Untitled

blahfacebrittany:

fuckyeahledzeppelin:

feelgoodhits:

Led Zeppelin - The Song Remains the Same

While I’m thinking about albums that remind me of winter, there’s this. I got The Song Remains the Same for Christmas one year, along with a poster and a shirt. I stayed in my room for an entire day devouring every glorious second of this album. A few months later the Mini Cinema started playing the movie on Fridays at midnight and we’d be there every week, mesmerized.

This album - and mostly this song -  defines the early part of my teenage years. Every memory of time spent in Eddie’s fort or Dennis’s garage or Julie’s bedroom or in the sump or the schoolyard has a song from this album attached to it. Every plan we hatched, every long, pot fueled discussion about what we would do with our lives and the rock star lives we would lead were soundtracked with the wail of Jimi Page’s guitar.

Double album. Just nine songs and four sides of music. A side long Dazed and Confused that was so long I knew couples that started dating and broke up while it played, so profound for us at the time musically that the build up of tension in the music left us spent when it was over. The Moby Dick drum solo. Does anybody remember laughter? John Henry Bonham! Rock and Roll.

We knew this album inside and out. Every note, every nuance, every word that was changed or added from studio versions. We played it in the park, we played it at parties, we played it the dark of night on our headphones, listening to certain parts over and over, pretending we were Jimi Page or Robert Plant or maybe just pretending we were there at Madison Square Garden, like everyone slightly older than us claimed to be. We wore the tour shirts as if we had been there.

This album is magic for me. I may not love Zeppelin the way I used to; I barely listen to them anymore. But any song from these discs and the title song in particular, just one note is all it takes, and I’m back there in that place. Fourteen years old, full of angst and turmoil. I remember five of us in the dark in Eddie’s room, listening to this song, contemplating life the way teenagers who smoked too much pot are prone to do and I thought -this is all temporary. All these stupid feelings of not knowing what comes next and wanting to be a kid but still grow up, it’s all temporary. It will all fall into place in high school. Right now, I’m just going to enjoy the hell out of myself because this right here, with the music and the dark and the floaty feeling in my head, this is what it’s all about. And it’s so weird listening to this song right now, remembering exactly the way I felt at that moment when I thought I had it all figured out.

And this is why I don’t listen to this song too often. Who the hell wants to feel fourteen again?