Zepperman

This weekend the three original members of Led Zeppelin will get together in Washington for the Kennedy Center Honors. Along with Buddy Guy, Dustin Hoffman and David Letterman, the Zeppeliners will receive Kennedy Center Medallions from President Obama tomorrow (Saturday Dec 1). Sunday night sees the Honors Gala, a "star studded celebration" that takes place at the Kennedy Center Opera House. The Gala will be shown on PBS on Dec 26th.

On Monday, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones will be interviewed on fellow honoree David Letterman's late night television show. It seems unlikely they will play on the show, and a rumour that they were scheduled to play an acoustic version of Stairway to Heaven has already been put to rest. However, Plant and Paul Schaffer have a relationship that goes back to his Honeydrippers album, and if there is any member that would be indifferent to performing it is likely Plant.

Whether they play or not, it's a good extended weekend to be a Led Zeppelin watcher.

Review Week - Day 5: Brad Tolinski's Light and Shade: Conversations With Jimmy Page

Brad Tolinski, as Editor-in-Chief of Guitar World Magazine, has had the opportunity to interview Jimmy Page a number of times. He has edited those conversations to create a Jimmy Page career timeline, and rolled them out as a biography of Page.

Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page is a fairly comprehensive Jimmy Page biography told mostly in Page's own words. Each chapter presents Page in interview form talking about a point in his career: studio, Yardbirds, forming Zeppelin &tc. Each chapter is introduced by Tolinski, and supplemented with an interview with a relevant figure from the era. i.e. Jeff Beck on the early days; John Paul Jones on forming Zeppelin; Paul Rogers on The Firm.

Tolinski manages to tie all the interviews together without bogging the book down in technical details, as often happens when two guitar players get together. Although Tolinski's interviews are originally intended for an audience of fellow guitar players, they will be easily readable to the average fan. What emerges from all the conversation is a fairly clear picture of Page the artist and player, much less so Page the man.

Having read a number of the interviews before, one fear I had when I first heard about Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page was that it would just be a rehash of the old interviews. However, Tolinski manages to re-edit the interviews to make them seem new and fresh. As well, the supplemental interviews, or "musical interludes," provide enough fresh material to keep things interesting.

Brad Tolinski's Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page is a fairly quick easy read, broken into enough sections that it can be put down and picked up at leisure. Every Jimmy Page/Led Zeppelin fan will enjoy it, and it would make a perfect Christmas gift for the Led-Head in your house.

Buy on Hardcover

or Kindle

Review Week - Day 4: Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters Live in Curitiba, Brazil

I had heard that Robert Plant had, in his own words, "found his big voice" during his fall shows with the Sensational Space Shifters (SSS). Not knowing for sure what that even meant, it was time to listen to what the Golden God was up to. All the shows from the South American tour the SSS are available for legal download at Livedownloads.com. I chose one randomly and wound up with Curitiba, Brazil on October 27th.


Plant sounds in very good voice on this night and his interaction with a lively audience is fun to listen to. Clearly the audience was in to it, and the Sensational Space Shifters gave them an uptempo set sprinkled with songs mostly from Plant's solo and Led Zeppelin career.

Unlike other tours, Plant stays fairly true to the originals, making arrangement changes for the instruments in use but not to the basic song itself. Rock and Roll, for instance, which was given a reworking into a rockabilly yawn-a-long, is back to being a solid rocker. Whole Lotta Love is recognizable as such while Black Dog is weirded out musically. The vocal line in the latter, however, is not much changed from the recent Celebration Day release.

Highlights include All The Kings Horses (during the intro of which someone yells, "beautiful man, beautiful"), Going to California and the aforementioned Rock and Roll. But outside of the opening song, Tin Pan Valley, there's nothing in this set that's not excellent. It has been a long time (been a long time, been a long time) since I've enjoyed listening to new Robert Plant music as much as I did this show.

That leaves us with one question: has Plant found his big voice? The answer is unquestionably yes and, having combined it with the half octave harmony vocalist he has learnt to be the last five years, he is effective and dynamic singer fronting a solid and entertaining band. One hopes Patty Griffin has more solo tours lined up in the next couple of years.

