Well, I did it: I bought one of those super-deluxe Led Zeppelin boxes.
The Super Deluxe Edition of the first Zep album is obviously the most commercialized, crass, regrettable, anti-rock, boomer-focused, rich-ass-yuppie piece of stupid bullshit to ever disgrace the name of the band that once bestrode the earth like a Colossus. Except it isn’t. To begin with, it comes with stuff you really want: rare photographs, perfect letterhead facsimiles of press releases, and additional historical information that will be familiar to those of us who have read all the Zep biographies but is presented in compelling fashion nonetheless.
The music itself — well, I had concerns. Page is an old man now and who knows how good his ears are when it comes to remastering and mixing forty-five-year-old tracks? No need to worry. He did a good job, at least by my standards. Admitteldy, I’m going deaf as well, haha. I heard the LP at my friend Chris’s house in Toronto a few months back and I’m pleased to say that the CD is just as good through my Sony ES SACD player, Parasound pre-amp and amplifier, and Paradigm Monitors. (Yeah, I bought a set of Magnepan 3.6s but I haven’t set them up yet.) I’m waiting to listen to the bonus CD until I have a really down day where I really want something to cheer me up. I hope it’s good. The reviews are all positive.
It’s hideously expensive. Getting the Super Deluxe editions of all the relevant studio records, which to me includes neither Presence nor In The Out Door, would cost you nearly a thousand bucks. None of the things Jimmy Page has done to cash out on his legacy are particularly cheap, whether you’re talking about the guitars, the guitar cases, the paintings, the signed items, or these reissues. I’m going to forgive JP for this because what he really wants, as he has made plain time and again for twenty years, is to tour as Led Zeppelin with Robert Plant. Ol’ Planty isn’t interested, he wants to flirt with Alison Kraus and inflict his Nashville-hipster Band Of Joy II on us.
To some degree, I sympathize with Plant. Imagine being defined for the rest of your life by the things you did before you turned thirty. The man’s a musician, he wants to create new things and have new experiences, not endlessly toil in his own mausoleum. Still… would it kill them to do one US tour? Just one? For those of us who, like me, were seven years old when Knebworth happened? Make it five hundred bucks a ticket if you have to. Let Robert sing the whole thing an octave down like he’s been doing. I don’t care. I want the experience of communing with a hundred thousand other fans in the open air. Zepapalooza.
This morning Patrick and I whipped out this cover of “Good Times Bad Times”. No, it wasn’t Monday morning; we’re both unemployed and we’ve lost track of time. We really could have used a drummer. Still, it was fun. It’s fun to play this great music, even if we don’t play it perfectly, and to enjoy the spirit of the thing.
One free TTAC T-shirt to the first person who can tell me why I’m playing an ASAT Deluxe Korina on this instead of a Les Paul. Note: this offer does not extend to galactagog, since we talked about it when I was in Toronto last. Hint: it’s the same reason I’d play the ASAT for “Stairway to Heaven”.
Cause Pagey played a Tele on the first album and, in particular, Good Times, Bad Times.
Correct!
Thanks for the shirt, Jack! It is awesome. I have to now say that Presence, at least, should be included in the canon. The urgency and additional funkiness is pretty great if not as intuitive as most of what makes up I-IV. And I quite like most of In Through the Out Door. It was a mighty impressive effort by JPJ and Plant to move things forward when Pagey and Bonzo were somewhat, shall we say, incapacitated. Pagey’s solos are pretty impressive too in their own inimitably off-kilter way (the stoned and stumbling yet brilliant style he first unveiled on Hots On for Nowhere).. But what do I know? I rank Ozone Baby as one of the best pop songs of all time.
I think Presence, in particular, would be the best album any other hard rock group recorded. It just doesn’t feel formulaic enough, and when you realize that Pagey had basically sold his soul to the needle at that point it makes sense.
JPJ is and always will be a monster. Just working on the riff for “Good Times Bad Times” makes that so apparent.
Enjoy the shirt!
I too have the first three remasters. Just the discs themselves. Not the high-zoot box sets.
The sound is very good on my Paradigm Signature S2s.
They’re like a time machine to a time of warped vinyl, happening London and when Jimi Hendrix met Mick Jagger.
But no they’re even better. They’re like catching up with your grade five sweetheart and she doesn’t weigh 160 lbs with visible stretch marks. Or for us autophiles - they’re like a 1970 Monte Carlo with a 454 Quadrajet PLUS radial tires, ABS and ESP.
It is a chance to go back and be young again without the risk of scratching your records or inhaling second hand dope smoke. It is having your cake and eating it too. Albeit ~40 years later with the emotional scars to prove it.
But back to 2014, there’s an organization called Windborne that does the music of led zeppelin. Pay whatever they ask, and travel as far as you have to, because that dear colleagues is the closest you’ll ever have to the real thing LIVE in your lifetime.
Jack - have you read “Light and Shade, Conversations with Jimmy Page?” Highly recommended. Page may be toiling in a museum, but thankfully, he is the keeper of the flame.
(http://www.amazon.com/Light-Shade-Conversations-Jimmy-Page-ebook/dp/B007YUANLU/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409103390&sr=8-1&keywords=light+and+shade)
I have it, it was one of the more thoughtful gifts I received from a young woman I knew who specialized in the art of the thoughtful gift.
I can’t make heads or tails of that one; was she a young woman who knew how to give the thoughtful gift as you said? Or was she a thoughtful young woman who gave thoughtful gifts, which was left unsaid?
Haha too funny!
Nicely played! Looks like fun; get your son on the kit next time!
That is a nice asat too, korina even
I’m just glad we can get brand spanking new, clean, quiet, great sounding zep vinyl for cheap, compared to overpriced collectable (and rare) originals
Track down the Barry Diament mixed CD’s from the 80’s I think they even sound better. Heresay maybe but I’m just saying what I hear 😉
Rock on!!
Oops: mastered, not mixed
Someone at the pressing plant screwed up and put the wrong label on my copy. I was expecting a Led Zeppelin album but it was all Willie Dixon songs.
😛
Nice rig, tho. Let me know how those Maggie’s sound.
I was a huge Zeppelin fan in the 70’s. The summer of 79 I was doing a study abroad in London and went with friends from the program to Knebworth. I think this video is from day 2 and we were there day 1 but I still enjoy watching it.