Arnold (documentary, Netflix)

The new Netflix docuseries about Arnold Schwarzenegger, "Arnold" has a lot going on. It's difficult to believe that one man could have done so much, but listening to Arnie's philosophy as he's interviewed today, at 75, you can see how he managed to push himself to get it all done. 

One thing that stood out to me is almost the first scene, a couple of minutes in. Arnold, at 22, wins the Mr. World championship, the career breakthrough that led to a string of bodybuilding titles. 

That's him (from Muscle Builder, reprinted at the Joe Weider website.) Incredible size--he weighed 230lbs. There are (nowadays) much bigger bodybuilders with much better cuts (and much better steroid regimes, it should be said), but this photo was taken when he was 22.  Talk about genetically gifted. I don't know how it's even possible for someone to grow this much by that age. Building muscle takes time as well as hard work. 

From the same webpage, here's Arnold in a line-up with Sergio Oliva (R) and Reg Park (L) at that Mr. World. 

Arnold is 22, Reg is 42 and Sergio is 29.  I can just about believe a man could get to Sergio's size approximately 17 years after puberty, but to get to Arnold's size after 10?

Anyway, there's about three hours more of the documentary after this, Arnold going from (sorry, I'm going to say it...) strength to strength. Jimmy Page once said that he (Jimmy) had followed Crowley's precepts, which he described as first determining your true will, then "forge ahead like a steam train."  In Arnold's case I guess he was built like a steam train and carried on from there. 

(I also watched the Arnie vehicle "FUBAR" which is also new on Netflix. Although Arnie is his usual lovable self, the series is barely watchable. If you're interested to see how many cliches and tropes it's possible to throw against the wall and see what sticks and then pick up the ones that didn't stick and use them as well, you can watch it with a cliche bingo card. If that's not your thing, watch something else.)

Jimmy Page & Roy Harper - St Ives, UK 1984 (New Video)

Wonderful new video posted by Mark Zep on August 11, 2022 - in other words, on the anniversary of Led Zeppelin's appearance at Knebworth on August 11, 1979. 

Beautiful dual acoustic performance of Roy Harper's Same old Rock. Nice to see Jimmy Page playing well and looking healthier in this one. The audience must have been stoked to see the pair of them together. 

(Found via Mark Donohue's Heart of Markness podcast.)

Stairway to Heaven vs Taurus - a roundup of soundalikes for the undecided "is it plagiarism" voter

I've written before on the Stairway to Heaven/Taurus plagiarism court case. One of the best posts has disappeared into the back catalogue and suffered the link rot that plagues blogs. 

Here are some of the comparisons, updated as of this week. 

I won't rehash the legal case. It turns on various technicalities in the law (like the fact that at the time, sheet music was copyright but musical performances on vinyl were not copyright) and technicalities in case law, like the "inverse ratio rule" that basically said if someone could have heard a song a lot, then you can claim he copied it by showing that only a tiny amount of his song resembled the original. Which doesn't make any sense, and it's gone now, thanks to the Stairway win. 

Instead I want to rehash the emotional case. Lots of people think Jimmy Page stole the opening bars of Stairway because a) he was a bit of a naughty boy when it came to taking credit for other people's work and b) the opening bars of Stairway do sound a lot like the post-introduction opening bars of Spirit's Taurus. 

I can't do anything about a), except to point out that wherever Led Zeppelin have been caught, they've eventually paid up, even, at last, to Jake Holmes for Dazed and Confused. 

But I can do something about b) which is to say, I can point out that the opening bars of Stairway sound like lots of things, because it's a very ordinary chord progression picked in an ordinary way (sorry Jimmy). If you normally listen to say, Death Metal or Doo-Wop, you may not have heard much of it and be susceptible, if you hear Taurus and Stairway played side-by-side, to saying a few seconds in the introduction are "the same". (Stairway is eight minutes long, and the rest of both songs are clearly different. The balance of Stairway is not 'picked in an ordinary way'.) If you've listened to other forms of music, you'll be more open to hearing they are two variations on a common theme.  Baroque music has similar progressions as does the Renaissance thingy passamezzo antico. Antico, meaning old! Another name for it is a cliché line, cliché meaning old hat!

Patrick Ball's Carolan's Dream (found via Celtic Baroque Roots of Stairway)

Or here, after the introduction. (Found via a comment in the blog above.)

Sonata di Chittarra, e Violino, con il suo Basso Continuo (at 35 seconds in)

But enough of those. What about pop music? Well, what about pop music! Here we go!

Cartoone, Ice Cream Dreams (1968) – Introduction

(Jimmy Page played on this album)

Davey Graham, Cry Me a River (1963) – introductory few seconds 

The Beatles, A Taste of Honey (1963) – arrangement and melody under "I dream of your first kiss and then I feel upon my lips again."

Johnny Rivers, Summer Rain (1968) – descending figure the orchestra plays, e.g. in the intro 

Crow,  Thoughts (1968) – introduction and guitar figure under verse 

Damnation of Adam Blessing (1969), Strings and things – all of it really

Nick Drake, Day Is Done(1969) – all of it really (he's doing his Davey Graham bit here)

(That is some great guitar playing, isn't it!)

