Finding Zoso - a Jimmy Page blog

Here's a plug for an interesting, thorough and dedicated Jimmy Page related blog.

Finding Zoso has many posts on everything Page from gear, photos and tablature to articles.  It's a fascinating read.

http://findingzoso.blogspot.com/

Weekend at the movies

We watched two sequentially. You probably know both of them, but if not (or if you want to argue about them):


Oliver! 
This is an all-singing, all-dancing, star-filled musical extravaganza about a boy who is being slaved and starved to death in a workhouse full of poor orphans, who escapes and becomes one of a gang of boy-thieves living in an abandoned roofless hulk over an open sewer in a high-GINI coefficient London until he learns something the most evil, greasy, nasty bully ever [*] wants to keep him quiet about. Luckily, because he's actually a toff, not a poor boy at all, born in the workhouse by what you might call an accident of birth, it all ends happily ever after. Except, that is, for the rest of the boys in the workhouse, the boy-thieves, Fagin, a million poor Londoners and the bully's prostitute.  Between this and Les Miserables, I grokked that the next smash hit musical would likely be about Pol Pot. 


However, that's not what Netflix delivered.

Om Shanti Om! 
This is an incredible visual-overkill, all-singing, all-dancing, star-packed-to-the-gunwales musical hyperextravaganza about an Indian film producer who has a wife he doesn't want, so he sets fire to her, along with the entire town-sized set of his planned epic-to-end-all-epics Om Shanti Om. Her from-afar admirer perishes in the flames trying to save her. As well as about 500 dancing cameo appearances from every Bollywood star ever and ALL THE CREW, it stars Shahrukh Khan's incredible torso, shedloads of flawlessly beautiful, feminine women and more costume changes than the human mind can imagine. (During one dance number that supposedly takes place in 'real time' rather than 'movie time' we counted five shirt changes in 40 seconds.) Luckily, because various hand-picked supernatural things are true, the reincarnation of Shanti's admirer manages to get revenge for her death. It's strongly reminiscent of the Phantom of the Opera, except featuring more colorfully-dyed cotton garments than the entire Indian yearly national output. Nobody lives happily ever after because they are all dead, but at least the original admirer's mother gets to see her son reincarnated and is more than happy enough for everybody.


[*] Oliver Reed, natch. 

Quote of the day

From an article in the Grauniad on the killing of Trayvon Martin:

finally lifting the lid on the US's racist underbelly 

I knew the US was getting so anti-sex that it is likely to begin wrapping the "limbs" of tables shortly so we don't think impure thoughts, but I hadn't realized we'd started the process by keeping our underbellies under lids.

I just gave myself a thrill by writing "underbelly". I know I really shouldn't try to escape the consequences of my icky female actions, but I hope I'm not required to carry a fetus to term for it.

Quote of the day

Ye Olde Pork Pie Shop, owned by Dickinson & Morris, who've been pieing since 1851, is the centre of baking excellence in Melton and stands out as a rather incongruous foodie mecca among the town's other rather staid shops. Its cabinets are brimming with bovine delights and we're spoilt for choice. 

From My Hunt for Great British Grub, in the Independent.

I'm not convinced that a pork shop would be brimming with bovine anything. Usually pork pies are of the porcine persuasion. A quick look at Dickinson and Morris' online catalog confirms the suspicion. Possibly the Independent inherited the Grauniad's proof-readers.

Lucifer Rising vinyl available

Jimmy Page has made his previously unreleased soundtrack for the Kenneth Anger film Lucifer Rising available through his website.

I covered the long and not always happy story of the relationship between Page and Anger in this post in 2009.  Suffice it to say that Anger decided that Page was not the right man for the job, and he went with a soundtrack by convicted murder and Manson Family member Bobby Beausoleil instead.  However, Page had completed his soundtrack and it appeared on at least one print. This allowed it to be bootlegged, and it was circulated briefly as a vinyl bootleg, and eventually found its way on to the internet. Now it's available in a cleaned-up, remastered version, and judging by the stream on Page's website, it sounds very nice indeed.

I attempted to get a deluxe copy, and I attempted to get a signed deluxe copy - no dice. I wonder how oversubscribed they were?

I didn't really want a regular vinyl of it, since I have it as a bootleg, but if something becomes officially available, you are kind of honor bound to buy it. So I did. It only took about fifteen minutes of navigating through the website to actually get it in the cart. The real angst will come later, when the huge flat vinyl package arrives and has to be signed for (there was no 'leave it on the doorstep' option).  I suppose I can work on that later.

