"Here's my favorite, on the written test, you drew a little guy with wings from the Led Zeppelin record cover." - OSI Guy, The Venture Brothers

 

Here is a lizard. The Mrs. deems it to be a GEICO©. I think that means it will give us good car insurance rates, provided we don’t crush like an Easter egg it in our unfeeling hands. Maybe I’ll just squeeze it a bit. Lower premiums. I’m not cold blooded after all. But the GEICO® is. As a note, those are not my back hairs, but hairs from a teensy weesny dog.

Once I was young. Of course, Demi Moore was once young, too.

Anyhow, The Boy often listens to music around the house. The Mrs. and I don’t allow him to listen to rap, because we’re very worried he could then grow up to be Don Imus, or, in the best case, we’d get a nasty letter from the school. Thus, The Boy has the alternatives of listening to anything but rap. Most often, he listens to classic rock. I know, I know, “You Shook Me All Night Long” seemed impossibly dirty to me too when I first heard it.

She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean . . . wow. She showers. And she’s fast.

Hot stuff. (Note: Pop Wilder in the WilderBunker told me to stay away from fast women but I married The Mrs. even though she won several High School track races and is thus demonstrably fast. She also showers.)

But things change.

In the 1960’s “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” seemed rebellious, but “I Wanna **** You Like An Animal” (real title “Closer”) debuted in the 1990’s, well, it hardly elicited a yawn. Given the trend, I’m just a teensy bit more comfortable with the pre-1990’s stuff.

So, The Boy listens to classic rock, and on occasion jumps up and turns up his radio when “Jump” comes on, because “It’s my favorite song.”

Which brings me to stupidity and music, at least as it relates to boys. As a kid growing up, I heard Led Zeppelin™’s version of “The Immigrant Song” which starts out “dun-dun-dun-dun-DUN-duh” with Robert Plant© going “aaaaah-ah-ah-AAAAAAH.” If you can’t figure out which song that is from that, well, you’re not alone. Keep reading.

After hearing this song on the radio one bright sunny summer day during the Reagan decade (Morning in America, dudes), I experienced an intense desire to own it, on a thing called a record so I could listen to it, well, whenever.

If you younger folks haven’t heard of this cutting edge analog “record” technology, well, let’s just say that your parents used to sit around and listen to hunks of spinning plastic whose only saving grace was that they were bumpy enough to make noise when scratched with a diamond. Oh, and you had to tape two pennies on top of the diamond or else it was totally worthless. In short, a record player and the associated amplifier are exactly like an I-Pod© that weighs about six hundred pounds and draws 4.3 MegaWatts. Headphones were extra, and if you wear them you look like Princess Leia©. And the headphones weighed sixteen pounds.

So I was on a quest. I had to find this new band that had put this song out. I went to the local record store and attempted to convey to the owner what song I was looking for. I went so far as to try to sing Robert Plant’s® falsetto high to a complete stranger. I’m sure I sounded just like Garth Brooks® strangling a cat in a hot shower.

Given that she had no idea what album, band, or even music genre I was looking for, she pointed at the racks of albums in the store. I began looking based on the cover.

A band that had a song so powerful and intense must, must, have a really cool cover.

Satan© might even be on it.

I proceeded to purchase an album a week for a year attempting to find this song, at $7.25 an album. That’s like $377.00 Reagan dollars. That’s $746.38 in Bush II dollars, according to the American Institute for Economic Research.

After a year I finally found out that this song was “The Immigrant Song” and was available on the album Physical Graffiti (which came out when Gerald Frigging Ford was President).

I was thrilled by my new discovery, having no idea that Led Zeppelin™ had broken up after the untimely death of one member while engaged in drunken debauchery reading the Bible alone in his room while I was just out of grade school. Led Zeppelin© produced eight albums, but only seventeen minutes of actual music if you subtract “Stairway to Heaven.”*

I marched into the record store after a year of purchasing albums by Canadian heavy metal artists (ever hear of Raven© or Helix™ or Great White®? I have.) and discovering Dio® and Judas Priest™ in the process, well, I was ready to buy the album.

I went triumphantly to the album rack. A double album? $14.95????

$14.95???? No way. Too expensive.

I now get to look forward to The Boy being hideously disappointed when he learns that all of his classic rock icons are old fuddy-duddies who live in mansions in England and are way older than his dad (David Lee Roth, I’m talking to you).

Make me smile. It’s not everyday that a man get’s to crush his son’s dreams. Besides, soon enough he’ll be listening to whatever will be popular in a decade. Maybe he’ll discover Nirvana©.

It sure won’t be pretty when The Boy finds out that they only have three albums.

*I like Led Zeppelin©