This California Girl is Going (back) to California

Well, it turns out that after all this time and expense and effort, I'll be on my way back to California soon.



I ran the numbers this morning after a few days of indecision, and I just can't afford to stay here on the East Coast looking for work. So, I'll go back home and try again there. I know I hit my head against that particular brick wall for far too long, and it isn't going to be easy to find anything there now, either. But I will at least be on familiar territory.

See, that's the thing. I've been having trouble navigating here. I don't know which way is up - well, which way is North and so forth, and I just don't feel comfortable when I don't know which direction is which. I also often can't get where I want to go because I don't know the area and don't know which buses go where and when.

That aspect of it wasn't too much of a problem in DC itself, actually, but I've been out here in Maryland, about halfway between DC and Baltimore for nearly a week now, and it's just hard to get around. I ran around in circles for about three hours this afternoon trying to figure out how to pay for my train ticket back to California once I made the reservation on the phone. There is no Amtrak station with a ticket agent in the town I'm in right now (Laurel, Maryland). The nearest one is about 10 miles away. I couldn't figure out how to get there on the bus, and it was going to take about two hours each way, anyway, and I really wasn't up for that. And I didn't have a credit or debit card to pay over the phone - if I'd had that, I could have just made the reservation and paid online. That would have been much easier than talking to a computer to make the reservation. And I certainly wasn't going to pay for a taxi to take me those 10 miles and back. I wouldn't have, even if I could have afforded it, which I can't.

Jeez - either someone is sawing something next door, or they're having sex on a bed with a very squeaky mattress. It's only 7:12 p.m. - it's too late for sawing and a little too early to be having that loud of sex.

Sorry or that interruption. To get back to the story - I finally decided that I needed to get a pre-paid debit card so that I could pay for the reservation. See, they would only hold it until tomorrow, but I don't check out of the motel I'm staying at to go back to DC until Friday morning. That was not going to work. One of the motel employees told me where she thought I could buy a pre-paid card within walking distance. I walked down there. No joy. So, walking back up toward the motel, I stopped at a convenience store to ask if they knew where I could get one. And the clerk did know. He told me that they sold them at Family Dollar, and then he said, "and they sell them at 7-11, too. There was another man in there, clearly someone the clerk knew, and he said, "What are you sending her clear up to 7-11 for. That's too far." (It really wasn't too far, but it was farther than Family Dollar, and uphill.) It was kind of cute, and they were very helpful.

This is one of the things I've learned while I've been out here, by the way; most people are more than happy to be helpful if they can be.

So, I walked to Family Dollar, bought the card, came back to the motel and activated it, then called and paid for the train ticket. So, the trip back to California is a done deal, and I'm glad of that. The odd thing is that I haven't been aware of being homesick since I've been here, but now that the decision is made and the ticket is bought, I'm very glad to be going home. Even though there is actually no home to go to out there. It's still home.

But, that whole process took about three hours, from making the reservation to getting the ticket paid for, most of it out in a warm-to-hot sunny day. I've got a lot more stamina than I did when I arrived here, nearly a month ago, but I was tired and hot by the time I got to the motel. Not least, I realized at nearly five p.m., because I hadn't eaten anything all day. This is a problem when I have a problem to solve or a task to accomplish. I start concentrating on that and I completely forget to eat.

So, I had to go out again, walk back over to the Subway sandwich shop, and get dinner. I could have had a peanut butter sandwich, but I decided that just wasn't going to cut it. I've grown fond of that Subway shop since I've been here, although I haven't eaten there every night. They make good sandwiches and the people who work there are friendly. At any rate, now I'm fed, and not so anxious, and have the rest of the evening to relax.

There's be pre-travel things to do tomorrow - primarily doing up the dirty laundry I've accumulated since I've been here and packing to leave the motel on Friday morning, but also trying to figure out if there's anything I can leave behind so that my luggage won't be quite so heavy. I doubt there will be, but I'll unpack everything and repack, and in the process I might find something that isn't essential. That would be a helpful thing, since I've got to drag all that stuff back to DC and onto the train. Thank goodness for checked baggage. However, since I'll be in the train station Friday night, I will have to lug everything around with me all day Friday and part of the day Saturday, until time to actually check the bags.