Scott Walker, Hills of Yesterday (1969) – guitar figure

The Kinks – Shangri La (1969) – guitar figure

Jim Croce, Time in a Bottle (1970) – introduction and guitar figure under verse 

Andy Williams, Music to Watch Girls By (1967) – introduction (after first five seconds)

Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven (1971) – introduction and guitar figure under first verses

(Recorded December 1970)

Spirit, Taurus (1968), 44 seconds in

Eric Clapton, Let It Grow (1974) – guitar figure under verse

Dolly Parton, We Used To (1975) – introduction, arrangement

U2, Sunday Bloody Sunday – introduction after the drums

Pink Floyd, Is There Anybody Out There? (1979) – at 1:25

Foo Fighters, The Pretender (2007) – introduction

I'm sure there's more, but you get the picture. 

A lot of these song names were transcribed from a video by ThatsSoInane, but they don't seem to exist on YouTube anymore to thank them. The video itself was taken down years ago. I bet these links rot soon too!

My neighbor has a dog called Spirit who is very yappy. I just heard him start barking and my neighbor's really loud yell, "SPIRIT!"

So maybe that's some sort of omen. 

Video tour of Tower House, with Jimmy Page

Channel 4 has screened a wonderful tour of the epic Tower House, Jimmy Page's home since 1972, designed by William Burges as a showcase of his architectural and decorative talents.

Jimmy points out a crack in the plaster

London is currently undergoing an epidemic of basement-building, or "undergrounding", as rich people with limited property sizes and listed facades dig deep under their houses in order to expand. Page's neighbor Robbie Williams is digging such a basement and the vibration and possible soil movement is threatening to damage Tower House. The neighbor on the other side is also having soil work done. Page is a very private man and I'm positive he wouldn't invite cameras in otherwise, but this is the third or fourth piece I've seen on his attempt to stop the possibly damaging "improvements" going on around him.

For us it's a rare opportunity to see this intricate and ornate castle-sized artwork. It's disheartening that we might be seeing it for the first and last time if the threats materialize. I can't imagine what it's like to live here. Page must not be able to smoke, or cook or do anything that will damage the more than a century old paint. I know he can't play music there, as the vibrations can crack the mouldings and carvings.

I can't embed the video, but it can be played on Channel 4's website, here and is definitely worth the click.

It Might Get Loud, Revisited

When It Might Get Loud came out in 2009, I was just getting into Jack White’s music and at the peak of a rediscovered Led Zeppelin fanaticism. I loved the hell out of the idea of the film. Thesis: take three guitarists and examine the role of rock guitar in music, and what drives the players to learn and excel at it – starring Jimmy Page, Jack White and The Edge.



The premiere was in LA and when I phoned up for tickets, they said there were two premieres. I asked what the difference was, and she didn’t tell me the truth, which is how come I went to the second premiere that didn’t have Jimmy Page and Jack White in attendance. But never mind! I saw it another two or three times in the cinema, and then bought the DVD. I gushed about it several times on my blog, and other bloggers – cooler heads, one might say – did try to tell me it wasn’t very good, but I wasn’t having any of it.

I re-watched it just now. There’s things I still love about it. Jack’s laconic gunslinger outsider shtick, Jimmy’s palpable excitement at listening to Link Wray’s Rumble and his enthusiasm with the other players; Edge’s self-deprecation and brief Wanderer-of-the-Wasteland episode ending when the looming tangle of trees suddenly resolves into perfect rows with clear paths between them; the cows listening to Jack’s Diddly Bow; the slide guitar jam near the end; the White Stripes performing for a room full of puzzled Chelsea Pensioners. And although the three men seem to be mostly there because they were the three who answered the phone, rather than anyone’s idea of a broad selection, they settle into their roles as Jack (heart), Edge (head) and Jimmy (groin).

The cooler heads were right, however. The exercise was flawed in numerous ways. Neither producer Thomas Tull nor director Davis Guggenheim demonstrate an understanding of the guitar nor are they able to pull together a cohesive account of the electric guitar or its place in rock. The narrative used is a three-act drama, which means that at the top of the second act, someone had to have a crisis, reach rock bottom and be forced to develop new strengths to overcome adversity and ultimately triumph. This is a really strange thing to have in the middle of a factual film that is not a biography. It’s shoehorned in by bending poor old self-effacing Edge’s story, having him go into exile to learn songwriting skills. Which he does, but the sought-for emotional catharsis is blunted by its artificiality. As a more concrete example of a flaw, Jimmy’s first electric guitar is labeled onscreen a ‘Stratocaster’ even though it’s a Grazioso, and Jimmy was one of the least likely rock musicians to be seen with a Strat at any point in his career.

More obviously (and loudly) two of the three guitarists refuse to stick with the script. Jack’s first love is the drums, and he’s portrayed as switching to guitar mostly because his upholsterer boss Brian Muldoon already played drums and he wanted to jam. Apart from a fair amount of drumming, the bulk of Jack’s music in the film is thumped out on piano, so Guggenheim must have been overjoyed to get hold of the footage of him bleeding for his art all over a guitar pickguard. Jimmy loves guitars – literally – but spends a lot of time talking about producing music (mostly drum sounds) and plays a lovely mandolin bit. At least he can tell his spooky story about the guitar “intervention” when his first guitar turned up mysteriously in his house just as he became interested in music. Edge sticks to guitar, but his style – very simple riffs compounded into lacy ruffles by echo, delay and other effects – means that the film spends most of its time marveling at his equipment and following his guitar tech around.

The ’summit’, where all three guitarists meet for the first time, with their equipment set up around them, is evidently supposed to be a climax. In the event, all three seem a little shy, and you watch The Edge, ever eager to please, trying to keep the conversation going by asking Jimmy questions but aware that he needs to avoid the minefield of disallowed inquiries that have tripped up many a professional journalist and gotten them yelled at by an irate Page. (He steps in it with the Kinks question, but manages to get out with both feet intact.) They demonstrate one of their famous riffs each, teach it to the others, and then join in on the ultimate song of the movie. It’s… The Weight, that old chestnut, played on acoustic guitars, and there’s nothing about it that you wouldn’t see at any house party where three or more of your friends brought or found an acoustic instrument and downed sufficient beers to have a loose jam.

