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.
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....
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.
please
register an account with Lulu first. This will save you a couple of
quid, as going straight into the links provided below seems to make
paypal think it's ok to charge in dollars, and apply their own
conversion rate, which will put the price up slightly for a UK buyer.
Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links (to either
paperback or hardback) or type "Honest, Not Invent" into the Lulu
Bookstore search box. If you follow a link, a pop-up box asks for age
confirmation - simply set the date to (say) 1 January 1960, and
proceed. If you type the title, the anthology will not appear as a
search result until the "show explicit content" box (found at the bottom
left by scrolling down) has been checked. You may also see the age
verification box, as above, at this point.
Honest, Not Invent is available in paperback or hardback.Link for Hard Back :
Link for Paper Back :
There may be a 15% discount try the voucher code = TREAT15 in
the coupon box, which takes 15% off the price before
postage. If this code has expired by the time you reach this point, try
a google search for "Lulu.com voucher code" and see what comes up.
Still cold here.
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