I'm really not looking forward to the night in the station - another one. It isn't a pleasant place to begin with, and it's positively dismal at night. At least I should have my ticket in hand, so I shouldn't have to try t find places to be all night and can grab a chair in the ticketed passengers section and get a little sleep. The train, though, doesn't leave DC until just past 4 p.m. on Saturday, so that's going to be a long time in the station. If there were a place I could park my bags, I could go sightseeing Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, but that costs too much to even think about. But, I've got knitting, and I can spend some time in McDonald's using the Wi-Fi - I'm going to be in withdrawal across the country, on a train with no Wi-Fi access. Still, I can listen t music and watch DVDs and write - they do have electrical outlets at each seat.

I'm trying not to worry about what happens when I get back to L.A. just yet. There isn't anything I can do about it now. I've already been looking at job listings out there, and trying to see what the possibilities are for a safe place to sleep when I first arrive. But tonight? I think tonight I'm going to take advantage of the motel Wi-Fi, listen to some music, maybe do some writing, and just think that by this time next week I'll be back on the Left Coast...which is the right coast or me.

I just hope it doesn't welcome me home with an earthquake, like it did when I arrived there in March.

Quakes or not, though, I'm a California Girl, through and through.

Music Sunday: The 1971 Edition

Last week, because I had been doing some research into the 1970s, I shared some of the music that came out the year I graduated high school. This week, since I'm still stuck in the Seventies in my research, I thought I'd skip back a few years from high school and share some of the music that came out in 1971, the year I graduated from junior high.

This is going to be tricky. I sat down and did a little research and started making a list of all the music that I really liked that came out in '71. Turns out, it's a long, long list. 1971 was a really good year for music, at least as far as I'm concerned. Oh, there were some clunkers and some schmaltz. If you're of that time, as I am, you'll remember "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" and "Knock Three Times", both by Tony Orlando and Dawn, for example, which were omnipresent on the radio. But the good (or at least what I liked) far outweighed the bad.

What this means is that I'm going to have a difficult time choosing what to share here today.

A few songs will be eliminated simply because I've shared them here before: "Stairway to Heaven", by Led Zeppelin and "Behind Blue Eyes", by The Who (which I'm really tempted to share again anyway, because it is brilliant, but I won't) are just two of those. But that still leaves me with a long list of good music that I'd really like to share.

I think I need to start with Janis Joplin's version of "Me and Bobby McGee", even though I'm fairly sure I've shared it here before, too. This song, which was written by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster, has been recorded by just about everyone in the music business over the years, but this is the definitive version, I think. It was recorded in 1970, shortly before Joplin died, but it wasn't released until 1971:



Another song from 1971 that I've always loved (and which I also might have shared before) is The Doors' "Riders on the Storm". Legend has it that it entered the Billboard Hot 100 on the day that Jim Morrison Died, July 3, 1971, and that it was the last song the four members of the band recorded together. I don't know how true any of that is. Either way, here it is:



In 1971, Elton John released the album "Madman Across the Water". It's a good album, but my favorite song among all the good songs it includes is "Tiny Dancer" which, incidentally, was part of "Almost Famous", a film I like a lot, too. Here is a live performance of "Tiny Dancer" from the year the song and the album were released:



Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" was a protest song that didn't sound like a protest song, musically speaking. It was reportedly inspired by police brutality witnessed by one of the song's writers, Reynaldo Benson, a member of The Four Tops, at an anti-war rally in Berkeley in 1969. Benson, Al Cleveland, and Gaye were credited with writing the song, which was named the fourth greatest song of all time by Rolling Stone magazine in 2004 and again in 2011. Here is a live performance of the song:



And here is another protest song, from what might be an unexpected source, Paul Revere and the Raiders. "Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian)", which was first recorded in 1959 by Marvin Rainwater as "The Pale Faced Indian" and was written by John D. Loudermilk, memorializes the "Trail of Tears", the forced relocation of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole peoples from Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama to Oklahoma after the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. This song spent a week at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July, 1971:



Here, as a matter of historical interest and to show where the Raiders' song came from, is the Marvin Rainwater version:



This version didn't get much notice, but a 1968 cover by Don Fardon, who is English, managed to reach number 20 on the Billboard Hot 100. It is, as you can see, very much like the later version by the Raiders, although some of the lyrics are different from both the earlier and later versions:



And, yes, that is what is known as a tangent. It's interesting, however, to see the evolution of what is essentially the same song through the years.

