Whole Lotta Love

I remember particularly the first time I heard Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love.

It must have been 8th grade--1970. I was with my best friend and his older brother, and his brother's friend, the cool kid who had taught us how to tie-dye tee shirts. (We would later learn how to stress jeans by tying bricks to them and dragging them behind a car;  since none of us had a car at the time, that was more of an aspirational thing.) 

This post is available as audio here on Substack.

The older brother's twin had bowed out. He was a contrarian, into country music at a time and an age when no one was into country music. Although, come to think of it, that whole family had a weakness for country music star Faron Young. Whether that was because he hailed from our hometown or because he was the spokesman for BC headache powders remains to this day a mystery. 

Let me say right up front that I was not a fan of heavy metal (had the term heavy metal even been invented yet?) I was by no stretch of the imagination musically savvy. My only entry point to the world of rock at that time was the local AM pop station KEEL, which I listened to with my ear pressed against a banana-yellow transistor radio that I had won by collecting dozens of Frosty Root Beer bottle caps. By the time I graduated to the eight-track tape player my brother had left behind, I was more into prog rock: Yes and Jethro Tull. The term prog rock was invented...later.

(Bottle caps were apparently legal tender in my youth. You could also get into the Saturday matinees at the Joy Theater with a king's ransom of bottlecaps. We would collect them from the sides of the road, blessing the litterbugs for their carelessness.)

 To illustrate the depth of my shallowness: I had gotten my friend and his twin sister (yes, there were two sets of twins in that family) each a 45 for Christmas from the Beatles Abbey Road album: him Come Together and her Something. What I had failed to recognize was that these were the A and B sides of the same record. I'm not sure I even grasped at that point that records had A and B sides.  The miseducation of Timothy Miller. 

I did, however, know all the lyrics to Zager and Evans's 1969 hit In the Year 2525, which was probably the only sci-fi themed rock song on the books until Ziggy Stardust came down the pike. The lyrics were eerily prophetic: 

In the year 6565
You won't need no husband, won't need no wife
You'll pick your son, pick your daughter too

From the bottom of a long glass tube

In vitro fertilization would come along nine years later. There were rumors circulating at the time that the pop duo were visitors from the future, or possibly another planet. They were from Nebraska.

Making the scene

Anyway, there we were in the older brother's room on a winter's afternoon. I was fairly certain even then that what the two older boys were smoking wasn't actually pot, as they claimed, and I was absolutely certain that my buddy had not taken some pills, as he claimed (He may have taken a BC powder, as he did speak rather convincingly of visions of flying horses). Nobody even asked me whether I wanted to indulge; I had the feeling I was meant to be the audience for this staging of teen rebel theatre, which I received with an equal measure of awe and skepticism. 

(My suspicions about the ersatz nature of the supposed pot were not actually confirmed until I went off to college and became intimately acquainted with the peculiar barnyard and body odor of demon weed. What were the boys really smoking that day? I don't know. Corn silk maybe?)

Still, when I heard Robert Plant on the turntable break out with "Way ... down ... inside ... WOMAN!... you need... LOOOOOOOOVE!" I knew I was being inducted into adulthood and the counterculture in the same moment. (Also, my mother had recently bought me some clothes from the Sears "Yellow Submarine" collection, including some white bell bottoms which I ruined the first day I wore them simply by sitting down on a bench to wait for a bus. And an ascot like Fred wore in  Scooby Doo.) 

The Words

You've been learnin'
Baby, I been learnin'
All the good times
Baby, baby, I've been yearning
Way, way down inside
Uh, honey, you need it
I'm gonna give you my love, uh
I'm gonna give you my love, uh

The lyrics spoke to me. Yes, I had experienced the pangs of love by eighth grade. In sixth grade I went so far as to hold hands with a girl during the class picnic at Betty Virginia Park. Unfortunately, it was the last day of school. I didn't see her all summer, and the first day of seventh grade she cut me dead. I had moved on and learned from that experience. The girl I fell in love with in the eighth grade I didn't speak a word to all year. She never hurt me.

(I've since learned that teen boys' pre-frontal cortical development lags behind that of girls. Apparently my crush's brain had leapt ahead during those summer months before seventh grade, while mine just stewed in its own juices. It hardly seems fair.)

Betty Virginia Park

The Moral to the Story

I was not as impressed with the B side of that single, Livin' Lovin' Maid. After all, as the chorus kept drumming into my head, the maid in question was "just a woman," although she was not to be confused with Anne B. Davis, who played Alice, the maid on tv's Brady Bunch.

Music is viscerally important to you when you're a teen-ager. I think it helps give form and voice to emotions you may be experiencing for the first time. And as each song obviously written with you in mind is paired with the appropriate searing emotion, your heart is eventually filled up, a song for every elation and every mortification. So by the time you're thirty, say, new songs can't resonate as deeply with your psyche, while the old songs get bronzed like baby shoes. I've never become a real Led Zeppelin devotee, but Whole Lotta Love still gives me the shivers. 

Even when I hear it mixed in with the Muzak while standing in the produce section at Walmart, knocking on melons.