Читать книгу Idle Worship (Text Only Edition) - Chris Roberts - Страница 8
ОглавлениеIN 1972, WHEN I WAS A YOUNG TEENAGER living in Glasgow, I did not expect Led Zeppelin to come to town. I had been going to gigs since I was thirteen and as Glasgow was a popular venue for music I had already seen most of the biggest progressive rock bands of the day – Hawkwind, Black Sabbath, Captain Beefheart, Mott the Hoople, Alex Harvey, Deep Purple, The Who, and many more. (With great foolishness I declined to go and see T. Rex, deeming them to be too poppy. How silly can you get?) Nonetheless, I did not expect Led Zeppelin to come. They were too big, and too serious. I mean, they didn’t release singles or anything.
I had no clear idea of what the daily life of Led Zeppelin might be and assumed vaguely that they lived in some sort of Valhalla, sipping mead, talking to the muses and occasionally making records. Possibly they granted a few divine favours in between times. Whatever they did it would not include touring Scotland because, at least in my school, Led Zeppelin were a class apart, and we were not worthy.
People, including me, used to marvel that anything as good as them could possibly exist. We used to walk around the playground carrying their albums despite the fact that there was nowhere in school to play them. It was just good to have them around, and be seen with them. I spent a fair part of my early youth walking back and forth clutching Led Zeppelin Two, singing the riff to ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and conscientiously imitating all the guitar solos. (I bought this record before I had a record player. Really.)
This for me is the stuff of strong memories. For instance, when Led Zeppelin Four was released the first reports were confused. Two separate people who had skipped school for the day reported that they had seen it in shop windows but each of their descriptions of the album sleeve was radically different. This led us to wild and lengthy speculations in class ranging from the likelihood of two Led Zeppelin albums being simultaneously released to one of the sightseers being strongly affected by LSD, which was always a possibility in the early seventies, even among the very young.
Strangely enough, the solution turned out to be that one shop was displaying one side of the sleeve and the other shop was showing the other. It was of course a mighty and complex gatefold sleeve, .the like of which is no longer to be seen in these post-heroic days. Such was our immense Led Zeppelin interest that this sort of thing was fuel for hours and hours of fevered discussion which I still recall though I have no idea what I might have been supposed to be learning in the class at the time.
I think it was shortly after this that we heard that they were coming to play in Glasgow. Now for me, already hurt and disillusioned in life because other boys had girlfriends and I had no idea how to go about this, my main happiness and only spiritual elevation was obtained by lying around in incense-filled rooms, listening to Led Zeppelin. The prospect of seeing them live was therefore overwhelming.
I queued up overnight for my ticket. The police patrolling this queue were particularly and needlessly unpleasant but I will not dwell on this as I do not wish to spoil the memory. The venue was Green’s Playhouse, later to become the Apollo. This had several features which would annoy me now, namely it did not sell alcohol and it was seated but I don’t recall being troubled by this at the time. Everyone generally stood on the seats or rushed to the front when the band played. As to alcohol, this was more of a problem, particularly as we were all too young to buy it legally elsewhere. Much creative thinking was done to obtain a few cans of McEwans and it was necessary to drink them quickly and surreptitiously in the street before the gig. Many junior rock fans, forced to bolt down their beer in the short distance between the bus stop and the venue, paid a heavy price later in terms of illness, disorientation and utterly irate parents.
I have probably never been as excited as when waiting for Led Zeppelin to come onstage. In the weeks since buying the tickets I had talked of little else. Well, probably nothing else. Although everybody had their different preferred bands we were entirely united in regarding Led Zeppelin as by far the best, apart from the out and out pop music fans, of whom I seem to remember there were relatively few, and possibly one or two hard-core West Coast devotees. To this day I completely fail to understand what they saw in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. I mean, put ‘Our House’ next to ‘Black Dog’ and what have you got? Precious little if you ask me.