To bring it back to 1971, which was where we started, here is Led Zeppelin in a live performance of "Rock and Roll", which was released as a single in 1972 but was released on their fourth album in 1971:

Music Sunday: The 1968 Edition

I've been reading a lot about 1968 the past couple of days, so I thought it would be interesting to see what was going on in music that year.

The first thing that jumped out at me about the year was that 1968 was when The Beatles recorded their double album, "The Beatles", known nearly universally as "The White Album". The recording sessions for the album when on from May 30 to October 4, and the record was released on November 22.

The first song on the first side of the album (remember when there were "albums" and they had "sides"?) was "Back in the U.S.S.R.", and it was predictably controversial, with some right-wing political groups, including the John Birch Society, insisting that the song was the band's way of declaring that they were in sympathy with Communism. What is so funny about that was that the U.S.S.R.'s official position was that The Beatles were "the belch of Western culture", and as late as 1980, Paul McCartney was refused permission to perform there.



While The Beatles were, by that time, not a new group and yet still had some time to go before they broke up, the other notable thing I found about 1968 were the comings and goings of bands.

Led Zeppelin performed together in front of an audience for the first time On September 7, albeit under the name The New Yardbirds. That performance was at a teen club in Gladsaxe, Denmark. Later on, on October 25, they played their first show under the name Led Zeppelin, at the University of Surrey.

Zeppelin also recorded their first album in 1968, and it was released early in 1969. One of the songs on that album was "Dazed and Confused", here in a live performance at Royal Albert Hall in 1970, with bonus Jimmy Page playing electric guitar with a bow, which is just always amazes me:



Another band that had their first performance in 1968, on August 4, was Yes. I have to admit to not being a huge Yes fan, but there are some of the band's songs that I do like. The first one I recall being aware of was "Roundabout", from 1971. Here is a live performance of the song from 1973:



But there were bands who also turned in their final performances in 1968.

The Buffalo Springfield, for example, performed together for the final time in Long Beach, California, on May 5. The band had formed in 1966, and while it had a short run, it was hugely influential as one of the first North American bands to hit it big in the United States in the wake of the British Invasion. Probably the band's best-known song is "For What it's Worth", written by Stephen Stills, recorded in 1966 and released in early 1967. Here is a television performance of the song from 1967, with bonus Neil Young acting silly:



That Long Beach performance in 1968 was not, in reality, The Buffalo Springfield's final final show. In 2011, the band reunited for six concerts, beginning with a June 1 show in Oakland, California.

Later on in the year Cream, often cited as the first rock supergroup, played its farewell show at Royal Albert Hall, in London. They, too, reunited, however, for their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 and again in 2005. Like the Buffalo Springfield, Cream only lasted for two years, from 1966 to 1968.

I think my favorite song from Cream is "Tales of Brave Ulysses", from the band's second album, "Disraeli Gears". I always love it when classical literature finds its way into rock music, so that's probably why I like this so much. This performance of the song comes from The Smothers Brothers Show on May 17, 1968:

Music Sunday: The "Women Rock" Edition

I found a book at the library the other day, Rock Chronicles (Firefly Books, 2012; 576 pages), edited by David Roberts. Interesting book, and a valuable reference, as far as it goes. It's title, though, points up its limited nature: it includes what its editor and contributors consider rock acts. Purely pop acts are mostly missing, which serves to leave out most female acts. In a way, this makes sense. Of the 22 contributors to the volume, only one is a woman.

Well, rock has traditionally been a male stronghold. The men make the music, and the women are mostly relegated to minor roles when they have any role at all. There are exceptions, of course, which is the point I aim to make here today.

Looking through the book, I realized that I've been emphasizing male acts here on Music Sundays. That is difficult not to do, considering that the vast majority of acts, especially in the rock era, are made up predominantly of men. But, having noted the lack, I decided that today is a good day to highlight women in music.