Setlist

• Tin Pan Valley


• Another Tribe


• Friends


• Spoonful


• Somebody Knocking


• Black Dog


• All The Kings Horses


• Bron-Y-Aur Stomp


• Enchanter


• Four Sticks


• Ramble On


• Freedom Fries


• Whole Lotta Love

-- Encore --

• Going to California


• Rock and Roll

Review Week - Day 3: Celebration Day Bluray/DVD

Having previously seeing Celebration Day, and loving it it, at the movie theaters, I wasn't expecting any surprises watching it at home on Blu-Ray. It is an excellent concert movie that puts the viewer on-stage in the middle of the action. Watching at home does offer, however, certain advantages and certain disadvantages. You can stop, repeat and review a song or part of a song at home. At the theatre you pay for atmosphere, to not have to put up with distractions and superior theatre sound.

So how come it sounded so much better on my weak Akai sound system circa 1988? Left alone on a Sunday afternoon, I was able to turn it up and just enjoy the concert. It was the perfect home viewing experience.

Lets be clear, if you saw the movie in the theaters, it is exactly the same concert movie. There is nothing new, and the viewing and audio experience is limited only by your personal setup. it was an excellent movie then, and it is excellent sitting in the living room in front of a roaring fire.

Review Week

The past month has been a busy one here at the Ramble On Studios. The release of the Celebration Day, and subsequent promotion push, has meant that there is something new coming from the Led Zeppelin camp almost daily.  It's been hard to keep up.

On top of that, now that it's officially the Christmas season, I have a number of items for review. On top of the Celebration Day CD and BluRay, I have a couple of books, a Robert Plant concert from Livedownloads.com and a guitar book, all needing review before Christmas.

That said, with the Celebration Day release out of the way, it's time for some reviews. I have started already, reviewing the Celebration Day CD yesterday and Barney Hoskyns Led Zeppelin: The Oral History of the World’s Greatest Rock Band today.

Keep reading for more reviews as the week goes along.

Meanwhile, I don't watch much TV, and always figure if I'm watching TV then I have something else I should be doing. Nonetheless, I have seen the ad for Celebration Day twice now in the past few weeks, so I assume everybody has seen it. If not, however, here it is, courtesy of LedZeppelin.com:

Review Week - Day 2: Barney Hoskyns - Led Zeppelin: The Oral History of the Worlds Greatest Rock and Roll Band.

Barney Hoskyns Led Zeppelin: The Oral History of the World's Greatest Rock Band tells the story of Led Zeppelin via the voices of those that were there. Using hundreds of interviews and a massive amount of research, the story is told from quotes mostly by people around the band (although he uses historical interviews with band members throughout). Considering the use of hundreds of voices, Hoskyns tells the tale of Led Zeppelin coherently and interestingly.

When reading a new bio of Zeppelin, as I've read far too many really, I have a simple metric to determine what kind of bio is it: does it tell the Seattle mud-shark story. If it does, I know it's a book interested in the salacious over the music. I prefer, having heard that story too many times, books that either ignore it acknowledge it without much detail. Led Zeppelin: The Oral History of the World's Greatest Rock Band passes this test.

The book focuses on the band, their music and their unique managerial style, treating the band largely as a five-some, with Peter Grant the fifth Zeppelin member. If something affected the music, or the selling of the music, Hoskyns covers it. And while it provides possibly the most comprehensive look at the bands drug use, particularly Page, Bonham and Grant's descent into heroin or, in the latter case, cocaine, it is always in relation to how it affected the band itself.

Led Zeppelin: The Oral History... is an interesting and reasonably quick read, giving the reader some new insight into what made Led Zeppelin tick, while creating a balance between being salacious and telling the full story. It is a must read for Led Zeppelin fans.

Buy the hardcover

Kindle

A Real Led Zeppelin Over Dallas

Haha. Nice promo idea.



h/t Nech