In search of food

I'm getting along much better reading the Space Opera now. I've gotten used to it. The protagonists just spent a couple of pages wandering around a city looking for a great place to eat. Luckily there were three cafes within walking distance. They pass up Mama Jo's and go to Tony's instead, of which it is said, "the fake stone facing of the entrance was obviously fake".  The smells are delicious though, and the next couple of pages are about what food they ate.

This writer loves her food. Since this is on a planet, I suppose it's not really Space Food, though.  Hopefully tomorrow they'll go to Section Three Bakeshop, which specializes in pies. I like pies.

Proper Space Opera

I think I was born liking Hawkwind. The whole Space Ritual album is quite amazing*. I'll confine myself to promoting Upside Down. The idea of the Hawklords giggling their way through a bout of space-induced invertedness just can't be missed.



Anyway, it's at least funnier than Geddy Lee. Or the Space Opera I was reading yesterday.

*Although I can only find part 2 on YouTube

Happy 40th, Glam Rock! My March 1972 Diary part 2.

Happy 40^th, Glam Rock!  My 1972 Diary

March 21^st.

[In French] I refused to wash dishes this evening, so I won't get pocket money. [In English] My French is getting worse.

March 22^nd.

Looks like I'll still get the extra spend. Going mad over Egyptology again.

March 23^rd.

Not much homework. Soon will break up [i.e. it will be spring break].  

Still compiling history of Turkos [my imaginary world].

March 29^th.

We didn't go to the Careers Meeting.

[Parents' decision or mine? I've forgotten. No wonder my career has been so haphazard.]

March 31^st.

Went  to Leeds and Bradford and Wakefield. [Why on earth all three?] Bought a new coat. [Bruv] came and borrowed new LP. (Again. He's recording it illegally!)

[See, kids, illegal 'uploading' of music was going great guns by 1972. Why anyone thinks that digital 'piracy' has anything to do with the slump in record sales is completely beyond me.]

Gareth Pugh shows, not tells.

As I was driving into the sunset this evening, and trying – and succeeding – to suppress a sneeze, I wondered how different drama would be if humans didn't sneeze.  Now I'm put on the spot, I can't actually recall the details of a single instance of a sudden sneeze giving away Our Heroes to the Bad Guys, but I know I've seen it a dozen times. And I think "see" is the right verb. I can't remember it on the written page at all. It seems to be a television trope of some sort.

Then again, even if I read it, since the bald words make no dramatic sense on paper, I would remember it in my mind as having "seen" it happen.

I did check TV Tropes, which knows everything, but it didn't come up with any examples that I would likely have seen, and mainly concentrates on the Gale Force Sneeze of Comedy, although they don't call it that.  

I'm reading a Space Opera, or at least trying to. It's by one of the second or third tier writers – I won't name her, as there's no point – so, not Lois Bujold or David Weber. I picked it up for a buck at the Friends of the Library bookshop for no real reason except the volunteer who runs the store on Saturday seemed depressed, so giving him something for his afternoon's work seemed like a win/win situation. It has a picture of a neat young woman in a uniform on the cover. She's firing a...blaster, I'm going to call it. Heavily armed humans are running towards her and there's a lot of superstructure and starlight suggesting Space. The title appears to be a pun, using a word for one's adversary with a present participle that can mean either  "about to kill" or  "about to marry". That tickled my warped fancy.  Perhaps there would be Romance and Shenanigans and Romps! With Space Battles!

So why am I bringing it up?

Because it's really, really, really, really boring. I have no idea how it could have been picked up by a publisher.

It's not boring in the sense that say, even the thought of Anna Karenina is, or War and Peace. It's boring because nothing is shown to happen.  It opens with the Captain waking up in bed – always a strong opener, I find – and on page 2, she goes to the Space Kitchen (they're called galleys, apparently) and is offered a breakfast of Space Egg Custard and a spoon to eat it with. She then talks about all kinds of things that happened in the past with a crew member, thinks about a lot of things that have happened in the past as well, and then decides she'd rather 'microwave' a Space Pot Noodle instead, so she throws the egg custard away (in a 'recycler').  The crew member tells her how to access her own brain  'implant'; there's more conversation and then she goes to Space Bed again.  Afterwards she has to pause to run her sheets through "the 'fresher cycle" but not to worry! Action-packedness will return! Soon she's... sitting at her Space Desk where she and her implant run through a battle that happened in the past. She thinks about it a great deal,  but eventually decides she needs to blow off steam, so she goes for a bout of Space Judo with a crewmember.  Then, until I drifted off, she either talked about the past with her crew members or thought about the past with the help of her implant.  All the while, the ship is nearing a star system. We know this because people mention it, or think about it, on occasion.