I have to start with Janis Joplin, simply because she was so remarkable a singer. Probably best known for her recordings of "Me and Bobby McGee" and "Piece of My Heart", I really love her cover of "Summertime", here in a live performance in Stockholm in 1969:



Another remarkable performer, from another generation, is Pink. Pink can rock with the best of them and make on-point social comment at the same time, as here, in "Stupid Girls":



On occasion, women have taken a prominent place in bands. For example, who thinks about Fleetwood Mac without thinking about Stevie Nicks? Here, Nicks takes the lead on "Rhiannon" in a 1976 live performance on "The Midnight Special":



I might actually be sharing this next clip because I want to have ready access to it without having to hunt around for it on YouTube. However, I think it is a wonderful example of women, in this case Ann and Nancy Wilson, from Heart, taking a song written by men, for men to perform, and doing as good a job of performing it as anyone ever has and probably ever will. This is the performance of "Stairway to Heaven" from the recent Kennedy Center Honors tribute to Led Zeppelin:



Earlier, in the 1960s and 70s, women were active in the folk music scene, although, as always, the men got most of the recognition. Meanwhile, women like Joni Mitchell were writing and performing songs like "Both Sides Now" (which was a hit for Judy Collins) and "The Circle Game". Here is Mitchell performing both songs on Canadian television in 1968:



Of course, I've just scratched the surface here with examples of women in rock and folk and blues. I haven't even gotten to Motown yet, or to women in country music. I think I'll leave that for another Music Sunday. Goodness knows, the men have gotten and will get enough time in the spotlight here, as sthey do in the music industry generally.

What I read this year...

I read some books in 2012.

Not as many as I had planned to, but more than I read in 2011 (2 more, actually). I passed the 10,000 page threshold, which was my page goal for the year. I read both fiction and non-fiction, which is always my hope and my goal. Despite the fact that I ended up reading a few stinkers, I also found some really good books during the year.

To protect the guilty, and because good and bad is, to an extent a subjective judgement regarding fiction, I won't belabor the subject of which novels I read and did not like. Well, with one exception.

In May, I pickied up a book at the library called Natural Selection. It had an interesting premise: the evolution of a new species that leaves the sea, adapts to life on land, and then wreaks havoc. However, Dave Freedman, who wrote the novel, clearly has no real grasp on how evolution works, does not seem to be able to write a sympathetic character to save his life, and completely contradicts something he wrote earlier in the novel near the end in a way that destroys any credibility as a storyteller he had built in the earlier telling of the story. Not that he had built up much credibility at all.

Maybe I should be easier on Freedman. As I recall, it was his first novel. But Natural Selection was just such a bad book that I can't manage to work up much sympathy for him. Somehow, he managed to keep me turning the pages, but looking back I can't imagine how, except that I had a perverse curiosity to see if it could get any worse. And it did. I remember finishing the book and wondering how he managed to sell it to a publisher.

On the non-fiction side, I have to say that the least satisfying book I read this year was Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice, by Alisa Statman with Brie Tate, which I read in April. I've read a lot of books about Charles Manson, the cult he built up, and the horrible things they did. This book was by far the least helpful in understanding that whole situation. I think part of the trouble was that it was co-written by Sharon Tate's niece and a family friend based on writings left behind by one of Sharon's late sisters. As a picture of a family that disintegrated in the wake of the murder of a member of the family it probably has some merit, but the problem is that the family seems never to have found any peace and just passes down its desire for revenge to each succeeding generation. I can see how that could happen in such a situtation, especially when the crime that took their loved one's life attracted so much media attention, but the book really provides no insight. It left me feeling like I hadn't learned anything, but instead just made me feel like I had peeked in on family dynamics that would have been better left private.

On the other hand, I also read my favorite non-fiction in April. That was Life, by Keith Richards, with James Fox. Life is an amazing book. I won't go on about it here, except to say that if you have any interest at all in music, in The Rolling Stones, in the culture of the sixties and beyond...read this book. Even if you don't have any interest in any of those things, read the book anyway.

While you're at it, read Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with The Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It), by Bill German. I'm not really sure how two books about The Stones turned out to be some of my favorite reading all year. I've never really been that big a Stones fan. But both of these books are really good.

