Last September I lamented with turbulently mixed emotion that Robert Plant’s new record Band of Joy didn’t suck. The gravity of the project had pulled Plant away from, an apparently reconciled, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones who were eager to tour following their O2 show honoring Atlantic founder Ahmet Ertegun. What, one wonders, short of the second coming could rival a reunion of the Zeppelin, with Bonzo’s son on drums, playing Led Zeppelin as Led Zeppelin rather than as some North African Led Zeppelin worldbeat cover band or as an amazing one-off with the Black Crowes? Well nothing. One even suspects that the Good Lord might be persuaded to wait.
Now, having listened to this record for several months and after much therapy I have reconciled a simple point. Led Zeppelin was a band from the 1970s. Although quite probably the greatest rock band to ever exist (if you put them in a locked room with the Stones and Beatles the Zeppelin would emerge with jewelry made from the bones of their victims and Jagger on a leash hopping around like some little Vietnamese heroin dealing warlord general who had been usurped and opium-enslaved by his more vicious successor with a sadistic sense of humor) they are now men in their sixties. One does not expect shark stories to emerge from this crew and good grief who would want them too?
So we arrived at a moment of clarity. I’m not as interested in getting blasted and going deaf at a Led Zeppelin show as I am in seeing Robert Plant play some of his new and amazing music. There, I have said it publically. My sponsor will be proud. Or I will kill him.
So I thought I’d share with you the song from the record that, currently, I can’t get out of my head. Silver Rider is a song from the band Low out of Duluth, MN. Some covers are able to stay in the same orbit of the original without offending while pleasing. This is one of them.
