The Uncritical Fan

A great poet, who appears in illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light which is any where radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore little solicitous whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant countries, whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they are equally welcome to his uncritical audience.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from Shakespeare; or, the Poet

A couple of days ago someone posted to a Led Zeppelin fan bulletin board a link to a a piece I wrote about Zep back in March. The piece--really an homage to a live, small-audience performance recorded by the BBC in 1971--was full of my not-particularly-controversial criticisms of the band--Bonham's sludgy time-keeping, Plant's silly screeching and preening, the sheer excess of it all.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised that the response from the Zep fans was like a cut-and-paste from a "Beavis & Butthead" script--"Zep rools, you suck!!!!!," that kind of thing, the type of correspondence that asks for no engagement and requires no response. Most of the posters seemed to have little perspective on music beyond their own, obviously narrow experiences. "Welcome to the world of the indie snob...All of this is done to impress his Belle & Sebastian loving friends. Elvis Costello wrote "real" songs," one guy wrote. For the record I've never heard Belle & Sebastian; I don't like Elvis Costello (at least not his post-1978 output); and except for the output of SST records in the early 1980s there never was such a thing as indie rock.

Worse yet the attitude of most posters was violently conformist. "...let's burn the bastard who bad mouths LZ :gets [sic] out a pitch fork and a torch," went one post. But these are the days in which we are living. It's the W-ization of America. You're either with me or against me. Kill all infidels. Round up the non-conformists and pack 'em off to Gitmo.

The occasional thoughtful comment was found back at the original board:

Robert acting like a fruitcake is my favorite aspect of the DVD! JPJ gets close with that dance he does on "Dazed and Confused", but no one can touch the head twitching and pelvic gyrations of Plant. :lol: Oh yeah, the music was good, too. ;)

Fair enough, certainly the goofiness of the preening and the screeching is a big part of Zeppelin's charm, a goofiness that was less apparently self mocking in 1971 than it appears today.

The guy missed the point about being a LED ZEPPELIN fan. We WANTED self-indulgence. We wanted Jimmy Page to play long guitar solos..and the violin bow thus creating his own rock orchestra...

Um, well, okay. The folks I knew back in high school who went to Zeppelin shows mostly just wanted a place to drink blackberry brandy, smoke cheap reefer, and pass out, so maybe long, bowed guitar solos with little or no harmonic or rhythmic development WERE giving the people what they wanted (oh yeah, and throw in the Holst quote to make it seem orchestral--frankly Page's multitracked studio parts were much more orchestral in nature). I never saw Zep but I did see Page do the bowed solo thing with The Firm in the 1980s. Terrible. A bad idea poorly executed and dragged out for an eternity. As I said before--little or no development harmonically, rhythmically, or even timbrally. Just a bad solo arco or not. Then again, for all his greatness as an arranger of riffage, Page was never a great soloist (Hee hee! They're gonna kill me now on that stupid board!) He got off a couple of very strong solos, most especially on the studio version of "Since I've Been Loving You," but mostly he twiddled on a bunch of fast hammer-on triplets alternating with sustained single note bends. The parts he put together for songs were packed with ideas. His solos were not. For my part the goof in Spinal Tap where the guitarist is playing a long, unaccompanied solo including rubbing the strings of the guitar not with a bow but with a violin, which he pauses to tune, got the Page shtick just right!

But most interestingly, the correspondence from the Ledheads was largely sycophantic and frighteningly devotional, stalker-ish even:

There was nothing bad about led zeppelin. They are the beginning and the end of rock and roll. No one else even comes close, cept maybe the stones. Anybody who doesn't worship zeppelin is a lost soul, and I feel sorry for them.

If this guy is serious I hope his mother or wife has him in therapy!

But my favorite comment was this facetious attack: 

though your entire deal here completely lacked any signs of thought, i did like a few things about it: -i liked how you BOTH praised AND knocked zep at the same time...

Well, duh! The implication of course is that one must either be an unquestioning, adoring, aggrandizing fan, or hate everything and not listen at all. The notion, it seems, is that a listener should never be critical. All this got me thinking about the uncritical fan. There is nothing more dangerous and deadly to a performing artist than the uncritical fan.

When Jerry Garcia died, Dead scholar David Gans spent a lot of time talking about the generally terrible music Garcia made during the final ten years of his life.

All he had to do was show up and play his guitar and people loved it, and the uncritical adulation that we showered upon those guys was one of the most detrimental things, because it meant they had no incentive to improve.