I read a lot of good fiction this year, but by far my favorites are two books in a series that combines fantasy, historical fiction, and a genre I don't read very much, romance. Those are A Discovery of Witches and Shadow of Night, both by Deborah Harkness. I picked up the first volume while browsing the shelves at my local library. It sounded interesting...at least, the vampires didn't sparkle...and so I checked it out and read it. I might not have done if I had realized that it was the first volume in the series and that the second volume hadn't even been published yet, especially when I finished it desperate to know what happened next. Fortunately, publication of the second volume was just a few months away. In that book, the action moves from Oxford in the present day to London during the reign of Elizabeth I. Like I said, it's a fantasy. Now I'm just waiting for the third volume to be published.

Well, if I reviewed everything on the list, this post would be way too long, so I'm just going to leave my full reading list for the year here with you. Each book is marked either F (fiction) or NF (non-fiction), and the ones I liked the best or felt were of special worth are marked with a double asterisk. Please note, though, that, especially with the fiction, these evaluations are very subjective and based on a lot of criteria, so your mileage may vary. For example, I liked Barbara Hambly's Ishmael very, very much. However, it is a genre novel based on two very old television series, Star Trek and Here Come The Brides, that I was a fan of when I was very young. A lot of the reason I liked the book was because Hambly managed to take two series that were very, very different and capture the spirit of both of them with an accuracy that I would not have believed possible. She also created a story that would have fit into an episode of either series. So, while it is a well-written book, I loved it for very personal reasons that you might not share.

January
**(1) Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood 1910 - 1969, by William J. Mann (422 pages) NF
(2) Gun Games, by Faye Kellerman (375 pages) F
(3) Red Mist, by Patricia Cornwell (498 pages) F
(4) Lucy’s Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins, by Donald C. Johanson and Kate Wong (309 pages) NF
February
(5) Hotel Translyvania, by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (252 pages) F
**(6) Ishmael, by Barbara Hambly (255 pages) F
March
(7) Hangman, by Faye Kellerman (422 pages) F
(8) Blood and Ice, by Robert Masello (675 pages) F
(9) Victims, by Jonathan Kellerman (338 pages) F
April
**(10) A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness (579 pages) F
(11) Restless Souls: The Sharon Tate Family’s Account of Stardom, the Manson Murders, and a Crusade for Justice, by Alisa Statman with Brie Tate (381 pages)
**(12) Role Models, by John Waters (304 pages) NF
**(13) Life, by Keith Richards, with James Fox (564 pages) NF
May
(14) Natural Selection, by Dave Freedman (414 pages) F
(15) Dead Time, by Stephen White (400 pages) F
(16) Latter-Day Secrets, by Natalie R. Collins (377 pages) F
June
**(17) The Calling: A Year in the Life of an Order of Nuns, by Catherine Whitney (250 pages) NF
(18) The Blackbird Papers, by Ian Smith (326 pages) F
(19) Virgin, by F. Paul Wilson (309 pages) F
July
(20) The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep and Never Had To, by DC Pierson (226 pages) F
**(21) Corn Flakes With John Lennon and Other Tales from a Rock’N’Roll Life, by Robert Hilburn (280 pages) NF
September
**(22) Shadow of Night, by Deborah Harkness (584 pages) F
(23) World Prehistory: A Brief Introduction, 3d edition, by Brian M. Fagan (299 pages) NF
**(24) How to Think Like a Neandertal, by Thomas Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge (210 pages) NF
(25) Summer of the Dragon, by Elizabeth Peters (277 pages) F
(26) LZ-75: The Lost Chronicles of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 American Tour, by Stephen Davis (217 pages) NF
October
(27) Bones Are Forever, by Kathy Reichs (288 pages) F
(28) A River in the Sky, by Elizabeth Peters (307 pages) F
**(29) Under Their Thumb: How a Nice Boy from Brooklyn Got Mixed Up with The Rolling Stones (and Lived to Tell About It), by Bill German (354 pages) NF
(30) The Bone Bed, by Patricial Cornwell (463 pages) F
November
**(31) The Prism and the Rainbow: A Christian Explains Why Evolution Is Not a Threat, by Joel W. Martin (170 pages) NF
December
(32) The Overlook, by Michael Connelly (262 pages) F
**(33) Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design, by Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross (401 pages) NF

Cumulative page total: 11,788 pages.

Stuck at home with a cold...

