Their music is very very hard to be objective about. I also picked up Coda and Presence on Friday. I haven't re-bought ITTOD this time. I remember seeing Plant do In The Evening at the Marquee in 87 (maybe 88) and it nearly taking my head off. The studio version has sounded distinctly weedy ever since. And yes both these reissues sound utterly magnificent in this new and expanded form. I would recommend them to anyone even remotely interested in what can be done with drums and the electric guitar.

I am well aware how much of my time spent exploring new / unheard music is an endless and mostly fruitless quest to re-experience something close to that first hit of Ziggy or Fragile or Berlin or Houses of the Holy or Marquee Moon or 1969 Live or Coltrane Live In Paris or Kind Of Blue or Y or White Riot or Nippon Soul or Mahler 5 or Firebird Suite or or Al Green's Greatest Hits or Motown Story or TagoMago or Tristan or Callas' Operatic Arias or whatever it was that stopped my in my tracks when school seemed to go on for ever and pretty much all I wanted to do was listen to records.

Zeppelin are of course a huge part of that feeling of the world simultaneously becoming so much larger through the reach of the music and also much much smaller and simpler. Buying Houses of the Holy in the summer of 74 was literally like joining a cult.

That said I have friends born three four years later than me for whom all baby boomer music (as they would term it) is literally worthless, compromised, cynical, incorrect, empty headed shit. They grew up with very different record collections and probably peaked right at that time where the music press fractured into genres and rock / metal got hived off into a ghetto. When indie had ossified into a style or a marketing gimmick not a way of doing business. The people I am thinking of didn't (and still don't) look back much pre 76 unless to Brian Wilson or girl groups or Roy Orbison or freak curiosities like Joe Meek. People who in their 30s would seem to enjoy an awful lot of culture "ironically" and who would almost literally wet themselves over say a new Magnetic Fields album and I would try and understand the appeal with total incomprehension.

Clearly this isn't about fallacies of being right or wrong about music but still I have been thinking a lot about that short period between Woodstock and Where Were You, why it produced what it did, why it continues to matter so much and why it casts such a long shadow. When I play Presence it all seems very simple.

I love Led Zeppelin.

Edit : Saying "I love Led Zeppelin" sounds trite.
They touch upon something between layers of existence. Glimpses of the truth, light, something usually hidden, it feels magical but i'm convinced it's just the revealing of the true nature of things. These words are inadequate and the way I feel is inexplicable.
But I do love Led Zeppelin.

Its good to see you kidda, long time no speak.

Note to self must dig out the deluxe Zep remasters, bought and filed under Over familiar! ;-)