BEFORE: The end is near - the end of the Doc Block, that is, so now I really have to scramble to figure out where I'm going to go after and which horror movies I'm going to watch in October. Of course, now I'm on deadline because I only figured out ONE movie past the DocChain and I'm hoping that it leads somewhere.
Just a couple states left in my "Get to Know a State" feature, and between Led Zeppelin and Billy Joel, they have to somehow split Rhode Island and South Carolina if this is going to work. I think it would work either way, so it doesn't really matter - there's footage here tonight of Led Zeppelin playing at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1969, in kind of a weird ironic reversal of Bob Dylan playing at the Newport Folk Festival a few years before. Yeah, I could work with that, but this bit of trivia is funnier and weirder - there used to be a roller coaster called "Led Zeppelin - The Ride" with an onboard audio system that played "Whole Lotta Love", and it opened in April 2008 at the Hard Rock Park in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The park closed after just one season, and that roller coaster was re-named "Time Machine" when the park opened under another name, but then THAT park went bankrupt, and the roller coaster was dismantled, shipped to Vietnam and is now called Dragon's Run. Hilarious, right? So today's state is SOUTH CAROLINA
Date admitted to the U.S.: May 23, 1788 (8th state)
Claim to fame: Great barbecue and the birthplace of Stephen Colbert, also where the Civil War started.
Nickname: The Palmetto State
State Motto: "Dum spiro spero" which means "While I breathe, I hope" or Animis opibusque parati", which means "prepared in mind and resources"
State Flower: Yellow jessamine
State Bird: Carolina wren
State Tree: Sabal palmetto
State Mammal: White-tailed deer
State Dance: Carolina shag
State Fish: Striped bass
State Mineral: Amethyst
State Fossil: Columbian mammoth
Notable Sports Teams: just college and minor league - we went to the State Fair near the home of the USC Gamecocks, the Clemson Tigers are also down there. Charleston RiverDogs are a minor-league baseball team, I know.
Fun Facts: King Charles I established the province of Carolana, which covered the area we now know as both Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee. But he only let members of the Anglican Church settle there, so it failed. Charles II pulled a fast one by granting the same land to eight different lords in return for their political and financial assistance, so really the whole territory came about through a giant con job. Real estate agents, am I right? Thanks to rice plantations and slave labor, by 1720 South Carolina was one of the richest colonies. Fort Sumter had the first battle of the war, and karma demanded that the war ruined the state's economy. Also that going forward, South Carolina would have the most earthquakes of any state on the East Coast.
I have been to South Carolina - on BBQ Crawl #3, because the state was conveniently situated between Georgia and North Carolina. They have a BBQ style there that is different from those other two adjacent states, it's more of a mustard-based sauce. We hit state fairs in both Carolinas on that trip, too - and the BBQ restaurant we chose in S.C. had ALL of the sauces available, four I think, including the state mustard sauce, a vinegar-based sauce, and two tomato-based sauces from NC. Variety, you know, is the key. So that makes 27 states I've been to, out of 47 profiled. I've got to revise my totals, because I just remembered I have been to Arizona, I crossed the Hoover Dam while on our first trip to Vegas, so technically now I'm up to 28. I have to go back and update all the stats for the month...
I'm counting this as another Thursday movie, like I doubled up on Thursday, so I can send a Birthday SHOUT-out to Robert Plant, born 8/20/1948. Well, I did start watching this movie on Thursday and I finished early Friday morning. This was a message from The Chain that I didn't need to watch that second movie about the Elvis Comeback Special - so now I hope I don't fall one movie slot short at the end of the year. Elvis carries over from "Bruce Springsteen: Born to Rock", by the way, but there's just no way he can advance much further in the rankings.
THE PLOT: The film traces the journeys of the four members of the "Stairway to Heaven" rockers through the music scene of the 1960s and their meeting in the summer of 1968.
AFTER: There's a time and a place for everything, and usually that's college - you're away from parents for the first time, and nobody can tell you what to eat or when to eat or how long to sleep or what to listen to, except maybe the R.A. if you're blasting Zeppelin songs very loudly from your room on a Sunday morning. I had a hardcore Beatles fan for a roommate, and that got me not only into the Fab Four and their solo albums, but also the Wilburys and Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan and in a roundabout way, Tom Petty who I picked up later. But around junior year (which was also my senior year) I got into Zeppelin, in the now-unpopular cassette format and through a walkman, which is hardly the best way to listen to anything, but it's what I had. I think maybe at some point I saved up and got a boombox before i graduated, so I could torture everyone else by making them listen to what I wanted to listen to.