It’s worth watching, because we care about the people and what they have accomplished, but as a movie, alas, it’s strictly third-tier.

Led Zeppelin - Key To The Highway and other delights

I'm digging (as the kids say these days) the Led Zeppelin remasters series.

Jimmy Page is in charge and he doesn't do any of that "Fuck it, here's a cassette tape we recorded of an Osmonds hit while we were drunk in Tallahassee, let's call it a lost tape" crap.

I listened to the Physical Graffiti one last night, and it's like hearing it for the first time, if hearing it for the first time involved listening to other stuff as well while Jimmy Page himself curated what records were on the turntable. Amazing stuff.

Here's Key To The Highway, the nearest thing to covering an Osmonds hit so far, i.e. not in the same ballpark. It's gorgeous.

And the reversed colors of the third album on the video's splash screen are just great, y'know.




I imagine all the remasters are on YouTube now, which is nice if you can't get hold of the originals. If you can, you'll find that there really is a difference between a YouTube/mp3 and a proper lossless track.

Jimmy Page on Jimmy Page - two 2014 interviews

I was going to post this on Jimmy Page's birthday, but...

Here are two interviews with Jimmy Page from December.

The first one is an hour-and-a-half long video interview by the Guardian based on his book, called (dramatic chords!) Jimmy Page by Jimmy Page. This has the advantage of being ninety minutes of Jimmy Page talking, and the disadvantage of taking ninety minutes out of your life to get to the end of it. I'm a big fan of transcripts myself. (A new Google that made video as searchable and indexable as text might well save all these fascinating video clips from ending up as useless bits in the giant bit bucket of history.)

The second fascinating thing about this interview is that Jimmy's book is a photo book. It doesn't have many words in it. The interviewer has selected several photos to discuss in detail. Jimmy and the interviewer point to a screen showing the photo Jimmy is talking about but the screen is rarely shown, and even when it is it's too dim to make out. This would seem to be a disadvantage, as even if you own the book (which I do) it's difficult to flip through it to find which one he's talking about. However, I prefer to think of it as an exercise in creativity. Listen to Jimmy describe something from his past you can't see, and draw what you think the picture should look like. Or select a gif or meme that matches.

On the other hand, this is the only discussion of a photo book that you can put on while you're chopping vegetables or changing the oil filter.



Second up, a fascinating interview by Chuck Klosterman in GQ Magazine. (Jimmy is one of their men of the year for 2014. No idea why - the Led Zeppelin remasters? Important to some of us but hardly world-shattering.)


Grouses of the Holy by Chuck Klosterman

The exciting part of this interview is seeing how Klosterman consistently and knowingly needles Jimmy all the way through by asking questions he's made clear he's not going to answer for literally the past fifty (50) years.  Klosterman is all upset that he got snapped at by a rock god, like a little puppy who doesn't realize why he's in the naughty corner.

Jimmy Page by Jimmy Page - the affordable edition review (Book, 2014)

A couple of days ago I was dithering about whether to buy the new "affordable" edition of Jimmy Page's photoautobiography, Jimmy Page by Jimmy Page.

Well, obviously, dear reader, I bought it.  The retail price is set at $60, slightly less than the limited, signed edition's $650, and it's being discounted to $37.95 plus tax here and there. (And I got free shipping.) Is it worth it? Yes!

First of all, it's huge. It's the same size as the limited edition, 12.4 x 10.1 x 1.5 inches, and weighs over six pounds. It's hardback, and sewn in signatures; the pages are not just glued to the spine. There are 509 pages, not counting the various endpapers, many of which are full-page photographs and many of which are in color. Most of these pictures I'd seen before, but that's because I'm a Zeppelin obsessive who has trawled the various Led Zeppelin message boards for more than seven years, and even curated the photo gallery for one of them (now sadly defunct). Chances are you haven't seen most of them - and you haven't seen them full-size and print quality. Fuzzy, artefacted jpegs don't do justice to them.

The book is set up as an autobiography, but Jimmy Page is a man of few words - his introduction is just three paragraphs long - and many photographs. They start with a photo of him as an angelic choirboy [1] and go through his early bands, like Carter-Lewis and the Southerners, Neil Christian and the Crusaders, Red E Lewis and the Redcaps, Mickey Finn and the Blue Men [2], through the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin to his post-Zep bands and collaborations including the Black Crowes, Page and Plant, and even Puff Daddy. There's a section updated after the limited edition was published in 2010 to take us up to 2014.  It's literally all there, in photos.



This photo of the Crusaders and their chick magnet ambulance is not in the book. A slightly different one from 
the same photoshoot is in the book

Although a photo may be worth a thousand words, the sense of journey doesn't come through very strongly in this tome - due to familiarity with the material, my mind supplied enough supplementary commentary to fill it all in, but if you haven't had the pleasure of reading the many books on the evolution of Led Zeppelin, it may all be a bit mystifying.  On the other hand, if you haven't, why are you thinking of buying this one? Then again, one of the very first pictures is Jimmy playing his Grazioso guitar in front of a typical sixties British fireplace - there's a brass plate in the unused fire grate and in front of it, two electric one-bar fires. Two of the last pictures are Jimmy playing the Beijing Olympics with an audience of literally a billion, and him receiving an honorary doctorate. He has indeed come a long way from Heston.

