#Zeplin harmony how to

#Zeplin harmony how to

The Sex Pistols turned the screw more precisely six years later: “Don’t know what I want / But I know how to get it.” Not knowing what to want but knowing how to get it: rock music is this pure enablement, this conduit of the how over the what. Alice Cooper, who played alongside an equally uncelebrated Led Zeppelin at an early gig in Los Angeles, in January, 1969, voiced the essential rebellion with perfect ingenuousness in “I’m Eighteen”: “I’m eighteen / And I don’t know what I want / Eighteen / I just don’t know what I want / Eighteen / I gotta get away / I gotta get out of this place / I’ll go runnin’ in outer space.” The stylus lay down in the groove, and wrote the law.Īnd, as my mother intuited, this law was a potent rival dominion, a law of negation, out to invert everything held sacred and respectable by parents, churches, principalities. “Listen to this”-said as he flipped the LP onto the turntable-was a command more than an invitation. The thirteen-year-old pupil was not expected to show any independence of taste. He both curated and retarded my education. Having an older brother was a mixed blessing in this regard. New to Led Zeppelin’s music, I had no idea that the group had become a ponderous joke, that Knebworth was to be its last gasp. In those days, stuck in provincial northern England as we were, musical information seemed to reach us years late, like news from panting messengers of wars that had already fizzled out.

Watching from the wings, learning how to deceive, I was mainly impressed by his honesty-why hadn’t he just told them he was going to see Peter, Paul and Mary? Our parents had told him that if he went to Knebworth he would cease to be a Christian. Stairway to Heaven? Chute to Hell, more like. A school friend of his had tickets to a Led Zeppelin summer show, at Knebworth he was desperate to go. My brother was involved in his own spiritual struggle. And surely Jimmy Page was a bit suspect? We had watched him during “Stairway to Heaven,” grimacing in bliss, dazed in ecstasy, leaning back as he throttled his dark, double-necked guitar, like a man wrestling with some giant shrieking bird of the night. On the screen, the stage at Madison Square Garden had become a diabolical altar: half naked, Led Zeppelin’s lead singer, Robert Plant, was screaming and writhing like a downed angel, and its drummer, John Bonham, was stolidly abusing what appeared to be a flaming gong. Our evangelical parents always managed to materialize while something awkward was on the TV, but our mother, who could find inappropriately suggestive moments in “Doctor Who,” had surpassed herself this time. He may have lost his soul already mine was still in the balance. Angus, five years older than me and provider of all musical contraband, was eighteen. In my memory, she looms as a column of judgment in the doorway of the sitting room, as Angus and I watch the closing frames of the concert film “The Song Remains the Same” on television. It was more than I or my elder brother knew, and gave her a sinister advantage over us. How on earth did my mother know that Led Zeppelin was composed of satanists? Specifically, how did she know that Jimmy Page had “a great interest in the occult,” and owned a bookshop “somewhere down in London” dedicated to these pursuits? Presumably, some furtive Christian network or back channel had provided the information.