This was the late 1980's, so Led Zep had already disbanded by the time I'd discovered them, and it would be a few years before Page & Plant got back together to record some acoustic sets and also years before there was ever a rollercoaster in South Carolina named in their honor. They only had 8 albums, so it just made sense to buy them all and listen to them in the order they were released, yes my OCD was in its infancy then but still it guided my actions. I also got really into cover songs, I thought at one point I could collect every album with a Beatles cover on it, which is quite impossible BUT it did expose me to a lot of artists that I normally would not have listened to, maybe, like James Taylor and Alison Krauss. Once CDs hit the marketplace I discovered a band named Dread Zeppelin, who covered L.Z. songs, mostly, but did them in reggae style and had an Elvis impersonator for a lead singer. POOF, mind blown, I started to realize you could take any song and perform it in any style, even, umm, that one. What's weird is that I went to see Dread Zeppelin live, and I've never seen Led Zeppelin live. Sure, I'm old but I'm not THAT old.
Look, I was born in 1968 so I don't have any memories from the moon landing or Woodstock or anything from the late 60's, OK? I was busy being a toddler and doing toddler stuff like learning to read. For a long time I thought John Paul Jones was just an admiral during the War of 1812 or something, and I found it confusing that he was somehow also in a rock band. I also heard a song by Mojo Nixon which had an improvised line of dialogue at the end that said, "In the later years, Jimmy Page was known as the one with the weird haircut...". This was back in the days where you couldn't just jump on the internet to research your favorite rock band, you had to pick up gossip and rumors from fans to learn about who these people are and how they got to be rock stars. We had something of a psych hospital or rehab clinic in my hometown, and over the years rumors had all kind of rock stars staying there to dry out, like that guy from Aerosmith or that other guy from the J. Geils Band, now I don't know if any of that was true.
Anyway, I was a Zeppelin fan for a long time, they had some pretty good songs split over those eight albums, like "Ramble On" with its references to Tolkien stories and "Kashmir" with its Middle Eastern arrangements, and "In the Evening", "Fool in the Rain" and "All My Love" from "In Through the Out Door" - even as the band was breaking up they crafted some good tunes, just like most tracks on "Abbey Road" were phenomenal, even if the Beatles were fighting with each other. I wondered if the Zeppelin chaps were always at odds with each other, too, and if so, whether this was a prerequisite to making good music. Later on I went back to "Physical Graffiti" and re-discovered tracks like "In My Time of Dying" and "In the Light" and "Down by the Seaside" and those tracks stayed with me through my thirties.
At some point, however, the veil was lifted because there was a music expert interviewed on the Howard Stern Show (my wife was a fan for a long while) and he claimed to be able to prove that Led Zeppelin had "borrowed" so many pieces of songs here and there that if you knew music, you might wonder what they actually wrote together on their albums, and that very little of it could be called "original". I mean, this guy played a bunch of old blues records, and you could easily see how they ripped off that one to make "Traveling Riverside Blues" and that other one to make "Dazed and Confused". Sometimes they kept the original title intact, and sometimes they changed it, and you would only change the title of a song if you didn't want people to know where it came from, right?
There were explanations, of course, that the band members learned old blues songs early on, and those songs stuck with them, so when they sat down to write, naturally they would be influenced by that. But sometimes the would just steal a song outright, and maybe that was a band that they toured with, like if you listen to a song named "Taurus" by a band called Spirit, a song which predated "Stairway to Heaven" by two years, you might easily hear that the songs sound very similar, and it's not too hard to believe that Jimmy Page would have heard that song, altered it a bit, arranged a couple new sections, changed the title, and re-released it as a Zeppelin song. It's quite believable when you also understand how many blues songs they ripped off without crediting the original song writers. I mean, in the case of "Taurus" this actually went to court and the U.S. Court of Appeals, who are NOT musicologists, found themselves in the position of trying to decide how close two songs need to sound for one to be considered a version of the other.