Two other books are mentioned on the back cover but a semi-careful perusal of all available blurb didn't say this was the second book in a series of three, or for that matter vice versa. Even if this is all recap, couldn't it be buried in something other than Brenda Starr dialogue?

After a really long while, one character (on a planet, natch) goes fly fishing and catches a trout, which she subsequently releases. There's no sign that it's a foreshadowing, mirror incident or metaphor. She just likes fly fishing. At least she's doing it in the present and it's described. She isn't simply talking about it with the other bloke who is fly fishing nearby.

I realize that "show, don't tell" is a massive cliché, and good writers are always finding ways to get around doing it. I think you have to master the showing first, then incorporate it into the telling later to be readable, though. Hundreds of pages of directly quoted speech, with a few paragraphs of wondering and remembering every few thousand words might possibly be thrilling, if the characters followed some other basic rules of drama. For instance, if you want to grip the reader, any given two characters have to want something different. They don't have to be hereditary mortal enemies (although it helps); they can be simply want slightly different outcomes.  Jim wants to go back to port before Dr. Badguy releases a plague that could sweep the planet where his family lives while Jack wants to continue in pursuit of the White Space Whale to avenge his father's death or something.  Tension, conflict, drama.

Like the scene where the two characters are fly fishing. One is a dry fly fisher and one is a wet fly fisher.

Conflict! Drama! Tension!

Well, not really.

I was listening to the BBC World Service today and they were reading a short story, New Gods by Joe Dunthorne. It's available here, at least for today.  It's about a daughter coping with the death of her elderly mother, whose online avatar is now left drifting in a MMOG, and whose dead father's personality has been uploaded to a service that spams her regularly in his voice, asking when she's going to pay to 'see' him again.  There's some good jokes: The online castle is being stormed by an army bearing a banner in Gothic Script, "Whoo Yea Gareth Pugh!" "Gareth Pugh is probably in his fifties now," the story goes on. "Perhaps a ruthless property developer."

When cyberspace fiction is podcast into the intertubes after debuting the same day on the positively steampunk valve radio of the World Service, it really is time to bury science fiction, I think.  I liked the story, don'ta getta me wrongo, but when perfectly mundane young men can get this story on the World Service, SF is probably so indistinguishable from background that you have to go hunt somewhere else.

Quote of the day

This is from the comments section on an article about the recent shooting in Afghanistan. Comment threads on that sort of news always tend towards truths expressed in ways that are not vetted for political correctness. I agree with this person's assessment totally, and his lack of spelling ability doesn't mean his views are incorrect.

Just saying we have one bad apple is literally blaming on
individual who was seriously sick and desperately needed job and treatment and
perhaps this individual was toxicated with hate full Rederick.

I think the concept of hate full Rederick will color my understanding of this conflict forever. Or maybe it just seems like forever that we - Americans - will be embroiled in this stupid and pointless conflict. There was no reason to attack Afghanistan, and even if there was, no reason to believe 'we' could 'win' as 'conquering Afghanistan' has been the picture under the 'futile endeavor' entry in the dictionary for a thousand years. Bashing our heads against a brick wall would have accomplished exactly as much, and wouldn't have resulted in innocent men, women and children being mowed down in their houses. People often lecture me that 'they [Moslems] are jealous of our freedom'. I wasn't so sure about that. But since this news broke I realize that our apparently complete freedom to go to their countries, break into their houses and kill their children could - you know - possibly be seen as a bad thing - maybe.

Maybe that's what people mean.

Blogroll updated

I cleaned out the blogroll today. I've been meaning to do it for a while.

One or two, like Steve Audio, don't seem to be updating frequently, and I miss them. Most of them, though, I deleted because either I changed or they changed, but either way they bore me. I'll add a few new ones as I remember new favorite sites.

The science fiction sites are nearly wiped out. Most of them have a few good posts, but the "community" they are so proud of in their comments sections is mature - which is to say, composed entirely of entrenched regulars. A plurality of those regulars are crazy, which is fine, as fen are often crazy, but many of them, crazy and otherwise, seem to be banging on about the same things they've talked about for at least five years, and are impenetrable to newcomers.