Between the photographs are pictures of Jimmy's passports and visa stamps, along with tour dates. The passports give Jimmy's eye color as green, which interestingly is not borne out by the color photographs - his eyes may be hazel, i.e. green in certain lighting conditions, but they look coal-black in many photographs. The photos have the date and city on them - for example, a very fetching picture of Jimmy exiting a small sea plane that I've seen around for years is labeled August 23, 1966, Catalina Island, USA. Many arguments over what Dragon Suit or Poppy Suit was worn when can be won by referring to this volume.  Other photos come into focus, so to speak, with the sparse captions. One of Jimmy with a feathery dried-flower arrangement over his head is labeled as being in Ahmet Ertegun's house, so given that information, I can date other photos of Led Zeppelin with the same plant (no Plant pun intended).  The photo set that I'd always seen labeled as "Sol Studios" (but did not match the date for Sol) are labeled here as being taken in Jimmy's home studio at Plumpton House, and were apparently part of an idea for Jimmy's fantasy sequence in the film The Song Remains the Same, before he decided to go with the Hermit idea to be filmed at Boleskine House.

Although there are not many words in the captions, Jimmy is dryly funny throughout. A shot of him guarding a wicket from a cricket ball with a semi-acoustic guitar is captioned "My contribution to sport". It's actually a photo taken for a giveaway competition where readers could write in to win the guitar. I know that because I entered the competition; Jimmy doesn't mention it here. The famous shot of Jimmy tipping a bottle of Jack Daniels down his upturned gullet is captioned "homeopathic remedy".


Homeopathic remedy

A rare shot of the legendary "stormtrooper's uniform" of Chicago, 1977 is laconically captioned "Here I'm wearing Hugo Boss".


Hugo Boss design. This photo is not in the book; similar ones are.

A shot of Jimmy with an injured hand shows him with a man whose back is turned to the camera, and whose hand is lifted towards Jimmy's back. The caption is "Et tu, Brutus? (sic)" The caption does not name the man as Bill Graham, with whom Led Zeppelin had some serious troubles, but I'm pretty sure it is.

And man, are there a lot of duck-faces. If you thought Instagram selfie-girls invented that, you were wrong. There are lots of guitars with too many necks and weird numbers of strings.

What Jimmy has chosen to leave out of the book is quite interesting.  There's a Knebworth field group shot, but not the one taken a few minutes later when Robert Plant pulled his pants down to 'salute' the strippers the photographer had brought along to cheer the group up. (For this was the seventies...) There are no pictures of the Chislehurst Caves stripping nuns. The pictures taken in the Swedish live sex club are unsurprisingly missing. (Click on the picture for the full shot; warning NSFW.) The book is more or less silent on the final days of Led Zeppelin. There are no pictures of family members at all - one photo of Jimmy arriving at Knebworth in a helicopter has Charlotte in shot, but she is not named in the caption - unless you count Jackie DeShannon, who is in one picture but there is no mention of a relationship with Jimmy other than mutual songwriters and musicians. No kids. No dads. No revealing shots of life at home.

The book has had to downgrade slightly from the limited edition. The paper is lighter, so the photos are noticeably softer. I doubt if most people would care, but if you want to say, rip the photos to put on the interwebs, you'd need the glossier limited edition. It also doesn't lie completely flat, so double-page spreads have that annoying curve in the center, unless you carefully unpick the stitches and press it flat. And mind you, it's cheap enough you could do that - one to open up and paper your bedroom wall like it's 1975 again, and one to keep on the coffee table.

Five stars.

[1]My fingers typed "angelic cowboy" there the first time. What does that mean, Dr. Freud?
[2] Sensing a pattern to these names somehow

Jimmy Page, by Jimmy Page (Affordable Edition) out today

Three years ago, I bought a copy of the limited edition of Jimmy Page's "autobiography", a book of photographs detailing his entire career, from teenager to honorary doctorate and OBE holder.  I wrote about it here.  It's a fantastic book, but at $650 it's not something I leave open on the kitchen table in order to gawp at the pictures every day while whipping up a souffle or two.

Today, the affordable edition is released, by the same publisher, Genesis.  Details are kind of sparse, but Genesis call it an "edition" of the same book, so I have to assume the photo selection is the same and the difference is in the craftmanship that went into it.  I'm currently swinging between irritation that "Led Wallet" (as the road crew apparently called Jimmy Page on account of his thriftiness) would go for the money by releasing an unlimited edition and a strange desire to own it as it is a book I could paw through without damaging it.

Jimmy Page's website has a slideshow of some of the pages in the book and a "buy" button, but you can also buy from Amazon, which as usual looks to be the cheapest option - it is $37.95, with free shipping because I'm a Prime member.

10/20/14 Edit to add: I did buy it, of course. I review it here.

New Jimmy Page TV interview from 1963

...if you know what I mean.

 Jimmy Page interview dated June 1963, when he was 19.


  

Jimmy says he's been playing guitar for "four years". I assume he meant professionally, as he previously appeared on TV in 1957, already playing guitar.

This interview comes at the time Jimmy was making big changes in his life (even though he's only 19).  He had stopped touring with perpetual no-hopers Neil Christian and the Crusaders (although he mentions them as his current band in the clip), started making a name for himself playing jam sessions in the big London clubs, worked his first few sessions and was, as he says in the clip, equivocating between becoming an artist and becoming a guitarist.