I'll be honest here. I've spent most of the past couple of days staring at the television. I've got a cold, and that's what I do when I'm too sick to want to do anything else. This has been true since I was very young. In fact, when I was in elementary school, I used to look forward to having a sick day, so I could watch the game shows, back when TV game shows were interesting. Shows like the original "Jeopardy", like "Concentration, like "Password". You had to have a least a little bit of a brain to be able to win these games. This is still true of "Jeopardy", but otherwise I can't think of any game shows that require much brain power.

At least my sick-day television watching is easier in these days of the remote control. I guess I'm giving away my age here, but when I was in elementary school, you had to get up off the couch and switch channels manually. I suppose there were primistive remotes around on some high-end TVs in those days, but I didn't know anyone who had one. Now, all I need to do is aim the remote and click.

So, I've been spending a lot of time aiming and clicking. Not so much on Christmas Day. There was a Doctor Who marathon on, leading up to the new Christmas Special, so that had my attention most of the day. There was also a Who marathon yesterday, but they were all episodes that I've seen recently, so I ventured on to other things, in between trying to cough up a lung.

I tried to catch up on the news yesterday, but most of the programming on MSNBC, which is my punditry of choice these days, was mostly showing "year-in-review" programming. I don't like "year-in-review" shows. The other cable news stations were busy purusing their agendas, which I also wasn't much interested in, and so I moved on to other things. There was a "Castle" marathon on, and I watched a couple of those episodes.

Along the way, the past couple of days, I also watched three episodes of some cable show about conspiracy theories hosted by Jesse Ventura. I like conspiracy theories, even though I don't generally believe in them, and the shows were diverting but ultimately silly. I looked for movies to watch but didn't find much interesting. I thought about catching up on "Dexter" episodes, but decided that I'd have to pay more attention than I was willing or able to summon up, so I didn't do that.

The aforementioned Doctor Who Christmas Special, "The Snowmen", was very good, but again, needed more attention than I was able to give to it, so I'm going to have to watch it again. Same with last night's new episode of "The Hour" - it was good, but I'm going to have to watch again when it comes up on On Demand.

The best thing I saw, though, in the past few days (yes, even better than my illness-addled viewing of "The Snowmen") was last night's broadcast of The Kennedy Center Honors. I usually watch those broadcasts very selectively; the shows can be very good, but the can also be very boring. Last night's was the best one I've ever seen, I think. First of all, Led Zeppelin was honored, which I think is just entirely too cool for words. While I'm not sure that, as Jack Black said when he was introducing the segment honoring the band, Zep is the "best band ever", but if not, they're certainly close. And the other honorees, Dustin Hoffman, David Letterman, blues guitarist Buddy Guy, and ballet dancer Natalia Makarova were also more than deserving of their accolades.

I especially liked the tribute to Letterman, which was perfect for his slightly off-center persona. Tina Fey's introduction to the tribute was one of the funniest things I've heard in a long time. The ballet in tribute to Makarova was beautiful. I didn't get to see most of the tribute to Hoffman - I was having an extended coughing fit. What I did see was very nice.

The highlights of the night, though were the musical tributes to Zeppelin and to Buddy Guy. Both were brilliant. I especially liked that Jason Bonham, Zepplin drummer John Bohnam, was part of the festivities, and that Ann and Nancy Wilson tackled, and pretty muchy owned "Stairway to Heaven".

But the best thing? The very best thing? That was a quick glimpse of US President Barack Obama singing along to "Whole Lotta Love". Yes, I know. There are many things that are much more important things for a president to know. But somehow, it was just a beautiful thing to see.

Maybe it was just my cold-addled mind, but I really liked that.

Oh, and just a note: I'm feeling better today, but still not well enough to proofread this. So, if you find any typos or other errors, you get two Internet points. But if you do find errors, I don't want to know about them.

Music Sunday: The Led Zeppelin Edition, plus a book review

As I mentioned a couple of days ago here, during the past week I read LZ-75: The Lost Chronicles of Led Zeppelin's 1975 American Tour (2010, Gotham Books; 217 pages), by Stephen Davis. Davis has written about the band before, in his Hammer of the Gods (1985), which was criticized as sensationalized and inaccurate by the members of the band. I haven't read that book, but due to its reputation, I didn't expect much from LZ-75.