Gans' observation was apt and spot on. Performing art is not merely a presentation but a communication, not just a give and take between audience and performer but but an emotional transaction in which exchange, change, and response actually occur. (That's why most of the live music I prefer today are gigs I see in small jazz clubs like the Village Vanguard where improvisation is the order of the day and the audience/performer exchange is strong).

The life cycle of a performer's career seems to begin with that kind of exchange, but, if an artist is lucky enough to hit it big, he or she inevitably seems to reach a point where the kind of sheer adulation preferred by these Zep fans becomes the norm. An ugly cycle begins to dominate a performer's career. Self-indulgence of the worse order sets in (because audiences will lap up any shit they are fed), and a simulacrum of exchange begins to replace real exchange in performance.

Audiences want to feel that they are in the presence of something special. Artists need to feel loved. It's classic co-dependence. But this cycle is always corrosive to art. Certainly it happened in Led Zeppelin's career. But it's not a phenomenon that is exclusive to rock. You see it in classical music and drama too, at least here in NY. Every audience member seems so desperately to want to be in the presence of something great and classic that a standing ovation is inevitable every night!

I started this piece with a quote from Emerson. Ol' Ralph Waldo was writing about Shakespeare and the quote is part of his defense of Shakespeare's appropriation of standard and folk material for his plays. It's not directly relevant to the case of Zeppelin. Certainly the band appropriated blues material (and later English folk material) for an audience that was and remains largely ignorant of it's source (at least in terms of direct experience) . But that wasn't Zep's fault or intention. They called attention to the original sources as much as anybody. But the quote IS relevant in it's implications for rock performers. In illiterate times the artist doesn't need to worry about inspiration. He can steal, crib, sample, regurgitate, spew, any kind of shit from any kind of source and find it equally welcome by his audience.

We don't live in truly illiterate times--at least in the industrialized West people can read at greater rates than ever before, and populations have access to music and cultural information of an unprecedented scale. But it seems that we do live in a time of willful ignorance and conformity and really, there is no difference.

Comments

[spelling Bea]

So - no mention of the fact that YOU GOT IT WRONG over the Plant/leotard and fairie lyrics part? Nice to see you can admit to your mistakes - NOT.

[jackson]

Great post Jason. I'm with you, at least as far as being a critical fan goes. My own view of Led Zepplin is much the same as yours, and I consider myself a fan. I'm a Kinks fan as well, but I can say with all honesty that alot of their albums are 75% crap. Blind appreciation and accepatnce of everything an artist does isn't going to help the artist any, other than put dollars in his or her pocket. As you well know; 'those not busy being born are busy dying" or something like that anyway.

[chervokas]

Leotard vs. tight flairs, fairies vs. Golem, the misty mountains, the may queen (a figure from europe's old days of agrarian pan-theism), Valhalla...what's the difference?

[Tom W.]

I loved this post. What goes for Zep also goes for James Joyce, I'm with ya.

(And as I mentioned on IM, if the number of everyday references were the standard, SpinalTap would widely be considered the finest movie of all time).

[jackson]

I'm sorry, Spinal Tap isn't the finest movie of all time?

[spelling bea]

BIG difference - and so you all know it, Chervokas is the author of this article - the one who can't admit when he's wrong.

[spelling bea]

Oh, and that'll be GOLLUM - Mr Super-journalist.

[jackson]

Alright, some action! I haven't had the pleasure of a good blog spar since the election. Spelling Bea - Jason cannot be wrong, it's called opinion, we all have 'em, if you disagree, fine, start a Led Zep Rulz blog and be done with it. I for one agree with Jason, and for the record I don't begrudge Mr. Plant the stagewear, but the lyrics....put it this way, I like Tolkien, I also like Stephen King, but I don't want to listen to somebody sing about Castle Rock or The Dark Tower, thank you very much. I, for one, have never had a bustle in my hedgegrow, and wouldn't recognize one if I saw it.

[sean]

Guess this is the nite for hanging around your site. I like Zeppelin, but could never deal with the whole rock-god storming down from Valhalla while reading Tolkien thing. But you'll never convince a fan of theirs that Plant's trips to Middle Earth were not manna from Heaven. Really, there's nothing more annoying than Zep devotees that can't stand a little criticism (except maybe for Pink Floyd fans, but that's another post.)
As for Page, his best attribute was, outside of writing some great riffs, as a producer. Chuck Eddy once said that their primary achievment was in the way they concieved aural space. Me, I just want to hear "Trampled Under Foot."