It was not unknown for bands to cancel their trips to Glasgow and this had been a source of great dread. Grimly pessimistic even at an early age, I was more or less convinced that they would not appear. Right up till the moment that Robert Plant, my complete, total and absolute adolescent hero, stepped onstage, I did not actually believe that they would play.
Now the Glasgow audience, while appreciative, usually took some time to warm up. Generally they would spend some suspicious moments sizing up the band before completely accepting them. Even then any heavy rock outfit indulging in too much balladeering and not enough power chords could be given a fairly hard time. On this night this was not the case. As Led Zeppelin appeared onstage like Mighty Heroes From Another Realm the place exploded. Everyone was up over the seats and piling down the front before Jimmy Page had completed his first riff. The bouncers, hardened Glasgow thugs normally hostile to this sort of behaviour, retreated in confusion.
Led Zeppelin played with no support act and, unlike many of the other bands in the fab early seventies, had no stage set and no fancy clothes. They wore plain T-shirts and jeans and their onstage equipment looked fairly modest although Robert Plant did have a sort of metal stick which made funny noises when he put his hands near it, very important for the psychedelic middle section of ‘Whole Lotta Love’.
They started off with ‘Black Dog’, a song with a dazzlingly good riff, and from then on it just got better. Thundering versions of crunching tunes like ‘The Immigrant Song’, ‘Communication Breakdown’ and ‘Rock and Roll’ flowed into the powerful electric blues of ‘Killing Floor’ and ‘I Can’t Quit You Babe’. (I suppose I would now have to grudgingly admit that it was a bad thing for Led Zeppelin not to have immediately acknowledged the original versions of some of these blues. At the time I would not have cared. I mean the original artists played them quietly, with acoustic guitars. Not the same thing at all.)
There were the screaming vocals of Robert Plant and the wailing and fantastical guitar playing of Jimmy Page. Behind them, as we young rock completists were well aware after dutifully sending in our poll forms for ‘Musician of the Year’ in each category to the music papers, were the excellent John Bonham on drums and the equally excellent John Paul Jones playing bass and keyboards. In between the huge chunks of noise were outbreaks of calm as they played a few acoustic numbers and some gentle songs of Misty Mountains and Elvish Warriors, all this being well suited to alleviating the tedium and frustration of my youthful existence. Aware of the status of the band, the audience listened to these in quiet rapture and did not speak, cough or fidget.
I loved every second of it. I was enormously appreciative of John Bonham’s drum solo. When Jimmy Page played his guitar with a violin bow I quite possibly wept for joy. I think it is an accurate recollection, rather than wishful thinking, that Led Zeppelin did do extremely good live versions of their material. As ‘Whole Lotta Love’ climaxed I had reached the sort of state you see in films of early Beatles concerts, that is, more or less hysterical. Seeing Led Zeppelin was probably a more satisfying fulfilment of a dream than any that was to follow.
They ended with ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Wow. What experience could have been better for me and my schoolfriends? None. Nothing would have come close. It was the best song in the world played by the best band in the world and here they were doing it right in front of us. The Archangel Gabriel coming onstage and blowing his trumpet would have had less effect. The concert ended. I was awestruck.
Outside I was completely deafened but still awestruck. That night the deafness gave way to a hideous ringing in my ears and I was still awestruck. Next day at school everyone was awestruck.
‘We are awestruck,’ we said, walking around the playground carrying our Led Zeppelin albums. ‘Completely awestruck.’
And it was true.
Time moves on. A few years later I was no longer awestruck by Led Zeppelin. They released another good album, Physical Graffiti, but were overtaken by time and the Sex Pistols. I went to many punk concerts, and it was still enjoyable but as the eighties crept on I started to lose the habit.