I stopped reading one SF writer's blog a couple of years ago when my first attempted comment was held for moderation - on blogger - and never appeared. It appeared that I had been rejected from commenting on blogger, which is like not being able to piss in the woods. In this case, I would like to be a member of a club that would have people like me as a member. I've just wiped out another SF writer's blog from the roll for not publishing a comment that was relatively harmless in a thread with 215 previous comments, which is more like being not allowed to piss in a public restroom.

I've wiped yet another SF writer's blog because he's mildly unpleasant.  A lot of SF writers are certifiably insane, but I've never linked to those folks, so I'm going after the mildly unpleasant ones instead. (If you want to keep up with who is insane, click on More Words, Deeper Hole, which I haven't removed, and follow the "memetic prophylactic recommended" tags.) And I've taken out the SF publishers' blog for having an egregiously "mature" commenting community who act en masse like Usenet denizens, but without the strict thread topic discipline that implies.

I doubt if any of them will notice the link is gone. So far all I've added is a music message board. I hadn't put anything there for fellow Jack White fans, so now something's added for you. If anyone has any suggestions for blogroll candidates, or if you're a reader who would like a reciprocal shout out, let me know!

Marc Bolan Disco 45 Special, 1972

I found a few moments to scan my 1972 Disco 45 Special on T. Rex, featuring Marc Bolan.  It's forty years since this Glam Rock publication was printed and was put into my hands for a mere 5p.  As an anniversary treat, I've put it up on the web for others to enjoy.

I'm aware that the issue is still within copyright, and there are several photos in there that the photographers probably wish to keep in their possession - although the artist who drew the middle page spread is probably hoping that no one will ever see it again - but I'm scanning it as right now it's out of print and no one could pay for it even if they wanted to. Of course, if you let me know you don't want your material displayed on this blog, let me know and I'll take it down immediately.

I love the contemporary style, which was to have 2 colors - in this case green and red - which are used as washes over various photos, giving the impression that the issue is in color, when in fact it's basically B&W.

Edit 2014: Flickr's apparently change the rules so I can't embed it as a slideshow, so  if you want to read each page in detail,  it's in my Flickr set here.

Could the horoscope be any triter? And, Mickey Finn, you're wearing a pro-cocaine t-shirt in a teenybop magazine! Post-mortem shame on you!

I have a few others of this ilk - the Jackie Marc Bolan story, for instance, that I'll share during glam rock's 40th birthday this year.

Quote of the day

I don't suppose you can expect an article on the death of screamy right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart to have an exactly civil comments section, and this one doesn't buck the trend.

Clearly you people have zero moral fiber or common sense to follow such ridiculous political ideology and propaganda of the Liberal Media who shoves what you want to hear and what they want you to hear down your throats.

I chose it because I think it's important that my Lie-brul Lamestream Media learns what it's doing wrong, and instead aims to shove it into our ears where it might have some effect. I could have picked the following comment instead, but it made me depressed (and also hug my guns):

Leave America, Commie. Remember Real Americans have guns, libs don't. Really think about that punk. When the SHTF you think your local police are going to help you? They're going to be running for their lives.

Something something improve the discourse re American politics goes here.

Bringer of war

Of course, musical similarities are nothing new.


I'm surprised, given how LOUD an orchestra is, that Holst's Mars, Bringer of War loses out in the decibel race here.





And Gustav Holst, the daddy





Rage Against the Machine's Wake Up is tremendous reworking of the old chestnut. When I first heard it, I did indeed sit bolt upright, awake for the first time in years. For some reason they don't allow embedding on blogs, though, so fuck them. If you want to leave this page to see a blank screen and hear Wake Up, you could click here.


Normally I'd upload the video to a non-YouTube site so you could watch it here, but ehhhhh...they're not actually obscure. They'll live without the clicks

Led Zeppelin, Oakland 1977 - new pictures

Bill and Jack Dautrich were two police detectives hired as an off-duty security squad for Led Zeppelin in 1977.  Jack tells his story here, and says that he is planning a book.

Not sure what an off-duty cop can say about a Led Zeppelin tour without getting himself into trouble, but if he writes it, I'll read it.

More interestingly, the article has previously unseen pictures of Led Zeppelin playing in Oakland, 23rd July 1977, which was one of the most eventful gigs of their career.  You can see that Jimmy Page did indeed have to change his pants, and you can espy that in the wings are Peter Grant and his son, along with Mo Jones and the little Joneses, and Richard Cole. Visible is John Bindon, ex-gangster also hired as security, and a man who would perpetrate the Oakland Incident a little later that evening. Led Zeppelin would literally never recover after this gig.

