Good Zep, Bad Zep, One Free T-Shirt
Well, I did it: I bought one of those super-deluxe Led Zeppelin boxes.
The Super Deluxe Edition of the first Zep album is obviously the most commercialized, crass, regrettable, anti-rock, boomer-focused, rich-ass-yuppie piece of stupid bullshit to ever disgrace the name of the band that once bestrode the earth like a Colossus. Except it isn't. To begin with, it comes with stuff you really want: rare photographs, perfect letterhead facsimiles of press releases, and additional historical information that will be familiar to those of us who have read all the Zep biographies but is presented in compelling fashion nonetheless.
The music itself --- well, I had concerns. Page is an old man now and who knows how good his ears are when it comes to remastering and mixing forty-five-year-old tracks? No need to worry. He did a good job, at least by my standards. Admitteldy, I'm going deaf as well, haha. I heard the LP at my friend Chris's house in Toronto a few months back and I'm pleased to say that the CD is just as good through my Sony ES SACD player, Parasound pre-amp and amplifier, and Paradigm Monitors. (Yeah, I bought a set of Magnepan 3.6s but I haven't set them up yet.) I'm waiting to listen to the bonus CD until I have a really down day where I really want something to cheer me up. I hope it's good. The reviews are all positive.
It's hideously expensive. Getting the Super Deluxe editions of all the relevant studio records, which to me includes neither Presence nor In The Out Door, would cost you nearly a thousand bucks. None of the things Jimmy Page has done to cash out on his legacy are particularly cheap, whether you're talking about the guitars, the guitar cases, the paintings, the signed items, or these reissues. I'm going to forgive JP for this because what he really wants, as he has made plain time and again for twenty years, is to tour as Led Zeppelin with Robert Plant. Ol' Planty isn't interested, he wants to flirt with Alison Kraus and inflict his Nashville-hipster Band Of Joy II on us.
To some degree, I sympathize with Plant. Imagine being defined for the rest of your life by the things you did before you turned thirty. The man's a musician, he wants to create new things and have new experiences, not endlessly toil in his own mausoleum. Still... would it kill them to do one US tour? Just one? For those of us who, like me, were seven years old when Knebworth happened? Make it five hundred bucks a ticket if you have to. Let Robert sing the whole thing an octave down like he's been doing. I don't care. I want the experience of communing with a hundred thousand other fans in the open air. Zepapalooza.
This morning Patrick and I whipped out this cover of "Good Times Bad Times". No, it wasn't Monday morning; we're both unemployed and we've lost track of time. We really could have used a drummer. Still, it was fun. It's fun to play this great music, even if we don't play it perfectly, and to enjoy the spirit of the thing.
One free TTAC T-shirt to the first person who can tell me why I'm playing an ASAT Deluxe Korina on this instead of a Les Paul. Note: this offer does not extend to galactagog, since we talked about it when I was in Toronto last. Hint: it's the same reason I'd play the ASAT for "Stairway to Heaven".