“‘Scuse me, while I kiss this guy…” “There’s a bathroom on the right…”

Those are some of the better known cases of “disk-lexia” – lyrics we THINK we hear.

Hendrix, of course, wasn’t gay. He sang, “Kiss the SKY”. And CCR wasn’t pointing to the lavatory. They sang, “There’s a bad moon on the rise”.

In marketing, music and life, perception may be reality, but what you see and hear ain’t necessarily what you get.

Over the course of conducting his interviews, Frank learned this right quick. One of his subjects was rather surprised when he got our first draft transcript for his approval. After all, he was pretty sure that he would never have described Jimmy Page’s playing of the Theremin as “pathetic”.

Houston, we have an “oops”.

So it fell to me, as Frank’s editor and resident linguist, to go back and unravel the threads of that original conversation. The troublesome phrase turned out to be: “He was moving his hand back and forth in the path of the Theremin”.

But hot damn! It sure sounded like “pathetic” to me, too. Good catch by our esteemed interviewee. And that’s exactly why we asked everyone to review what they’d told Frank before we published it.

I don’t know about you but, in any job I’ve every had, you can sweat bullets over the big stuff. And it’s ALWAYS the little things that raise their ugly heads and bite you in the derriere.

What has all this got to do with Led Zeppelin?

Well, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones had the studio smarts to know all about those little details. As renowned Zeppelin author, Robert Godwin, explained to Frank, in 1968/’69, when Led Zeppelin’s first two albums were recorded, there was a universal flaw in recording techniques. No one had figured out how to successfully capture the “bottom end” of bass and percussion.

And by the way, in those days, “stereo” was cutting edge in America but still mainly foreign in the UK where Zeppelin recorded the debut LP and parts of Led Zeppelin II.

If the recording engineer put too much bottom end on the master, the lathe would skip when cutting the lacquer and it’d drop out. However, the folks in Motown had figured it out. And, thanks to John Paul Jones’ passion for Motown, he knew exactly how they did it.

It was largely this attention to detail – not only in performing the music, but also in recording it – that made these early Led Zeppelin albums so sensational. They sound as fresh and exciting today as they did back then.

Amazing what you can learn when you talk to people, EH? (That’s for you, Steve and Bri…).

What are YOUR favourite examples of “disk-lexia”? They don’t have to come from Zeppelin…

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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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Cool! Our very first blog post!

Welcome to Enzepplopedia’s brand-new website. Enzepplopedia is devoted to Led Zeppelin, because of my brother Frank Reddon’s
encyclopaedic knowledge of the band. My name’s Lou Anne and I’ll be the one writing here most often, especially at the very beginning.

Anything that’s said about Led, though, is coming from Frank, the expert. Because there’s no way I could make this stuff up. OK? You already know far more about Zeppelin than I ever will, although I’m learning, thanks to the bro.

Frank and I hope you’ll enjoy your stay here. We have a sister site, too, where you’ll find even more information. I’ll tell you about that later.

First, let’s get acquainted.

Frank’s an extreme kind of guy. He doesn’t do anything by half. He’s training to run his SIXTH 100-miler at the end of May. That’s like running from Buffalo, New York to downtown Toronto.

Except this will be a trail run along the Niagara Escarpment. Mud. Hills. Forests. Wild animals. A real chance of plunging over a cliff in the dark. No thanks. Frank can have it.

Why do you need to know that? Because his Zeppelin project has also been an ultra-marathon. It started the first time he ever heard Led Zeppelin. He was 9.

We come from a musical family. Mom played piano. Dad was a dentist who would have preferred being a professional euphonium player. I hack away at piano and flute. And then there’s Frank. The most gifted one of the whole clan.

When he was two years old, Grandpa gave him a rocking horse for Christmas and Santa gave him a pair of cymbals. Real ones. Dad would put a brass band record on his hi-fi, Frank would mount his steed and rock in perfect time to the music.

There might have been only one single, solitary cymbal crash on the entire record. But our Frankie was ready. He’d dismount, race to his bedroom, grab the cymbals, remount his horse and CRASH! He’d play those cymbals at precisely the right moment. Never missed a beat.

Silly bugger. It was hilarious to watch. At the time, he also did a lot of other weird stuff that he’d kill me for telling you about. (But I might, if you leave a comment and politely enquire…).

So I didn’t really pay much attention to his musical quirks. How could I know he was developing a wicked ear and had a raw talent for music?

This was fun but I’ll have to pick up the story with our next blog post. ‘Til then, Frank and I hope you enjoy the new site. And thanks for dropping by!

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