According to George Case's Magus, Musician, Man, Jimmy contracted glandular fever (mononucleosis) in mid 1962 and became so weakened he had to leave the Crusaders (YouTube autoplay) shortly afterward. (He did participate in studio recordings, with them and the legendary Joe Meek in fall, 1962.) He attended Sutton Art College from 1962 to late 1963 (studying painting) and played jam sessions at the Marquee to keep his hand in, which expanded to sessions at the legendary Eel Pie Island and Crawdaddy.  This led, once again according to George Case, to offers for him to work on studio recordings as a session musician. Tony Meehan and Jet Harris's Diamonds (YouTube autoplay) is the first record he played on to be released, in early 1963.  Mike Leander got him in on some sessions in fall 1963 of which he said, "Before this I thought session work was a closed shop".

"The chronology of these heady days for Jimmy Page and his peers is vague," says George Case.

The interviewer is Royston Ellis, the Beat Poet. Jimmy played at one of his poetry slams around the time of some time before the interview, which apparently takes place in Guernsey. Case says it's unknown whether Jimmy did go on an oft-rumoured trip to Europe at this time, but perhaps being in Guernsey is a hint that he did travel a little.


h/t to Aquamarine who put this video on her Facebook. I would have missed it otherwise. 

Led Zeppelin and their wacky analog recording techniques explained

Very interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today, synced with the release of the newly remastered Led Zeppelin releases.  It's called The Making of Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love, and has new material from Jimmy Page, George Chkiantz and Eddie Kramer.

When I first heard Whole Lotta Love, on LP (or "vinyl" as they say nowadays for some reason), one bit that stood out was the way that Robert Plant's vocals were foreshadowed by a quiet, eerie repetition of the line that (unlike most repetitions) preceded the actual line, "Way down inside, woman, you need..."

You can hear it at the four minute mark here.



At first I thought that the line was sung so loud that I was hearing 'ghosting', something breaking through from the next groove, but I never heard a similar thing on "a vinyl". When I started reading books about Led Zeppelin, I got the impression that this was Jimmy's invention, and was called either backwards echo or pre-echo. They had statements like these:

...the track's famous "middle section." This was an abstract (but carefully rehearsed) gyre of sound - clamoring trains, women in orgasm, a napalm attack on the Mekong Delta, a steel mill just as the plant shut down. It had a strange, descending riff that Page sculpted with a metal slide treated with backwards echo.

(Quite obviously no one else than Stephen Davis in Hammer of the Gods. A wonderful prose stylist even if the band didn't like his book!)

...the famous psychedelic middle-section of 'Whole Lotta Love', in which Plant's howling lust-maddened vocal improvs are mixed with an other-wordly cacophony of special effects, from the backwards echo of the slide guitar to the grinding sound of a steel mill, orgasming women, even a napalm-bomb explosion...

(The much later and yet eerily similar phrasing of Mick Wall, in When Giants Walked The Earth - perhaps the first and the second passages together only count as one citation.)

Drenched in reverb as it was, "Whole Lotta Love" featured Page's innovation of backward echo, which he had tried as far back as the Yardbirds and on the earlier "You Shook Me" against Glyn John's reservations that "Jimmy, it can't be done."

(George Case in the very readable and recommended Jimmy Page: Magus, Musician, Man.)

Pre-echo, baby. Run the tape backwards and print the echo to another track, then flip it and it comes first. Cool in both sound and concept.

(geo, a person of the internet.)

It turns out, per the conversations in the WSJ that I, and many others, were reading something into it that wasn't there.  The vocal is a print-through or bleed through from another track - but not on the record, on the master tape. It's not done deliberately by reversing the tape and rerecording it, it was just there already.

From the WSJ article:

Mr. Kramer: At the point where the song breaks and Robert slowly wails, "Way down inside…wo-man…you need…love," Jimmy and I heard this faint voice singing the lyric before Robert did on the master vocal track. Apparently Robert had done two different vocals, recording them on two different tracks. Even when I turned the volume down all the way on the track we didn't want, his powerful voice was bleeding through the console and onto the master.Some people today still think the faint voice was a pre-echo that we added on purpose for effect. It wasn't—it was an accident. Once Jimmy and I realized we had to live with it on the master, I looked at Jimmy, he looked at me and we both reached for the reverb knob at the same time and cracked up laughing. Our instincts were the same—to douse the faint, intruding voice in reverb so it sounded part of the master plan.
Mr. Page: I hadn't heard anything like that before and loved it. I was always looking for things like that when I recorded. That's the beauty of old recording equipment. Robert's faraway voice sounded otherworldly, like a spirit anticipating the vocal he was about to deliver.
Mr. Kramer: By adding reverb, we made his faint voice more dynamic, and it became part of rock history.

So you learn something every day!

The rest of the article is well worth a read too.

Jimmy Page says Stairway to Heaven Taurus rip-off claim is "ridiculous"

You can read the whole thing at Bloomberg Businessweek, but there isn't much more there than the headline. Jimmy Page was asked about the claim by the Liberation newspaper, and he said, "That's ridiculous."

Meanwhile, the lawyer who was originally said to be about to file the suit is not having a good time on a current case.  According to Radio.com, Francis Alexander Malofiy is representing Dan Marino against Ussher in a lawsuit concerning the song Bad Girl.

During the trial, however, Judge Diamond spoke against Malofiy in particular; filing a 22-page Sanctions Memorandum against him (which you can read here), saying that the “Defendants have shown clearly and convincingly that Attorney Francis Malofiy has acted disgracefully: lying to an unsophisticated, impoverished, unrepresented Defendant, thus convincing that Defendant to expose himself (probably baselessly) to substantial liability.”

