Sifting & Sorting #3: Led Zeppelin I

Jimmy Page in his boathouse in Pangbourne. http://findingzoso.blogspot.com/2012/08/page-places-pangbourne-boathouse.html

Led Zeppelin, my dad’s favourite band, played together for the first time in the village where I lived between about 12 and 18. Pangbourne, where my mum still lives is a pretty but dull place on the banks of the Thames. It has a train line into London so it is full of city-workers, and today it is almost as expensive to buy a house there as it is in London. I don’t think my dad knew that about the village, where he did visit us once or twice, I don’t remember him mentioning it. He was a fan who grew up well before you could type the name of an album into a search engine and find out more or less everything you might reasonably want to. Jimmy Page bought a boathouse on the Thames with the money he had earned as a session guitarist in the 1960s.

When Page was interviewed there for Melody Maker he said:

We often get friends dropping in. We don't exactly take part in the village life, but it's like the New Renaissance of Berkshire, I suppose. A baronial life in our palatial country retreats

60 years later, the town is still waiting for a renaissance. It has had its moments, Kenneth Grahame wrote the Wind in the Willows there, Tolkien and Jethro Tull are buried in the same churchyard in a neighbouring village. But when my dad came to visit us there the best thing we could do was buy sandwiches and look at ducks.

I set out from there a few days ago, I had been to Birmingham the day before and was using my mum’s house as a stopping off point before going to collect my dad’s ashes from the crematorium that the low-cost and environmentally friendly funeral directors that carried out his cremation had used. When I was on the phone to the funeral director said, its beautiful there, that’s where I’d like to end up. After dealing with the death of my Dad I think that when I die I would like to be dealt with in a way which is as close to vanishing as possible. I don’t want anyone to have to handle my remains. But I couldn’t figure out what that was so I had Trevor reduced to ashes.

On the way there I listened to Patrick Raden Keefe’s Empire of Pain. I hadn’t anticipated when I read it that this book about the U.S. opiate epidemic might bring me back to thinking about Trevor, which is stupid really because I had seen the piles of pills in his house before we returned them to the pharmacy where they had come from. He suffered from chronic illness, a mix of symptoms and some diagnoses which always seemed partial to me, they explained little. Of course he knew much more than me he seemed to tell us things randomly, sometimes with devastating effect.

At one point the book mentions the transdermal patch called Butrans, a Purdue Pharma product which delivered a slow trickle of opiate pain relief, I learned for the first time what the things I had used to help apply for him were. Like everything with him it was a painstaking process that included wiping his skin down with a cleaning wipe, drying it with a cloth, applying the patch and pressing it down firmly, before covering it with a precisely prepared pair of white mesh sticking plasters which were attached to one another in just the right way. It was, as with all these tasks, annoying to complete because of how finicky he was. But I hadn’t appreciated how important these patches must have been for the management of his pain. Now I drive towards the crematorium I wonder where his pain stopped and the opiate dependency began.

The crematorium is next to an airport that confusingly calls itself London Oxford Airport. It is indeed beautiful, I timed my arrival per instruction to a little after the hour to ensure that I would not turn up at the same time as a coffin and its mourners. I had sat in a nearby service station to ensure that this would be the case, timed to perception I got to see the flowers spelling out DAD, GRAMPS, and I got to see the undertakers in their ridiculous Victorian garb, but I did not see another sad family member. Just me. The very kind women in the office checked the list to find my name and looked in a box where seven or eight other boxes of ashes were being kept. They had to wear these weird little grey crossover ties and matching grey uniforms. It was very sombre there until one of them dropped something and for an instant they used their normal voice. Not the strange hushed one that they kept up the rest of the time. I showed my ID and signed a piece of paper once for the ashes and again for a bracelet which I have not yet looked at. They put the box in one of those paper carrier bags with string handles, like from a jewellers, and I took it/him to the car.

And I pressed play on the CD player and the big opening chords of Good Times Bad Times, the first track on Led Zeppelin played as I backed out of my parking space and drove away. Putting my foot down in low gear and making the car howl along with Page, rumble along with Jones. Bonham’s precise drumming cutting through the libidinous sounding opening song, intended to be the single, and not much of a song – except for the playing.

I like Led Zeppelin, I always have, and listening to this record as I have done dozens of times in the last month or so is to borrow a kind of passion, or urgency which I haven’t been able to tap into in my own feelings. I like the part of the second track Babe I’m Gonna Leave You where it sounds like the band are all looking at each other and hammering out this hammering rhythm as the chords descend and the sound crescendos. Plant has this silly warbling voice at times but it also opens out with this really clean tone in other places. I imagine them in that boathouse in boring Pangbourne, looking at each other while they play together for the first time and realise that it is going to work. That is what it sounds like where the band grinds through those hammering chords and Plant wails overhead, like a private jet ready to land at London Oxford Airport.

The Zeppelin CDs are the first my brother and I took out of his flat to listen to while we drove to my mum’s house after our first visit to his flat after he died. And I have been playing the first three of their albums again and again. I’ve enjoyed playing these CDs really loud with the windows down as I drove back and forth from the dump in Harwich trying to get rid of some of Trevor’s things, and some of my own to make way for the things we decided to keep. In the last few years Trevor got into singing along to the music he listened to, he had books of lyrics of his favourite bands all to hand in his flat. His neighbours must have fucking hated it, particularly because he was very deaf.

But the thrill that Led Zeppelin offer up disappeared on the way to the M40. And all I could hear in that second track was the sound of a man justifying his own weakness as if it were something grand and admirable.

Babe, baby, baby, I'm gonna leave you

I said baby, you know I'm gonna leave you

I'll leave you when the summertime

Leave you when the summer comes a-rolling

Leave you when the summer comes along

I wanted to drive around in my car feeling like the spirit of Rock and Roll gave me some great understanding of my father. Some kind of triumphant spirit of freedom. But on that journey all I could hear was hatred for women. On reflection, I was in a pretty bad mood, what with the cardboard box of ashes in the boot. I wanted a celebration but I was just angry thinking of Trevor mouthing these lyrics to himself, or singing them aloud:

            Been dazed and confused for so long it's not true

Wanted a woman, never bargained for you

Lots of people talk and few of them know

Soul of a woman was created below, yeah

            I start thinking about how this album must have given voice to the most petty instincts of my teenage father. It is full with disdain and cruelty. Listening in the car I could only hear the lyrics, and my mind circled itself getting more and more wound up. Every man wronged by his woman, I hate the way that Plant sings the word woman. I’m being a spoilsport I know, and I’ll listen to this album again, but it is the grown up boys of this generation who claim that people are just trying to harsh their vibe when it is suggested that they might chose less hateful turns of phrase in everyday conversation. Hearing it in the background you’d think Your Time is Gonna Come is a rabble rousing song of generational change but these are the lyrics: “You been bad to me woman / But it's coming back home to you / Your time is gonna come”. The whole song is a threat.

            I recommend you hear only the sound of Plant’s voice without listening to the words. This album is written from the perspective of the kind of man that blames the women he leaves for everything he has done wrong. Plant sings “said you messed up my happy home / Made me mistreat my only child”. Today our car went into the garage and the mechanic said that one of the tyres was worn down to the fabric. He told Rebecca he wouldn’t have driven it down the street. When I was driving home all I could hear was the lyrics. I had plans to listen to more Zeppelin but I went back to the cheery account of the opioid crisis. It is a wonder I kept the car on the road.