I Ruin Led Zeppelin!

In the spring of 1969, something called Scenic Sounds began promoting rock shows at one of the unlikeliest venues in Greater (an oxymoron!) Los Angeles, a drafty barn-like affair in Pasadena heretofore known solely as where huge floral floats are prepared for the annual New Year’s Day morning Rose Parade. For their first shows in May, Scenic Sounds booked as headliners a bluesy new English band whose first album was getting played a lot on local radio in spite of having been dismissed as self-indulgent crapola in Rolling Stone. To review the show, the Los Angeles Times dispatched the selfsame spotty young Jewish university student who’d written the Rolling Stone review.

He liked the performance even less than the record, and Led Zeppelin were ruined.

Yes, I was that spotty young student, Zeppelin actually weren’t very ruined at all, and though I grow faint with embarrassment 40 years and more after the fact on noting how dreadfully written was my review of the Rose Palace show, I haven’t changed my mind about what I saw and heard.

I liked songs, especially tuneful ones, with witty or poignant lyrics; I liked The Who (no, I didn’t: in those days, before the bloat and bombast, I worshipped The Who) and The Kinks and The Move. Zeppelin weren’t remotely about songs, but rather about riffs and showing off, much more about athleticism than self-expression. A cat in heat could hit H above middle C? Robert Plant could hit J-flat.

Where the playing of Jeff Back, whose great success the year before had obviously emboldened Jimmy Page to throw this mob together, was alternately droll, anarchic, and emotive, Page’s was unashamedly exhibitionistic. When I was able to make out any words, they seemed, in that bluesy way I loathed, to be about what a misogynistic bull stud the singer was. Give me Townshend, via Daltrey, I thought, fretting about his sisters forcibly crossdressing him. Give me Ray Davies, raking leaves.

I won’t pretend I wasn’t very much in the minority. There’s always an audience for virtuosity, and I might have been the only person at the Rose Palace who seemed not to derive enormous pleasure from how fast and dexterously Page played, at how high Plant was able to screech, at the undeniable brute power of the rhythm section. It was 1969, anglophilia continued to rage unchecked, and such notable local beauties as Pamela Miller were observed to be waiting moistly in the wings to receive the boys' sperm at show’s end.

When my review was published, I was denounced from every pulpit as a philistine or faggot. That no crosses were burned on my front lawn owed solely to my living in Venice (Beach), with the junkies and the ancient Jewish widows, and having only a little square of sand that I shared with my downstairs neighbor. And consumer fervor doesn’t mean something’s good. Iron Butterfly replacing The Beatles atop the American album charts a few weeks earlier hadn’t meant Iron Butterfly weren’t awful.

Led Zeppelin came back as conquering heroes in midsummer. No mere Rose Palace could hold them now. Seeming to feel that its readers knew quite enough about my disdain, the Times didn’t invite my comments on their show at the Anaheim Convention Center. I was delighted not to attend, but heard from several who had how Robert’s between-song patter had included the promise that the group would find me, and make my ears resemble cauliflower. I knew their manager to have a reputation for violence, and enrolled in self-defense classes.

A decade hence, I attended a Wolverhampton Wanderers football match with my friend Bev Bevan, once of The Move. We encountered Plant outside the stadium, and Bev introduced us. My name didn’t seem to ring a bell.