Brian Ives at Radio.com details more of the choice words the judge used, along with other background on Malofiy.

I keep wanting to spell that word Malfoy. Now Lucius Malfoy, a pureblood wizard, would be a better foe for Jimmy Page, I believe.

I wrote about the supposed "rip-off" here. Hint: No it isn't.

Led Zeppelin being taken to court over Stairway

I found a handy video showing how Taurus and Stairway to Heaven can sound so similar without it being a rip-off. I guess the uploader got sensitive about the issue a year or so ago, just in time for Spirit's lawsuit. 

First, some background on the case: Rolling Stone  Casey Rae

 And of course, here's Taurus and Stairway. The Stairway-alike part starts at 44 seconds in.

 




Here is a handy ready made compilation video on why this sounds so familiar to us. This type of descending minor progression is actually called a cliche line! (Others with more musicological bent call it a passamezzo antico.)

[video has been taken down] The compilation video by ThatsSoInane contains the following tracks:

Davey Graham's Cry Me A River introduction - you know this is where Jimmy heard the chord progression the first time, don't you!
A Taste of Honey, by Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow, played by The Beatles
Spirit's Taurus
Summer Rain by Johnny Rivers
Thoughts, from the group Crow
Ice Cream Dreams from the band Cartoone. Jimmy Page is the session guitarist on this album.  Cartoone subsequently toured with Led Zeppelin. So if my understanding is correct Jimmy Page is playing the riff here before he tours with Spirit or has heard Taurus from the sidestage. (Edit: the webs say that JP played Telecaster on this track, so the acoustic may be the band's guitarist, but the point stands that they were in the studio playing this together in October 68, and the tour with Spirit was not until April 69.)
And She's Lonely by The Chocolate Watchband
Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin
Time in a Bottle by Jim Croce
Let It Grow by Eric Clapton

Some others people have suggested the following. A few of these are just guitarists remembering their first bit of classical that they had to learn at school, I think, but The Dolly Parton is amazing. If this sort of thing was actionable, I suspect Page's lawyers would have mentioned this one to him.



Dolly Parton's We Used To (introduction)



U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday (introduction after the drums)



Pink Floyd's Is There Anybody Out There? (start at 1:30)



Foo Fighters' The Pretender (introduction)



The guitar solo and general feel in Damnation of Adam Blessing's Strings and Things.



Nick Drake's Day is Done. (This sounds like Davey Graham again.)



Scott Walker (introduction)



The Kinks - Shangri-La

There are probably a thousand more, but once everyone starts suing each other, there won't be another one because they'll all be spending all their time in court.

Things could go badly for Page. Not that I think he stole it. Unfortunately for Stairway, everybody and his brother has heard it ten thousand times, so anything similar sounds like it was stolen from it, or even it was prior, that Stairway was stolen from that song.

As for whether Spirit's lawyers have a chance at redressing a grievance at this late date, yes, the three year statute of limitations is reset every time a record is re-released. However, royalties would not be awarded for the early releases, so Page isn't set to lose the half a billion Stairway is said to have earned. (He's spent it, anyway. According to the interwebs, his net worth is between $125 million and $127 million.) 

Gripes of this age do come up. There was a recent court case in England concerning the organ playing on Whiter Shade of Pale, where laches (the legal argument that someone has waited too long and has lost his rights) played a significant part. After much hard judicial thinking and a trip to the House of Lords, three years of royalties were awarded, as the law lords decided that that the delay in filing had not caused hardship to the original songwriters, but had in fact benefited them, since they'd trousered the money for all those years.  

As usual, the lawyers will be the winners.


Edited 8:33pm
Notes: The Cartoone album was recorded "at the same time" as Led Zeppelin I.  Led Zeppelin I was recorded in October, 68 (Led Zeppelin, A Celebration, Dave Lewis, p. 139). The second American tour with Spirit was April to June 69. (Argentum Astrum.)

05/28/14 Update here. 

Jimmy Page at Berklee

Jimmy Page video interview just prior to the Berklee College of Music commencement address and bestowment of his honorary doctorate tonight, to be seen here at Boston Globe (limited page views per month) and here at Blabbermouth (with a nice picture of him looking like a wizard).





A friend of mine was there and said that he was "so beautiful" which is nice, but I already knew that!

Jimmy Page a doctor - again

Jimmy Page will be giving the commencement address to the Berklee students on May 10. I don't know what Berklee is, or what a commencement address is, but the students are lucky duckies.  I'd be there in an instant, and I know a couple of people who will be there too, hoping that the address (and Jimmy's subsequent receipt of a doctorate) will allow them to get near enough for an autograph. 

I would LOVE to get close enough to Jimmy, one of my heroes, to say hi, so best wishes to you two. 

Announcement in full at Blabbermouth.

Roy Harper - in the dock - Same Old Rock

You know, if I were whoever is webmaster at jimmypage.com, I would be kicking myself for having programmed the front page picture for November 16th to be this one:



(It says, "On this day, 16th November 1984, I appeared with Roy Harper on the Old Grey Whistle Test.")

Why?

Because this was the major music headline for November 15th:

Veteran Folk Singer Charged With Child Sex Offences - The Telegraph, 15th November.

Roy Harper, of County Cork, Ireland, is due to appear at Hereford Magistrates' Court on Monday accused of nine sexual offences charges in total, West Mercia Police said.
A spokesman for the force said: "The summons relates to two counts of unlawful sexual intercourse with a girl under 13, three counts of indecent assault on a girl under 14 and four counts of gross indecency with a girl under 14. 

