Random Musical Revelations

• Listening to Led Zeppelin is not conducive to highly technical work. It is very difficult to care about the current non-support of duplicate IP addresses in the ol’ corporate network -- even though multicasting does, in fact, require duplicate IP addresses -- while listening to “Hey, hey mama, said the way you move/Gonna make you sweat/gonna make you groove.”
  
• Listening to Led Zeppelin is, however, conducive to rediscovering Sandy Denny. That’s her singing on “Battle of Evermore” on Led Zeppelin IV/Zoso/Runes/The Satanic Stairway to Heaven Album. She was the lead singer of a band called Fairport Convention, a bunch of folk rockers most famous for taking ancient traditional English folk tunes and tarting them up with electric guitars and a backbeat. She got drunk, fell down a flight of stairs, and died of a head injury at the ripe old age of 31. Sad. But wow, could she sing.
  
• Led Zeppelin had a secret J.R.R. Tolkien fetish. Aside from entitling a song “Misty Mountain Hop,” they also wrote a blues song (“Ramble On” from Led Zeppelin II) with the line, “But Gollum, the evil one, ran way with her.” It’s hard to fathom the choice between a virile, chest thumping, preening, golden-maned Robert Plant and the slimy Gollum, and that some hippie babe might choose Gollum. But there you go. Who would have figured? No wonder Robert’s heart broke (listen to “Heartbreaker,” from the same album, if you don’t believe me) and he felt the need to ramble on.
  
• Bands who use Roman numerals in album titles are really pretentious. The band Chicago really mastered this ostentatious twaddle, making it all the way up to XXIII or XXIV, I believe, but Led Zep was no slouch in that department, either. Get over it, guys. This is rock ‘n roll, not Virgil’s Aeneid.
  
• My favorite Roman numeral is X. That’s also the name of a perfectly wonderful band. They had a lead singer/bassist named John Doe and a drummer named D.J. Bonebrake, both of which are better names than Robert Plant, which was far too docile and vegan-like for a rock singer. Check out Los Angeles, Wild Gift, Under the Big Black Sun, and More Fun in the New World.
  
• Using an iPod in shuffle mode is generally the way to go (I like to think of it as the world’s greatest radio station, WHIT), but sometimes the transitions can be brutal. Like going from The Ramones to Rachmaninoff. Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny, and Sergei.
  
• Listening to Led Zeppelin IntraVenous (IV) reminded me of the great Backwards Masking controversy that surrounded this album in some Christian circles. The backwards masking conspiracy theorists cast a pretty wide net, and at one time even implicated The Carpenters, who purportedly embedded the message “That’s not the way and video sends the message” in their hit song “Close to You.” Scary stuff. Okay, nobody said that the backwards masking had to make sense. But at any rate, various fundie preachers claimed to hear Satanic messages when they played “Stairway to Heaven” backwards, particularly when they listened to the line “It’s just a spring clean for the May Queen.” So, to alleviate your fears, I decided to listen to the line backwards, and here’s what I heard: “neeewk yaim uht rof neelk nyirps uhtsuhj stih.” Hail Neeewk Yaim. Here’s the thing, kids: don’t try to listen to music backwards. You can hear plenty of crap just by playing it forwards, the right way. But you won't hear all that much if you listen to Led Zeppelin IV, which still sounds like a pretty great album.