(c) Dautrich

History in the making.

(Edit: Links and picture fixed. 7/2017)

Led Zeppelin News: So what happened to Jake Holmes' claim on Dazed and Confused?

Edit, 05/21/2014 - This post has become popular again, but it is dated. The update is that Holmes settled out of court and received a credit for "inspiring" Dazed and Confused (at least on the Celebration Day release). It's not generally known whether money changed hands.  Videos have also been relinked. Here is my post on the current Spirit case. 


In 2010, folkie Jake Holmes sued Jimmy Page and various publishing companies on the grounds that the song Dazed and Confused was his work.  He had a copyright on it in 1967 and according to reports he renewed it in 1995. I don't know why he waited forty years or more to act on his copyright, but the delay probably didn't help his case much. The verdict* came out last month.

Here's Jake:




And here's the Yardbirds, featuring Jimmy Page on guitar:



Have to say that really hits the spot, unlike Holmes' song. Or at least it does until Keith Relf starts singing. Love the man, but one-lung Relfy isn't Robert Plant.  I once saw him described as "the weakest singer this side of the Downliners Sect" and I have to say that's without doubt the most obscure put-down I've ever read. What's most fascinating about this version is the Jimmy Page noise-bow solo, fully developed all those months before we saw it in Zeppelin action. At least it's incredible until Keith Relf's harmonica comes in...he does tend to sound a bit like he's about to drop out with Peter Scott on duck call. And yet the famously Gregorian-chant influenced vocals in this section sound wonderful against the guitar's evil insistence.

Jimmy tried again with Led Zeppelin.  This is the version is from the BBC Sessions, as there's invariably something odd about YouTube album rips, whereas the live and BBC sessions videos seem to be left alone.



That's better, isn't it? The sinister guitar and the combined power of Jones and Bonham, fronted by that voice, that mad Elric of Melnibone howl... that's how to play to Dazed and Confused.

But it's still obviously the same sort of thing as Jake Holmes wrote, so how did his court case go?

Dismissed with prejudice on January 17th, 2012.  There's a view of the court document here, signed by the wonderfully-named Judge Dolly Gee. Golly gee, Judge Dolly Gee!

It's short, but mysteriously refers to an action that took place on November 7th, 2011 which doesn't appear to have been properly recorded at the time, and is just now being set down. It seems likely that this was an out-of-court settlement.

I wonder how much Jake got? (Frankly, I wonder how much Jimmy Page has left?)

* Edit to add: Verdict is the wrong word, isn't it? Dismissal is better. Since this post seems to have been picked up by search engines I should try to be accurate.

I use the NME - Happy 40th Birthday, Glam Rock!

Reminiscing on this blog about the forty years between Marc Bolan and the sadly Bolan-free world of today reminded me of my love affair with the New Musical Express, known to friends and enemies alike as the NME.   I first started getting it in early 1972, about the same time it made a major push for the younger music lovers, and succeeded mightily, peaking at more than a quarter of a million broadsheets sold each week.

NME has never actually been thought well of, so I can't say that people think less of it these days, but it's definitely shrunk a little from being the paper of me and mine and of the moment to being just another pop/rock fishwrap, and that's a terrible shame. I haven't gotten it for years - it's too expensive to import to the US, and anyway if it gets any scoops the rest of the internet steals them within 8 hours. (I'd hate to be a journalist today.) The NME, perhaps realizing that now is the time for a tell all, is bringing out its biography, The History of the NME: High Times and Low Lives at the World's Most Famous Music Magazine, by Pat Long, an ex-assistant editor. I've preordered it, but it won't be here until June. [Ed: It's here.]

There is a related blog, which features at least a couple of good articles. There's an interview with my mate Mick Farren, an underground press alumnus who worked for the NME during the Golden Age. (The Golden Age of a music paper, like the Golden Age of Science Fiction, is when the reader is aged between 14 and 16.) He brought a less frivolous, more gritty edge to a paper, which after all, was there mostly to tell us about this week's Bowie haircut, or what Bryan Ferry was doing, as the other interesting article, an interview with writer Nick Kent, puts it.

