In our previous post, I was telling you that Frank was 9 years old when he heard his first Led Zeppelin tune. It was Dazed and Confused, played on a jukebox in our family’s favourite Chinese restaurant.
You know how it is sometimes, right? There are defining moments in all our lives but we don’t realize their significance until we look back at our past. This was one that would change Frank’s life.
He started collecting everything Zep as soon as he was old enough to have the spending money. He went to Zep conventions. Record shows. Made friends with other collectors and fans. Most of all, he listened. The kid might have been deaf, because he listened LOUD. But we knew he wasn’t.
Mom, Dad and I could never figure out what he heard in that wall of noise. Robert Plant’s five-octave falsetto grated like nails on a blackboard. The genius of Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones’ playing was lost on us. And would that drum solo in Moby Dick EVER end?
When I was Frank’s age, The Beatles were my musical idols. I was 8 years old when they debuted on the Ed Sullivan Show and I remember that night with the same clarity of detail as I do the JFK assassination from three months earlier.
Now, of course, I love all the classic rock bands. But I lived through the Beatlemania years. The Rolling Stones and later, Led Zeppelin, were too hard and gritty for me back then. I took refuge from hard rock by exploring the earlier stuff, like Elvis and Motown. Big bands and jazz.
I’ll always love The Beatles. A big part of it is the nostalgia. The innocence. But I now appreciate how the musical mastery and technical brilliance of each Led Zeppelin member outshone my heroes’. The lyrics “I wanna hold your hand” or “she loves you yeah, yeah, yeah” blanch in comparison to that “bustle in your hedgerow” that’s “just a spring clean for the May Queen”.
Frank was already running miles ahead, on a quest to explain the appeal of Zeppelin’s music. He was fascinated by the band’s ability to improvise live in concert, as evidenced by his now-massive collection of live concert performances.
He started documenting the musical differences from one concert to the next. And he did it in a way that had never been done before. It took him over a decade.
In his first year at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Frank submitted a paper for his course in popular music history, called The Musical Evolution of Led Zeppelin: 1968-1980. His prof was blown away and encouraged him to write a book some day.
Frank has logged over 18,000 hours in writing about that. Yes, he kept track. He documents everything, from running and tennis to his work and book projects. That attentiveness to detail (to put a polite term on it) is what makes him such a great researcher. And that’s how he dug up some pretty amazing info on his favourite band and yours.
What’s your first memory of Led Zeppelin? Your favourite album or song? Did you ever see the band perform in concert?
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