THEM BLOND HAIRED ANGELS : A TRIBUTE TO LED ZEPPELIN

It was a hot summer night and as usual I had tossed and turned in my bed for a couple of hours. Searching for a way to kill time I went out and switched on the TV. As the dark black screen gave way to the plaintive voice of Robert Plant singing the first chords of ‘Black Dog’, I knew something had fundamentally changed in me. I had been transformed into a rebel. It was as if someone had knocked off the corks plugged into my ears due to years of listening to beach blond divas in tight plastic clothes just by the sheer magic of their music. And that someone was Led Zeppelin : Them Blond haired Angels.

I was the quintessential child of the 1990’s brought up in a country that was just beginning to throw its arms wide open to the world. I grew up listening to MTV Select and singing aloud with my elder sister to Backstreet Boys and Boyzone. That was my introduction to “English” music as it was called back then. As years rolled on I started listening to Bryan Adams, which made children “cool” in those days. But when that moment of epiphany happened on my couch I somehow knew that my perspective of looking at things had been altered.

As the program progressed I became more and more entangled in the wizardry of those four magicians and when it ended I was on the internet within seconds trawling through their biographies. Within a matter of days I had finished listening to all their songs and from then on I graduated to becoming even bigger fans of The Doors, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, AC-DC and many others. Yet it was Led Zeppelin who had been the stepping stone to that golden generation of the 1960’s and 1970’s and shall remain the closest to my heart.

Ravi Shankar once said that a lifetime was not enough to understand the work of Rabindranath Tagore. Such is the sheer diversity and brilliance of the work produced by Led Zeppelin that much the same can be said about them. The drum intro of “Rock And Roll” and “The Song Remains The Same” are moments of superlative invention. They almost invented the art of beginning songs with a slow beat and then changing gears abruptly in the midst of songs like “Bring It On Home” and “Whole Lotta Love” and mastered it with “Stairway To Heaven”. Whether you are sad, happy, haunted, jilted or even horny, one can find a song for almost any mood. And name a genre of music be it Country (Friends), Rock (Heartbreaker), Folk (Bron Y aur Stamp) or even Texas Rockabilly (Hot Dog), Led Zeppelin left their indelible mark of genius on each one of them.

When Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Paul Jones and John Bonham a.k.a Led Zeppelin began their journey could they ever envisage that four decades later, a young boy living in India could derive such joy from them. A year ago, as I sat dangling my legs on the footboard of a train taking me to Calcutta, the rays of the rising run had just begun to kiss the waves of Chilka Lake almost as if someone had lit a million sparklers beneath its surface. It was at that exact moment that the first riffs of “Stairway to Heaven” began to pervade my senses and I knew that I had found my ticket to divinity. Go find yours.