As it turns out, LZ-75 isn't really about Led Zeppelin, but more about Davis's experience covering the band's 1975 American tour. He made it sound just a miserable time, and again highlighted the drinking (primarily by John Bonham who, of course, isn't around to defend himself), the groupies, and the difficulties both musical and technical, of the tour. He makes sure to point out that in its early years, Led Zeppelin was routinely discounted and criticized by Rolling Stone Magazine, a publication that Davis worked for during that time. I think it is interesting that Davis couldn't get an assignment from Rolling Stone to cover the 1975 tour after he was told that an assignment with a reputable publication was a requirement for him to have access to the tour, but ended up getting the assignment he needed from The Atlantic Monthly, not a publication known for its rock/pop music coverage. It is even more interesting that the article Davis eventually turned in based on his experiences on the tour was not printed by the magazine. Well, things like that happen in publishing, but one wonders exactly why they declined the article. Davis's excuse is that the "elderly" editor-in-chief of the magazine "hated" his article (p. 194).

LZ-75 was only ever written, according to the author, because he found his long-lost notes from the tour and thought that "there was a story that could be told" (p. 4). But, it seems to me that it is more Davis's story than they story of a band on tour. Which could have been interesting, but ultimately wasn't, especially. The most interesting thing in the book, from my perspective, is Davis's reporting, in a few pages, of a meeting between Jimmy Page and William S. Burroughs, in which the two men discussed, among other things, crowds and the control of them in the context of the live rock and roll show. In these discussions, Page seems most interested in balancing the energies of band and crowd so that things don't get out of hand, while Burroughs seems obsessed with the times when crowds have gotten out of hand, with disastrous results.

Other than that, I can see few reasons to recommend Davis's book. But, it gives me a chance to share some of Led Zeppelin's music. First up is "Kashmir", which is from the album "Physical Graffiti", which was released during the tour chronicled in Davis's book. I find it interesting that, while Davis makes a big deal about the fact that Rolling Stone Magazine was both critical and dismissive of the band in its early years, six of their songs placed on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. "Kashmir" came in at number 141 on the list. This live performance comes from May 24, 1975, at Earls Court in London:



Of course, the Led Zeppelin song to place highest on Rolling Stone's list is "Stairway to Heaven", the most requested song of the 1970s. It placed at number 31 on Rolling Stone's list and in 2000 it placed number 3 on VH1's list of the 100 Greatest Rock Songs. I believe I shared this song a few weeks ago here, but with it's reputation as one of the greatest song ever, I feel comfortable sharing it again, especially since this is a different live version than I shared before, this one being from another of the 1975 Earls Court shows, on May 25, 1975:



"Whole Lotta Love" came in at number 75 on Rolling Stone's list of greatest songs:



The other three songs that made Rolling Stone's list were "Black Dog", at number 300; "Heartbreaker", at number 238; and "Ramble On", at number 440.

And, because I love drum solos, here is John Bonham's "Moby Dick" drum solo from Led Zeppelin's January 9, 1970 show at Royal Albert Hall in London:



Besides the six songs that Led Zeppelin placed in the Rolling Stone list of 500 Greatest Songs, at least three of the band's albums placed on its list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, the band itself came in at number 14 on the magazine's list of 100 Greatest Artists, Jimmy Page placed at number 9 on Rolling Stone's list of 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time, and Robert Plant came in at number 15 on the magazine's list of 100 Greatest Singers.

It seems to me that, in the end, Led Zeppelin won the argument with Rolling Stone about its worth as a band.

Three books in four days...

I haven't done that in awhile. Finish reading three books in four days, that is. You know, ignoring things that need to get done and staying up much later than I should considering the time in the morning the alarm is set to go off, all because the book I'm reading is just too good - or at least too involving - to put down.

Well, that was the case for two out of the three books I finished reading between Saturday and Tuesday just past. The other one got read just because it wasn't that long, was pretty easy reading, and I wanted to get through it to know if I could use some of the information from it to help construct next Sunday's Music Sunday post.

The first book I finished, on Saturday, was Summer of the Dragon (1979, Tor Books; 277 pages), by Elizabeth Peters. It's a romantic mystery from the same writer who has given us the Amelia Peabody mysteries, and while it is slight in many ways, it was a fun read. The story concerns D. J. Abbot, an anthropology student who secures a summer job working for eccentric billionaire Hank Hunnicutt. The main attraction of the job is the fact that Hunnicutt lives in northern Arizona, 600 miles away from her family. It isn't that D. J. doesn't love her family; she does. But they are, well, a bit eccentric themselves, and she would rather not spend the entire summer with them.

