All about me

I've rambled and ranted about guitar players recently, perhaps as the initial sign of an impending middle age crisis. If that is the case, please shoot me before I start wearing Lycra shorts and leasing a Porsche. So far I don't feel the yearning for ice cream suits and shiny blue shirts with overly wide collars, so I think I'm safe, for the moment anyway.

Doesn't mean my self indulgence need end here. In fact, that is the core essence of blogging - self indulgence, an ode to the self, myself, me. Regardless of topic, extent of outside sources and links, blogging is at its heart a pursuit inherently All About Me. I don't mean to disparage anyone who engages in the practice but I also lend little weight to the notion that blogging is itself akin to responsible journalism. Note the use of the word "responsible", a term not entirely applicable to many major newspapers, and especially news developed for television, be it the nightly half hour of Death TV or the round the clock breathlessness of CableSpews. In the mix of all this the "blogosphere" (gag me with a laptop) is said to beat the major news outlets to the story. This all sounds like ideal citizen journalism, but most of it isn't anything more than energy for a feedback loop repeating poorly or completely unsourced stories, which then bounce in and out of the major media.

In the old days of named sources, the days when no self-respecting reporter would use the term "reportedly" in order to introduce speculations or utter fabrications to the construct of an actual news story, none of this drivel would see the light of the day. The blogosphere's sole redeeming quality has been its willingness to continue the pursuit of the details of a story even after it falls out of the bare minority of news organizations that have earned the moniker "responsible". This carries its own difficulties as many of these stories are already done to death, and the pursuit comes full circle as the hunt for clarity descends once again into a morass of rumor and allegation without evidence.

But hey, what do I know? The threshold of evidence required to get a story on the front page of a major news daily is remarkably low. Astonishingly so.

The good news is that Led Zeppelin II is still one hell of a record, put together in bits and pieces as the band toured the U.S. for the first time. What were once simple blues riffs were given an accelerant and a match, and an amp turned up to 11. Sure, you have "Ramble On", a juvenile lyric fill of Tolkienisms, but the music backing those pathetic lyrics is straightforward. Driving drums, inspired guitar lines.

Heartbreaker stands out on this record for me because again it highlights Jimmy Page's use of multi-tracked guitar to achieve a useful musical end. If you listen closely to the track you may discover that the best guitar lines in that song are not necessarily the blistering solos.

And to close the show is a clearly stolen blues riff over which Robert Plant uses a harmonica sparingly, backed by lots of good old analog reverb. I'm not completely enamored if his imitation of the sound of some of the great black blues singers, but that is washed away as soon as the electric guitar riff injects the song with a bit of intravenous amphetamine. Page again demonstrates why he is arguably one of the greatest riff-writers in all of rock history, and includes a bit of counterpoint to set it all into context.

There is only one thing wrong with this album. Zeppelin wound up in a court battle with Willie Dixon over whether or not "Whole Lotta Love" was too close for comfort to one of his own tunes. Instead of fighting a real blues player in court, the Zepp should have been more gracious about it and found a way to settle. Something a lot of people forget is that while white boys on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were borrowing, imitating and outright stealing their American bluesmens' work, their idols and inspirations, those who made their brand of rock even possible had mostly been screwed financially by the music industry. It would have been a small thing for Zepp to part with a slice of their many millions and acknowledge outright that those who came before were worthy of recognition and recompense.