03 January 2010

No sharks allowed

I was in the car listening to a Led Zeppelin song on the radio, loving the intro and how beautiful it was but simultaneously dreading the bridge, which turns the song into something else entirely -- something else, as a woman, to be dreaded. It's that energy that says, "I'm full of lust and I'm not taking no for an answer. You're in my path and I'm comin' at ya, ready or not."

I just thought for the ten-thousandth time how much more I would have liked those guys if they could have done more than a song or two that was simply beautiful and not full of all that pushy "baby, baby" energy.

Then I opened the New York Times Book Review to discover there's a new biography of them that to hear the reviewer tell it leaves out much about the music and rehashes the gnarly details of their decadent rock stardom. There's some hideous incident involving a woman and a shark that I can only imagine. A bandmember pooh-poohed all that, though, saying they'd only done all that nasty business "for a laugh." "The thing I remember most from that time was the laughter," he said. I wonder if all those women remember the laughter the same way. Ick.

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