October 16, 2016 — I just realized David Lee Roth is writing blog articles weekly. I suppose I knew they were there, but I just noticed they are regularly there. Thursdays, his come out on Thursdays. The latest is about time travel, about going places virtually, the Matrix, it seems. I don’t know about that. I think one’s experience would be that of the imagination of the computer programmer, but outside of that one computer game I played in the days before graphics, I am not that into them. I suppose I’ve not really given them a chance, but when I put that game away, I put the genre away. I suppose it’s because I liked it better with my own imagination. Feeling things in someone else’s vision doesn’t sound that good to me.

He did capture my attention with one reference though. The Mona Lisa, the painting; he said he’s never seen it. I have. It is one of the few things I’ve ever seen. It has hordes of people around it. It’s very small, much smaller than I expected. As for paintings in the Louvre, I recommend The Last Supper. That thing is huge and really detailed. It took an enormous amount of effort, of talent, to do that thing. But then again, I wonder if indoctrination into detail made me prefer that painting. Mind you, I’m not very schooled on art. I wish I was. I probably never will be though since what little there is to my own art education was formed by two events. They are in reverse order of time.

The first was my father’s seeming obsession with the painter Michael Delacroix. What I know of Delacroix surrounds my father’s shopping for signed lithographs in my late high school-early college years. The paintings I’m familiar with are very busy streetscapes. The one my family had (I don’t know what its story was) had little small images making up bigger images of many, many buildings. This art was complicated, perfectly suited to the dawn of the ‘80s, when all things-complicated were in vogue. That art looked like it took real effort, real talent, much like The Last Supper obviously did; okay not as much as that, but still, lots of effort. Complicated art commands respect, I think. Then there is the other event.

I was probably nine. I say that because my adult-like memories start when I was nine. That’s the year my dad started letting me do work, real work as opposed to just making the beds and doing dishes, the housework-chores of a normal child. My work: adding numbers for his accounting on the adding machine. I loved, and I mean loved, the adding machine. It was this machine with a slanted front. One would press the numbers, then pull a lever on the side, and the machine would print them, and magically add them all. It was serious work … for a serious little girl. I kept files too, files with added figures, all decorated … because files should be decorated. Least you say this is “child abuse”, recognize I thought of myself as a serious business person. It’s what I wanted to do more than anything, you know, take over the free world. I might as well start at nine. Reminiscent of my week, my adding machine work was only actually bad at tax time. I had time pressure then with my additions, my father handing my more and more columns to add, never acting very, shall we say, calm. But then again, who is calm when one is doing taxes … or … taking over the free world. And yes, I can see legions of people wondering why anyone would have their nine year old helping to prepare their taxes, but I was no ordinary nine year old.

Seeing as I had this job, I often would accompany my dad to offices. I cannot tell you what we were doing there, not any more, a fault of the human brain that memories from childhood get overwritten. What I do remember is seeing my first real art, and that is the second event I think of as significant for my art history.

This art was a small thing, framed on the wall, signed, they told me. Its owner was bragging about it, Picasso, he said. I remember thinking this is an outline of a woman’s bum; I wondered what the big deal was. Mind you, it probably deserves mention again that I was no ordinary nine year old, but also it was a different time, a time when nine year old’s listened to Led Zeppelin, not Kid’s Bop, so seeing a Picasso-drawn bum would not have been a risqué event. As for my reaction, I remember thinking, outside of why would anyone draw a bum, that it was really artistic, that it was art with this tiny amount of detail, that it was art without being busy. That art inspired me. In those years, we would have art in class. From that point on, my art was as simple as I could make it. My lump of clay was not transformed into a bowl or a dinosaur, just a simple hand press and a few lines and a shaping of a beak, and voila, one has a bird.

I can’t tell you anything magical about how art and music are the same. I don’t know if they are. I don’t know if they aren’t. But as I do know there is some juxtaposition, I think, between the simple and the complicated. As in art, there is complicated music. A symphony is complicated. Perhaps it’s great because it’s complicated, just as The Last Supper is great because it’s complicated. Van Halen is complicated. I have a Van Halen song book and there are so many chords just in one song; forget the notes. You all who can play it, you’ve got some serious skill! Complicated takes skill, no doubt about it. In fact, my thought is DLR’s lyrics, his voice, serves to kind of uncomplicate the complicated, but that’s an entirely different topic. One the other hand, Led Zeppelin, isn’t complicated. I think it isn’t complicated because, at least as to the chords, I can play Led Zeppelin, perhaps not that well, but I can play it. Perhaps that makes it more accessible to me, the music I’m learning by, but perhaps it is simply that it’s like a drawing to me. Sure it’s not a bum line drawing; I think of it more as a face line drawing, and believe me I find the drawing of faces to be completely daunting, but I feel like I can get there … get there meaning the ability to play Led Zeppelin. Or… is that just my taste?

Perhaps my taste has gone back to the beginning. Perhaps after all the Delacroix and Last Supper and complicated guitar, I simply want to have the art of my music be less complicated, more accessible, something that moves me in a way that always did. Perhaps it’s the songs. Credit to rci for his posting of a clip of Robert Plant playing Black Dog on Austin City Limits, from a show that aired recently.

I listened to Mr. Plant’s singing the familiar Led Zeppelin songs, now set to complicated musical orchestrations, but they are still the same songs. To me… it’s Robert Plant’s voice that makes Led Zeppelin the special thing that it is. The comments to the Youtube clip praise Robert Plant’s voice; people say Led Zeppelin should tour. Robert Plant doesn’t seem to want to though. And that begs a question for me, something I’ll call the Axl Rose phenomenon. We accept singer substitutions. Axl Rose, in particular, can be the singer of any band these days. I asked myself if I would accept Axl Rose singing Led Zeppelin songs with Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and someone playing drums, Jason Bonham, perhaps, on a Led Zeppelin tour. Or how about Sammy Hagar? Mr. Hagar seems to like to sing Led Zeppelin songs, and he has a voice tone in the higher register. Would I accept that as Led Zeppelin. For me, the answer is no. No other option would work for me other than a Robert Plant-fronted Led Zeppelin. Perhaps he is the line drawing element of Led Zeppelin. Then there’s Robert Plant himself.

Robert Plant talks a lot, but the bottom line of what he says is that he wants to make music he likes. He talks about music he heard a long time ago, things that influenced him, that moved him. It’s that line drawing principal, again, if you ask me. Robert Plant has his own mental version of a line drawing, and no matter what Led Zeppelin is to everyone else, he’s happy with his own line drawing, whatever it is that moves him, especially things that influenced him in his musical taste. Perhaps that’s what every artist should strive for, something that takes us back to the beginning. I wonder? But then again, if Robert Plant does this many Led Zeppelin songs with other people, why not with ….? If that ever happens, I hope I get to see it …because Led Zeppelin is my line drawing.

Full Show (I found another):