Farren was the one who knew how society worked and actually ran one to the extent he ran an open air festival, and could critique society at large with a White Panther's unflinching gaze. Nick Kent was the one who dressed more outrageously than the Stones and lived a more rock'n'roll lifestyle than even Keef (and you didn't believe that was possible!) He was also a one-time Sex Pistol who got beaten with a bike chain by Sid Vicious during one of those times when gangs go off-message and do something odd. Mick, on the other hand, wrote and sang with the (Social) Deviants, and could maybe best summed up by my describing how once I heard the greatest Bob Dylan track I'd never heard before, wondering why I hadn't come across it in the past, and realizing much later it was Mick Farren singing. I don't mean to sound as if all rock writers are frustrated musicians - they obviously all have some feel for music or they wouldn't be driven to write about it, but rivaling the Stones' glamour or outdoing Dylan is rare even among NME scribes.

Mick has written many books, the most germane...no pun intended Mick...being Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, which I've never reviewed here but is worth tracking down and reading. Nick Kent's more recent book Apathy For The Devil is more intensely personal, as living the glam rock life entailed taking the glam rock drugs, which subsequently meant a long nightmare of recovery, but has more than a glimmer of his unbelievable early writing and kept me so entertained I read it twice through in one sitting. I reviewed it here.

My collection of NMEs used to stretch from 1972 - Bowie and Bolan, Sweet and Slade - to 1977 - the Sex Pistols and the Damned.  Sometime in the mid-seventies I answered an ad from a bloke paying cash for 'any articles on Bowie', and shortly opened the door to a man with a broad Yorkshire accent and a bright red Ziggy mullet. He paid me an incredible amount of money for the early NMEs and wandered off, happy. That means the ones in my cupboard stretch from 74 to early 77, a tedious musical wasteland that included bright but ultimately pointless gems such as Be Bop Deluxe and Kilburn and the High Roads. It wasn't until mid-77 that the power of punk actually became clear. (Despite Mick Farren's legendary polemic in the 1976 Titanic Sails at Dawn piece prophesying the new order...not the New Order, the new order...which I still have.)

I watched the BBC's mammoth documentary of popular music, All You Need Is Love, recently. I've been meaning to write about it but never got around to it. The last episode, in 1977, is hilarious and yet sad in its blind aimless search for the next big thing that's so obviously due, and in fact actually there, yet quite invisible to people over 15, a demographic which the film-makers did not fit. AYNIL desperately interview the Baker Gurvitz Army, and stare at Mike Oldfield or ELO or Black Oak Arkansas hoping they'll Do Something.  Well, they didn't, and unfortunately that's the time period of NME I still have in the closet. But I remember my long-sold 1972 to 1974 runs with great fondness. Great fondness.

Fish paintings

Incredible 3D "paintings".



I love the movement and action in these resin photos.

Quote of the day

"Romney and Santorum are two ends of a candle burning towards the middle. When it melts and there's hot wax dripping all over the elephant, who will jump out of the shadows to save the day? " - commenter at NYT in an article hilariously headlined Rooting for Santorum. 

Cherchez la femme. Also quote of the day.

Here's something that combines Cherchez La Femme with quote of the day.

Does this sculpture look like a vagina?




Well, of course not. It looks like a vulva. A vagina is the inside part. It's dark there. But given there's a whole internet bunch of interest in it, doesn't that mean it looks like a "vagina"? Eh, no.  Thinking it's a vagina (or a vulva) and needing to have something done about it  is definitely cherchez la femme.

For the quote of the day, a commenter writes:

Disgusting. Replace this sculpture w/ something noble & pure, maybe erect a single free-standing column or something

I agree, god dammit.

Happy 40th Birthday Glam Rock! My March 1972 Diary.

Happy 40^th, Glam Rock!  My 1972 Diary

March 1^st.

T. Rex is ace. Not much homework.

March 3^rd.

Hello, I am mad. Hi hi.

March 7^th.

Got to learn a chapter for Geography. He'll be lucky.

March 9^th.

Not much homework. Boring day. Telegram Sam has gone down to Number 18.

March 11^th.

Grandma died. She was coming out of OPW with mum – just collapsed.

[Was that building opposite our house really called Old People's Welfare? Looking at it on Google Earth today, it does seem to still have a sign "Old People's Centre". I guess PC is a long time coming to my home town.]

March 13^th.

Funeral on Thursday. Frank came. Mum went to a lecturing. [A what?] Marc on Bob Harris! Fantastic! Played Ringo, Clapton and Zep.

March 14^th.

Mum's gone to Town Hall for a dance. Won't be back til one [am]. Will watch Old Grey Whistle Test!

March 16^th.

Funeral -  took last lesson and afternoon off.

March 18^th.

Stayed in and did nowt.  Went to an afternoon [a what?]. Got all sorts of things but nowt like the Bolan Specials I wanted.