Led Zeppelin
The last time I saw Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page on stage, in the band's televised 1985 performance at Live Aid, his long hair was jet black. When the band performed in London yesterday in its first concert in 22 years, his hair was still long but had turned snowy white. You can see for yourself in the photo that accompanies the Los Angeles Times review.
Not that age seemed to matter, based on the rapturous reviews of the concert, a 16-song set which was part of a tribute to the late Atlantic Records executive Ahmet Ertegun. Here are the reviews from the New York Times, Reuters, London Times, Belfast Telegraph, and Associated Press. And here's a late arrival from the Washington Post.
Jason Bonham, now the drummer for Foreigner, filled in for his late father, John "Bonzo" Bonham, who died one of those classic early rock star deaths back in 1980, after which the band broke up.
I saw Led Zeppelin in concert once, at Earls Court Arena in London in 1975. I was on a three-week May Term course there to finish out my Hope College degree. I needed three more credits to graduate, having withdrawn from a statistics course along the way because my work on the college newspaper, the Anchor, made it impossible to keep up with the daily homework. I will say that London was far better than a statistics course.
We saw the concert advertised and three of us--myself and two other Hope students, the Londono brothers from Colombia, went to the show in high spirits. It was a classic 3-4 hour Led Zep extravaganza, and it was one of the concerts on the "Led Zeppelin" DVD released in 2003.
Apart from everything else, Led Zeppelin's triumphant return to the stage yesterday--an event awaited by legions of fans around the world--shows the triumph of the 1960s culture. It is easy to despair sometimes over the rise of the religious right and movement conservatives in America, who routinely disparage our culture as depraved and decadent. But the truth is, the 1960s, with the youth/rock culture, and the 1990s (when Bill Clinton was President), with the Internet boom, were the premier decades in the American century.
I've always suspected that conservatives really hate the 1960s (defined as the period between the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and the Nixon resignation in 1974) because they were listening to "Chicago" and wondering why the cute hippie chicks would have nothing to do with them. But basicly, it's even simpler than that: we won.