"The charges are in connection with offences alleged to have taken place in Herefordshire between 1975 and 1977 and relate to one victim."

I can't argue that the track's a cracker - I've written about the recording of it, and the legends about it, before, here, but blimey, Roy, 12 is a bit young, isn't it?

Delivering Presence - Led Zeppelin Celebration Day

Celebration Day -  Led Zeppelin at the O2

I wore my bell bottoms, or flares as we called them there and then, afghan coat, Jimmy Page t-shirt (licensed), and a smidge of patchouli - about 1/100 of a dose, as I didn't want to cause the whole cinema to riot - and called myself properly dressed to go to a Led Zeppelin concert.




This was the one-off showing of the film of Led Zeppelin's December 2007 Ahmet Ertegun charity concert at the O2 arena in London. Yes, we waited five years for Zeppelin to show it on big-screen video, even though the service, whose name I can't remember but was something like Fat Home Vents, reminded us about 13,000 times before the movie started that they were perfectly capable of showing exciting live shows live, as it happens etc. But as John Paul Jones remarked, five years is quite a short time for Zeppelin to get anything together, so I suppose we're lucky.

No one else had dressed up for the event, sadly, and the cinema was evidently under some ordinance that the audience must be allowed to hear a pin drop during the loudest musical passages for some unknown reasons probably to do with fire or safety or food anti-defamation laws or zombie awareness. The audience protested loudly several times and eventually, rather grudgingly, the sound was improved slightly. By the end, peak sound levels were hitting 89 dB, or about one hundredth as loud as Led Zeppelin actually were live. That just about covered the sound of popcorn, shoes creaking etc. and so I guess it had to do.

The show itself is surprisingly exciting. They are all old, now, of course, and there's no disguising that. Even Jason Bonham, the son of the original drummer John, is getting up there in his Gen-Xy way. But there's no denying the fluidity and mastery of their material that characterized them back then, and hasn't changed a bit. Mind you, since modern bands are unbelievably wimpy and amateur in comparison with any kind of actual rock music, Zeppelin now appear to be far harder and far more technically accomplished than they even seemed in their heyday, which is saying a lot. Back in the day, people spoke of power & control, light & shade, and in today's terms I think they actually display complete subjugation and #000000 & #FFFFFF.

And jazzy. It's perfectly possible that my completely untrained rock mind thinks of  "any jam including one or more unusual chords" as "Jazz" - but I don't think so. I think the classic rock bands instinctively move into jazz when jamming. (I hear it in Black Sabbath, for instance, though Deep Purple tend to jam in classical mode instead.) You don't hear Jack White or Skrillex or Deadmau5 or Ke$ha or Maroon 5 suddenly dropping into an extended proggy bit with jazz overtones, but Zeppelin do.

Plantations - the Robert Plant rambles between songs - haven't changed much either. Robert introduces Trampled Underfoot as a Robert Johnson-influenced song, but puts a different date on Robert Johnson's song when he mentions it before the song and when he mentions it after. (1935 or 1936, take your pick.) And he introduces Nobody's Fault But Mine by mentioning the time they (Zeppelin) saw Blind Willie Johnson, at a church in Mississippi back in 1932.

John Paul Jones, of course, regularly plays with hard rock bands - I saw him with Them Crooked vultures a couple of years ago. Don't know what Jason Bonham does, but I assume he's been in practice more recently than Led Zeppelin, and Robert Plant plays Zeppelin songs with all and sundry (though more often with sundry) and gigs regularly. The only retiree in the band is Jimmy Page. He played superbly for a hermit, and was quite his young self all the way through. You'd expect some sort of rustiness, but there was none. A couple of major clangers, yes, but that's rock and roll. Or Jazz. Certainly didn't detract from the overall performance.

Which was fun. All four looked like they were enjoying themselves, which is a good start, and when the sound was turned up beyond the low grumble level, we were enjoying ourselves too. I'll be buying the DVD, but of course nothing matches the big screen for delivering presence.

Led Zeppelin Celebration Day Press Conference, 09/21/2012

Or of course, Led Zeppelin Celebration Day Press Conference, 21/09/2012 if you're British.

Places to buy cinema tickets for 17th October, 2012:http://bit.ly/RJwqY9Place to buy the Audio / DVD & Blu-ray, Out 19th November, 2012: http://bit.ly/Q2hjwz

"Five years is five minutes in Zeppelin time - I'm surprised we got it out this quickly" - John Paul Jones.

It's great to see the three of them on stage together. But a shame they didn't bring their instruments...

Led Zeppelin 2007 02 Reunion Show to be released

Hooray! Celebration Day, the DVD of the Led Zeppelin reunion show from 2007 at the 02 is about to be released.

I was one of the 20 million people who applied but didn't get tickets.  I'll be after this one as soon as it's released - even though I've had a bootleg DVD for the last five years. (As does everybody, probably.)



Doesn't Jimmy Page look happy?  Time to get back on stage, old son!

Roundup of the interwebz and more

It's fashionable to assume that laughable malapropisms are due to the interference of malevolent autocorrect demons.

Tweets the actor and author Stephen Fry: “Just typed ‘better than hanging around the house rating bisexuals’ to a friend. Thanks, autocorrect. Meant ‘eating biscuits.’ ”

(From NY Times article)

But I've been rereading one of Richard Lederer's tomes on English language bloopers, and it's quite apparent that the unaided human mind is quite capable of producing the same errors.

The equator is an imaginary lion that runs around the world forever.
Comets are made up of organic material...and are thought to be ruminants from the beginning of the universe.
The climate is hottest next to the Creator.
In spring, the salmon swim upstream to spoon.

