As musical influences go, everyone acknowledges band likes the Rolling Stones and Clash. And yet the folky, Beatle-based leanings of Katinka and Malvine, also known as my older sisters, informed the tastes of a generation.
“Generation,” in this case, referring to “me.”
But families always keep secrets, sometimes ones that rescript your identity. My sisters never mentioned two older brothers:
Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.
Led Zeppelin showed up a few decades later, dusted off my adolescence and retroactively gave it the edge my sisters’ influence never could. Jimmy and Robert brought backyard wrestling and the torture of noogies. They made me cooler just by being in the same room.
As a kid I was blissfully unaware. My indoctrination-turned-devotion included the Fab Four, Simon and Garfunkel, Donovan, Jim Croce, James Taylor, Cat Stevens (no Nick Drake, strangely enough), David Bowie, the Doobie Brothers, Queen and, for mercifully brief periods, the Bee Gees and John Denver.
Their music, glittering with harmonies and eclectic songwriting, helped mold my self-image. Sensitive tunes … sensitive guy. And, bonus, here was the perfect method to nice my way into a girl’s arms.
That delusion might have been rightfully crushed years earlier if Led Zeppelin had been around. As it was, Jimmy didn’t whale on his guitar and Robert didn’t wail like a banshee in the Vogler household of the late ’70s. Contact was limited to imposing album covers at Tower Records – dirigibles, and naked little girls climbing over rocks – along with songs I couldn’t quite identify blaring from other people’s cars.
So it was fitting that another tune I couldn’t place – a pretty, haunting thing akin to the softer playlists I knew – brought Led Zeppelin to me for good within the past year or so. Its mandolins and high-register vocals looped in my mind without the benefit of lyrics.
What was it called? I collected and rummaged through “The Rain Song” – the strings sure sounded like drops – “Fool in the Rain,” “Ten Years Gone” and the promising “Over the Hills and Far Away,” a title whose rhythm fit the melody. Even “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” got an audition.
Finally, I hummed a little of the melody for my pal Gary, whose brain is a pop-music search engine. What came back was the wistful “Going to California.”
My quest had turned out to be a roadtrip to my native state. But between rest stops I had found all those other songs and craved more.
Soon, in addition to the poppier and more introspective side of Zeppelin, I found the knife edge of “Misty Mountain Hop,” “Whole Lotta Love” and “Dazed and Confused.” I knew the songs from before, but never in a context that allowed me to pay heed and tribute.
On a recent visit to my hometown of San Jose, I would remedy that with my best friend. We would take Jimmy and Robert cruising.
Led Zeppelin had visited Pietro much earlier in life. In one of those passing cars from the late ’70s, a pale-yellow Dodge Challenger, he and his buddies were sharing “Kashmir” and “Houses of the Holy” with the rest of the valley. But music for him is often like a favorite movie: He can go years without seeing it again.
It was time to roll the credits – once more for him and the first time for me.
We marshaled our Led Zeppelin forces into a mixed CD designed to jar suburban Santa Clara County out of a slumber we knew was our own. Our journey past the boulevards and strip malls mixed epochs that included mortgages and high school toughs, getting older and yearning for that cheerleader in social studies. The two heads banging to “Immigrant Song” along the desolate Monterey Highway belonged to dudes suspended between youth and manhood.
We painted subdivisions, cul de sacs and our own lazy mind-sets in shades of fury, angst and hope. We hadn’t rediscovered our adolescence; we had reinvented, at least temporarily, a better version of it.
My sisters’ playlists, with their warmth, decency and optimism, remain in the rotation of my life. But sometimes there’s no room for Paul McCartney in the crowded back seat of a boys’ night out.
Staff writer Vic Vogler can be reached at 303-820-1749 or vvogler@denverpost.com.