Hunnicutt is looking for a summer intern because he has found something in the desert. Although D. J. and her advisor at school suspect that this something probably isn't really anything, since Hunnicutt has a reputation for interests that are not entirely scientific and is known to surround himself with mediums, UFO enthusiasts, treasure hunters, and other fringe types. However, the pay is good and the scenery will be different, so D. J. takes the job. But, when she arrives in Arizona, D. J. finds more than she bargained for. Hunnicutt is being very mysterious about what he has found, most of the hangers-on at Hunnicutt's ranch are positively hostile toward D. J., and mysterious things are happening. But D. J. likes Hunnicutt from the beginning, and finds his right-hand man quite attractive despite his abrasive personality.

Developments move quickly, and soon D. J. is in over her head. It's a fun story. I won't claim that some of the characters are not rather flat and stereotypical, but that didn't hurt my enjoyment of the story overall. As a bonusm the archaeology is accurate; after all the author is an Egyptologist with a doctorate from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. Summer of the Dragon, in short, isn't great literature, but it's a quick, fun read. Maybe it's just me, but sometimes a good story trumps great literature.

I'll only mention the book I finished - in fact, read in it's entirety - on Sunday briefly, because it is going to be part of Sunday's music blog post. I'll just say here that it was LZ-75: The Lost Chronicles of Led Zeppelin's 1975 American Tour (2010, Gotham Books; 217 pages), by Stephen Davis. It was another quick read, but not my favorite book about the music industry, a genre that I enjoy a lot. It isn't a bad book, but it seemed to me it was more about the author's experience on tour with Zeppelin rather than really being about the band or the tour itself. But...more about that in a couple of days.

The third book, which I finished reading on Tuesday, was Bones Are Forever (2012, Scribner; 288 pages), by Kathy Reichs. This book tells another story in the further adventures of Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist, upon which the television series Bones is based. There are no similarities between the character in the books and on the TV series other than her name and her occupation, but that's okay. The books are very good, and I enjoy the TV series immensely. I just accept that they are two very different things.

In this, the fifteenth book in the series, Temperance finds herself investigating the deaths of four newborn infants over several years, all apparently born of the same woman. The mother has disappeared, and Brennan and detective Andrew Ryan, with whom Brennan has a past, find themselves searching all over Canada to find her. Starting in Montreal, they follow her trail to Edmonton and then to the far north, to Yellowknife, where, they find, things are not entirely what they seemed when their investigation began.

I hesitate to say any more about the story, for fear of giving away too many spoilers. I will say that Bones are Forever is a good book, well worth the time spent in the reading. Reichs has once again constructed an exciting, engrossing mystery, something she is very good at. The characters are well-drawn. The plot is just convoluted enough to hold the reader's interest without going overboard with twists. For someone like me who has read most if not all of the books in the series, the main characters continue to grow and remain interesting, an unusual and not inconsiderable attraction in series mysteries.

Music Sunday: The Day Late and a Dollar Short Edition

Yes, I know. It's Monday, not Sunday. But, it's a holiday here in the US, Labor Day, and it's been a busy weekend. And so real life, as it does sometimes, got in the way of Music Sunday. But I didn't want to completely miss my music post for the week, and so here I am, taking a break from working on the novel I'm writing, to share a couple of very long songs with you.

First, since this week is going to be very short on the history of the songs I'm posting, I thought I'd leave you this little history of the first decades of rock and roll, by Don McLean, "American Pie", from 1972. You can look up the interpretations people have made of the lyrics here, but rest assured, Buddy Holly is here, and Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger and the Stones, and a few others:



And then, there is Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven". I think this version is from "The Song Remains The Same". Maybe it's just me, but it seems like Robert Plant might have sung this song a few too many times by this point; he seems a little bored to me through parts of the performance. But no matter, it's still a great song:



I was thinking about also including "Alice's Restaurant", by Arlo Guthrie. But then I decided that it is much more appropriate for Thanksgiving. You'll probably see it here around about then.

But, since today is a holiday, I'm going to go off and do holiday things now. Music Sunday should be back on its regular day next week.