Now, here in this doc, while discussing the making of "Whole Lotta Love", Robert Plant casually says, "Oh, I just dropped in a Willie Dixon lyric..." - well, that's also called stealing. Or copyright theft along with cultural appropriation - my point is that Willie Dixon was not credited as a writer on "Whole Lotta Love" until recently. Musicologists started really calling Led Zeppelin out about 10 years back for outright theft of song lyrics from old blues singers like Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters and such, and it's only the most recent Led Zeppelin re-released albums that give any credit at all to those original songwriters, so really, for DECADES Led Zeppelin was making profits for many songs that had their roots in blues music, sure it's a lyric here and a riff there, perhaps, but those songwriters, or at least their estates, got cheated out of royalties for a very long time, while Led Zeppelin and their record label made a lot of money. You can't go back and correct past mistakes, but you can at least try to.
I can't really forgive them for this, the band members even now seem very clueless about what song theft is, they all seem to think if you take a bit of that song, a bit of that other song, arrange them together and give it a new title, that you've done something original, and I happen to disagree. The fact that they are forced to credit the original blues writers NOW really seems like an admission of guilt to me. So I thought I was listening to original material all those years, and apparently I was mistaken, it was just new to me. I mean, everybody was doing it, like Elvis and Col. Parker were stealing black music like crazy, but at least they credited Leiber and Stoller whenever they did it, they robbed the bank with the security cameras on, at least, so we knew the theft took place. Page and Plant wore masks and knocked out the cameras and robbed the bank at night so nobody saw it, but it was still a robbery.
We live in a society where there are rules, and there should also be repercussions for crimes, even artistic ones. I'm not saying Led Zeppelin should be thrown out of the Rock Hall of Fame, but if they're also in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, somebody should really take a look at their history and the song credits to see if they really belong there. That being said, this documentary really stops when it hits the second year of the band touring and their second album, so I suspect that there could/should be a sequel in the works. I would love to see a montage put together just of covers of "Stairway to Heaven", I have a few dozen on various CDs.
It's a bit confusing because the first half of the film follows the "collision course" method of parallel editing, the three living members of the band all discuss their childhoods and early music experiences, and the film has to jump between all three stories (four if you count the taped recollections of the late John Bonham) and this can be disconcerting. The Cheech and Chong doc kind of followed the same format, but there were only two of them. It's quite a relief in both cases when the band forms and then we can follow just one storyline instead of three.
I don't quite understand the process by which Led Zeppelin toured America and was promoted heavily by radio stations and record stores, all before their first album was even released in America, I wish they could have explained this better. Once the album's done, why wouldn't they want to sell it in both countries? Isn't more record sales better than less? Also, why didn't someone buy their album in the U.S. and fly it over to the U.K. so people could enjoy it there, too? Sure, it was 1969 but they still had planes and you could mail or ship stuff from here to there, right? They did all that promotion in America and then flew back home and nobody knew who they were? That seems a bit counter-productive, just saying.
Directed by Bernard MacMahon
Also starring Jimmy Page (last seen in "Little Richard: I Am Everything"), Robert Plant (last seen in "Travelin' Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival at the Royal Albert Hall"), John Paul Jones,
with archive footage of John Bonham (last seen in "Count Me In"), Buzz Aldrin (last seen in "Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood"), Neil Armstrong (ditto), Carmine Appice, Joe Baldwin, Shirley Bassey (last seen in "If These Walls Could Sing"), Rev. Gordon Bates, Jeff Beck (last seen in "Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple"), Jack Bonham, Jason Bonham, Patricia Bonham, James Brown (last seen in "Reinventing Elvis: The '68 Comeback"), Margie Castle, Lonnie Donegan, Donovan, Perry Foster, Peter Grant, Glyn Johns (last seen in "History of the Eagles"), Maureen Jones, Eddie Kramer, Gene Krupa, John Lennon (last seen in "Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley"), Little Richard (ditto), Lulu (last seen in "Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie"), Marilyn Monroe (last seen in "The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes")f, Mickie Most, Richard Nixon (also last seen in "Reinventing Elvis: The '68 Comeback"), Yoko Ono (last seen in "Roberta"), James Page, Patricia Page, Annie Plant, Carmen Plant, Maureen Plant, Robert Plant Sr., Terry Reid, Jerry Wexler (last seen in "Devo"), Sonny Boy Williamson II, Wolfman Jack, Rod Wyatt,
Carter Lewis & The Southerners, Herman's Hermits, Johnny Kidd & The Pirates, Johnny Burnette Trio, Vanilla Fudge, The Yardbirds,
RATING: 6 out of 10 avant-garde guitar solos
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