I was, I suppose, a little bored with the whole thing. Music did not seem a great deal of fun. I was aware however that this was a problem with me rather than the music. It is odd how people can dismiss whatever is popular at the time as ‘not as good as it was in my day’ and actually make themselves believe it. There is always something good around, it’s just that you get past the stage of appreciating it properly. Personally I was a little distressed no longer to appreciate it properly. Having passed thirty it always seemed like too much effort to actually go and see a band anywhere, what with London being so difficult to travel around in late at night. It was also too much effort to enter enthusiastically the fantasy land of any group of people whose sole talent was knocking together a reasonable tune and posing onstage. I had probably not been really excited by a live band since The Jesus and Mary Chain some years previously and by 1989 I had ceased going to gigs entirely.
By 1989 of course music listening had entirely changed. Whereas at my school Led Zeppelin were common currency, by now no such common currency existed. In any school there would be devotees of Heavy Metal, Rap, Reggae, Trance, Techno, Thrash, Hardcore, Indie Rock and no doubt various others. Dance music, utterly without credibility in the early seventies, was now popular with all sorts of people. However as this is a piece about two gigs rather than a history of music I shall pass over this, merely pointing out that from my point of view, proper music absolutely requires that there should be someone onstage hitting a loud guitar and the guitar has to be plugged into a fuzzbox. Anything else just won’t do.
So, where was I? Living in London and gone completely off gigs, it would seem. And I must admit that this was somewhat of a disappointment, and made me feel old.
When someone provided me with a spare ticket for the Pixies in 1989 I accepted it fairly doubtfully. I really only agreed to go at all because my pleasant new girlfriend wanted to. Personally I would just as soon have stayed home watching TV, especially as Britain’s late-night viewing had radically improved in recent years and I could now watch all night ‘American Gladiators’ and ‘Video Fashion’.
I had no great expectations of the music. For one thing, I had never heard the Pixies. They were American and had been in Britain before but this was their first time as stars. Their first full album, Surfer Rosa, was a big hit and they were receiving a lot of attention. So although I was ignorant of them, among others there was an air of expectation about the gig generated by those hip enough to have bought their first release, Come On Pilgrim, a mini LP, and those still avidly tuning in to John Peel on the radio.
Life for me now was different of course. I had to work for a living, which was bad. On the other hand, I no longer had to make up stories and bribe older people to buy me alcohol, which was good. I was fully entitled to march into any bar in London and demand a pint, and a whisky to follow if I deemed it necessary. I had my own home to go to and would not be censored by anyone even if I crawled through the door and made a mess on the carpet.
Different as well was my attitude to the upcoming event. I did not hang around in my bedroom listening obsessively to Pixies records, as I did in those weeks preceding Led Zeppelin’s show. Nor did I talk about the gig continually, or feverishly worry that it might be cancelled. I probably would not have minded had it been cancelled. This would have saved me the trouble of going out and left me free to watch ‘American Gladiators’ and ‘Video Fashion’. How perilous it can be to reach thirty!
The concert was at the Town and Country Club – a very strange name for a music venue I always thought. Unable to come up with any last-minute excuse for staying in, I reluctantly got myself ready and found myself packed in with what seemed like hundreds of people in a Transit van, driving slowly from Brixton to Kentish Town.
As I crawled out of the van, and rubbed the circulation back into my limbs, I saw that there were people everywhere. Hordes of fans were struggling out of the Bull and Gate, pint glasses still in hand, and queueing up for the Town and Country. The pavements were full of couples holding hands, groups of young boys and girls edging their way closer to the doors, serious looking souls selling fanzines, gloomy-faced policemen, hopeful ticket touts, and various smug-looking people slipping in through the door marked Guest Passes. All in all a good atmosphere, and I was already thinking that possibly this was not such a bad thing to be doing.
The Town and Country was a good venue, much better than Green’s Playhouse, with bars in easy access, a huge open space to hang around in and a balcony with seats if you needed a rest. As we arrived the support act was playing. I have never had any interest at all in support acts, regarding them mainly as things that get in the way of the real gig, but tonight it was My Bloody Valentine and they were very fine. Already a fair proportion of the crowd was dancing to their dense sound.
