THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME

I'm reading this biography of Led Zeppelin this week called WHEN GIANTS ROAMED THE EARTH. It's I guess what they call "exhaustive" since it just goes on forever about every little detail of everything, which I like, and even has these weird interludes where the author creates "fictional flashbacks" wherein various people featured in the book are taken back through their life stories. All of these interludes have the same, "Those sods you knew in your early days, they never knew what you were capable of, but you knew ..." It is a very odd device and I find it kind of fascinating as a writer, because you really shouldn't be able to do that, especially if you are giving everybody the same resentment-based perspective, but in another way, it kind of works and nicely breaks up the story. So funny too, Zep was one of my favorite bands in highschool but was usually put down by my frieds as being kind of lower class, metal type music. They all preferred The Stones and the Dead and crap like that. Which I liked too but I ALWAYS knew that zeppelin was by far the most accomplished band musically, which is what is so fun about reading this book. They really were that good. They were like frickin' Beethoven or something. So now I'm listening to all their records again and getting these weird junior high school flashbacks (white bellbottoms and feathered hair), yes I am that old. And also thinking about the very short life-spans of even the greatest bands. By the time Zep was done the guys were barely thirty!!! What the hell did they do with the rest of their lives. Garden, I guess. That's what Voltaire advised at the end of Candide.....