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I'm listening to "Stairway To Heaven". It's a pretty good song. It's the kind of song you sing in the shower and think how great you sound. When I was a kid, this was like the total rock anthem of all time.
Led Zeppelin is one of the very few 70's bands that it doesn't make me laugh out loud to think about now. I mean like if you're watching TV and someone on the show is listening to Captain & Tennille, or Bread, or Abba, it's just hilarious. To me it is anyway. I mean just the fact that those groups existed, and wrote songs like "You Are So Beautiful" and "Muskrat Love" (the latter of which was the very first Top 40 hit to include, in the background, what sounded like two cartoon muskrats copulating), and the fact that people ever even listened to them.
Led Zeppelin isn't funny.
But you know what is funny? Led Zeppelin fans are funny. They're funny because Led Zeppelin is so serious, and their fans all take the music so seriously. It's like art. It's like the Mona Lisa, or Michaelangelo's "David", or Beethoven's 12th (which is the only classical piece I know by name, but that's only just because it's what they kept playing in the background of the very first Die Hard movie, especially when the roof of the Nakatomi Building blew up and the FBI helicopter crashed to the ground and Bruce Willis tied a fire-hose around his waist and hurled himself over the side of the building 31 stories up, which was all totally cool and also, I'm fairly certain, exactly what Beethoven had in mind when he composed it). Anyway, Led Zeppelin is art, although not the kind of art you put on display and sit around discussing at snooty exhibits. It's the kind of art you best appreciate turned up real loud in your parents' basement with a black-light and three hits of acid.
Not that I've ever done acid. More than just that one time, I mean. But that's a story for another day.
I was never that much into Led Zeppelin, I guess. I suppose I was always more into, like, Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd. None of them are really art, but at least they're not really funny either. Except the Doobie Brothers, a little, but that's just because anything with an "oobie" sound in it is kind of funny.
I do remember listening to Led Zeppelin and all the kids were so totally into it, it almost got kind of scary. You know how a three- or four-year old can watch the same six episodes of "Barney" over and over and never get tired of them, until you're convinced that there is some kind of purple dinosaur mojo sending subliminal messages directly into their brains? Or how like a woman can be really pretty and nice and everyone likes her but for some reason or another she gets to be 35 or 40 years old and still not married, so she winds up glassy-eyed and calling herself mommy to a dozen homeless cats? This is exactly how teenage stoners were about Led Zeppelin in the 1970's.
I also remember back in the early 80's, a bunch of folks started getting all upset because they said Robert Plant hid Satanic messages in his songs that you could hear if you played them backwards. Supposedly, they said, your brain could pick up on it, but I don't know if I ever really bought it. I suppose your brain could pick up on backward messages, but to me that seems a little too much like saying you can walk backwards and still get where you're going, which may also theoretically be true, if you also believe that you can walk all the way around the world and wind up close to where you started, even though some small part of your brain still acknowledges that two-thirds of the Earth is covered with water. And all of that may sound silly to you, but my example may seem more accurate when you realize that a great many of the folks who believed in backwards messages also believed that the Earth was flat.
Someone once told me that Robert Plant and John Bonham both belonged to a cult that taught that Satan wanted them to do everything backwards so that they could be contrary to God's way. Now whether it's true or not, it does make a certain amount of sense to me, because I do honestly believe that the Devil would like me to bust my ass walking backwards into walls, and grind out my clutch by always trying to start my car in fourth gear and ending up at 70 miles per hour in first gear. Anyway, this is how his belief in backward messages started and how if you play "Misty Mountain Hop" backwards you can hear them singing "I am Satan, Satan is good." Or something like that.
I don't know if I believe it, or anyway if the songs even make that much sense when you play them forwards. Like, what's a bustle in your hedgerow? Plus, if I was the Devil and I wanted to spread my message of debauchery and self-indulgence, I don't believe I would hide it backwards in a Led Zeppelin song, especially when there were a lot of bands around back then who were doing a pretty good job of saying the same exact things forward. If I was the Devil and wanted to hide something, it would be somewhere no one would think to look, like I wouldn't care if you watched The Exorcist a hundred times, because I would hide my Satanic message in an Olsen Twins video.
The song itself is kind of weird. I mean it sounds like he's starting to say something, "...Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run..." Now, there are a number of things that he can be trying to say here. He could be saying that you can only choose one path, or that only one is right, or even that they all go to the same place. But what does he say?
Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run...it's just a sprinkling for the May Queen...
Now this is another reason why I say that Led Zeppelin must be art. Because I totally do not understand art, either. I mean, does anyone else hear this line and automatcally think of someone peeing? And, like art, it's okay as far as it goes, but I don't want to be around it too much: I might appreciate the statue of "The Naked Man Thinking," but I don't want it sitting in my living room.
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