And so on. (From Richard Lederer's Bride of Anguished English.)

Today started of with great excitement as a neighbor rang me up to say,

"Hey Steven and this is Stefan, your neighbor. There's a 3 foot and one out walking around the neighborhood needs for some reason funds. We had yours but if it is to come and it and if it's not, forget about it. My home number is...."

Or at least that's what the auto-transcribed email of the voice message said he said. When I listened to the message, it was apparently a "three foot iguana" and they wondered if it was ours. No, our geriatric lizard was sitting quietly at home at the time. I arrived at their house at the same time as Animal Control, which was a little disappointing as I'd got hyped up to 'rescue' it myself but of course once an officer is on the ground, the animal is his. He scared it into a pool, where it immediately dived and prepared to wait us all out. Eventually between him netting it and me entowelling it, we got it back to his truck. A very healthy one, either an adult female or a young male. Hope its owner sees it on the Animal Control webpage and gets it back.

I watched the Olympics Closing Ceremony today. I didn't think I would be doing anything of the sort - I've been whining about the Olympics, the cost, the disruption to Londoners, the insane security including SAMs located on handy tower-blocks, for years. Then it actually happened and I got taken over by national pride. Not that I watched any of the sports (can't stand sports) but I gather the Home Team took home many medals and the whole thing is generally regarded as a success.

I switched on a proxy to watch the closing directly on the BBC website. I'd tell you which proxy I used, except they said if I tweeted their name I'd get a free gigabyte of bandwidth, which I did, but the bandwidth hasn't appeared yet, so no mentions for you, no name proxy! Anyway, I watched most of it in astonishment as London put on the World's Biggest Variety Club performance ever!11!eleven! On the one hand, I'm sincerely proud that a small island has produced such an incredible amount of musical talent, but on the other hand I'm amazed that pop music (and fashion) made up about 90% of the show. (With fireworks making up the rest, natch.) I sat on twitter the whole time and a spate of people said that seeing the Spice Girls made them feel young once again; not me. The Spice Girls the first time round was when I first realized I might be getting past it, so they actually made me feel old once again.  Queen played, with Long Dead Fred whipping the crowd into a frenzy from one of those things the media calls 'holograms', followed by Jessie J taking his place at Brian's whassname's side - and looking/sounding like she belonged there.  Kaiser Chiefs! Annie Lennox! Russel Brand! Tinie Tempah! Taio Cruze! Muse! Fatboy Slim! Madness! Ray Davies! And of course, the Who,  who changed the lyrics of Baba O'Riley to "not only teenage wasteland' in order to bring the song into negative cynicism territory.  There were Rolls Royces! London Taxis! Those mobile billboards you drive around (except that as well as a billboard, each one carried a genuine supermodel to the stage, which had become a giant catwalk). With so much vehicles and rock, it now makes sense why Jimmy Page and Leona Lewis stood on a bus at the closing ceremony of the Beijing Olympics and belted out Whole Lotta Love.  Eric Idle sang, as promised, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, which means he got to use the word "shit" in front of the entire planet, while accompanied by rollerskating nuns and a troupe of Indian dancers.

And Sir Paul and Sir Elton were mercifully awol for the ceremony.

Robert Plant played Clarksdale, Mississippi. I've been there - it's billed as the cradle of the blues and certainly looks it. (Though it was quite as warm an humid here is So Cal today.) Wonderful to see that Robert Plant has 'come home' as well.  He lives in Texas now. 

Here is a little known British piece on the blues - Blues and Gospel Train, from 1964 featuring Muddy Waters, Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. It's about 38 minutes long.



Harmless Drudge has a piece on the lyrical beauty of the descriptions of colors in Webster's Third dictionary.  These are unusual as the editors were mad keen on keeping the entire book as dry as bone, but for some reason, based on a command to describe colors only in terms of other colors, the descriptions of colors were an exception.

Vermillion: “a variable color averaging a vivid reddish orange that is redder, darker, and slightly stronger than chrome orange, redder and darker than golden poppy, and redder and lighter than international orange.” Lapis lazuli blue: “a moderate blue that is redder and duller than average copen and redder and deeper than azurite blue, dresden blue, or pompadour.” Cadet: “a grayish blue that is redder and paler than electric, redder and duller than copenhagen, and less strong and very slightly redder than Gobelin.”

(Via Making Light)

Language Log had a piece on how "I'm gonna" is now rendered in written black slang as "I'm on".

Rita said to him, “Honey, don’t move. I’m on get you to the hospital.”

This reminded me - for what turned out to be a not very good reason - that the Yorkshire dialect for "You must" or "You are going to" is "Tha mun".  While looking that up, I found this list of Yorkshire terms that are derived straight from the Viking (Norse), and although I can safely say I haven't used most of them, I can remember my dad using at least two: Rig-welted, which he used to mean helpless or stuck and apparently is descriptive of a sheep on its back, with its heavy fleece preventing it from righting itself (rig meaning backbone and velte meaning turned over) and minnin-on, which he used to mean a snack and apparently comes from minna, the word for reminder, but usually means snack.

Dangerous Minds had a piece on the Pretty Things' S. F. Sorrow, which it calls a "great lost psychedelic classic". I'd agree with all of that except "lost". I just checked and my copy is still in the radiogram cabinet, where it's been for about forty years.

Loved this Iron Maiden video which begins with Bruce Dickinson chewing out some helpless texter.




And finally: Ten reasons why the Megaupload bust was illegitimate.