert given by the four bozos known as Led Zeppelin who, with their thug manager, Mr Peter Grant, trashed 70's American hotels and teen virginity  with gay cock-rock abandon.
 

 Difficult to see how anyone might endure more than a couple of minutes of this rubbish but millions did, pasty-faced young men in greatcoats and hormone-crazed bints alike flocked to these noisy shows, homo-erotic bombast for the new cognoscenti,  the musically illiterate. Now pay attention, Jimmy Page seemed to say, as he fucked about pointlessly with a new, twin-necked Gibson,  this is all very clever stuff and I'm sure that later, children, in your bedrooms, you'll all want to pretend to do this yourselves; you may not be able to play anything and you certainly can't afford things like this, but it's the thought that counts for you, anyway, for us it's the money. Page's playing  was shit and proper men, of course, like Rory Gallagher, played Fenders, anyway, Page, though, a nasty, pushy, middle class brat sometimes played his Gibson SG with a bow, just like it was a,  whaddayacall those things, a cello, man to demonstrate his genius.

Look at my smooth, hairless chest and my golden tresses, pouted the brainless oik, Plant, I may be stupid, and I am, but look at my chest, I am  pure biceps rock'n' roll  Narcissus, dig my poses, Man.  Somewhere behind, another unpleasant, neanderthal couple flailed away at dark, Satanic drums an bass, at least one of them tragically and irreplaceably, Man, drinking and drugging his worthless self to death.  Ah, the glory days of  Rock consumerism, Keith, man, and Jimi, man, and Janis, man, drowned in vomit, far out. And tragic, too tragic, man.

It is said that when the Zeps ran out of inspiration, surely after about ninety seconds playing together, they would retire to a Welsh cottage with the latest Incredible String Band record and recharge their creative batteries, or steal the ideas of truly creative people, as we call it in the real world. I find this hard to credit. The String Band were one of those odd combinations of flighty wit and  roaming intelligence and virtuosity;  they could effortlessly merge sitar with barrelhouse piano, four piece rock band with string section and   cathedral organ with tin whistle to produce stunning and inimitable masterpieces, thoughtful and elegant, rocking and rolling; riffs, reels and ragas,  the world's music, distilled and alchemised into something uniquely British,  leaping and soaring, running, laughing at Time's tricks,   giggling,  from the scratchy vinyl groove, at Ruin's march.
There's none of that in Whole Lotta Love.

................................................................

Contrary to mr ishmael's view of the man, Jimmy Page's wikipedia page tells us that Page is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential guitarists of all time. As you'd expect of a rock cock-god he's also had many significant relationships - notably with Lori Maddox, beginning when she was 13 and he was in his twenties, which attracted recent attention in the light of the Me Too Movement as statutory rape. Since 2014, his girlfriend, now aged 31, is actress and poet Scarlett Sabet.  Anything you want to know about the music business you'll find in the pages of Kill Your Friends and its sequel, Kill 'Em All, by John Niven.

Jimmy Page has been very interested in occultist Aleister Crowley for many years, even going so far as to own Crowley's old place, Boleskine House, from the early 1970's until 1992. Crowley was infamous locally for performing black magic, in particular for saddling the House with Hell's aristocracy. He started a ritual to invoke his Guardian Angel, which required 6 months of preparation, celibacy, abstinence from alcohol and the summoning of the 12 Kings and Dukes of Hell, in order to bind them. Unfortunately, after he'd invited the Kings and Dukes to Boleskine, he was called to Paris by his boss, the leader of the Golden Dawn. He never got around to banishing Hell's aristocracy, who occupied themselves for the next hundred or so years, up to the present, in mischievously  setting fires, rolling decapitated heads around the corridors, pretending to be wild animals snuffling outside guest's bedrooms and other japes.  In 1978, Jimmy explained: "I feel Aleister Crowley is a misunderstood genius of the 20th century. My studies have been quite intensive, but I don't particularly want to go into it because it's a personal thing and isn't in relation to anything apart from the fact that I've employed his system in my own day to day life. ... The thing is to come to terms with one's free will, discover one's place and what one is, and from that you can go ahead and do it and not spend your whole life suppressed and frustrated. ."

 

So what's Jimmy doing now? His girlfriend has pretensions to being a poetaster, and it turns out that her stuff is popular, in the modern fashion for dire dross, the public's taste having been formed by exposure to greetings-card couplets and pop music lyrics, mixed in with Melancholia and Significance. Jimmy, of course, couldn't tell good from bad, but he knows what makes money and he has produced Scarlett's spoken-word  album Possession.

As mr ishmael used to say, Scarlett has the sort of face you'd never tire of slapping. Your hand would drop off long before you got bored attempting to remove the pout and the cow eyes. Her ponderous, studied,  artistic, dirge-like narration is absolute proof that poets can't read their own work and that the taste of the Great British Public can never be under-estimated. Her oeuvre leads one to sympathise with mr ishmael's view of poets:  "My resolved view of poets is How Dare there be such, making rhymes and rhythms from the entrails of our sorrow? And then selling them."

mr ishmael's essay today was extracted from the following:

These few Precepts                           23/09/2014

Can White boys sing the Blues?       17/04/2011

Whole Lotta Shite                             6/06/2010

What's on Telly - Betjeman Land     1/09/2014

Honest, Not Invent is an anthology of essays by stanislav and mr ishmael. It is  available from lulu.com  and  is listed by both Blackwells, the Book Depository and Amazon.

 

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Still cold here.  

 

 

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