Johnny_Peebucks wrote:otyikondo wrote:As for "no rock in the form that we know it today"... well, that is a REAL stretch.
If you knew anything about music history, which I doubt you do, you would know that the influence of the "big 3" IS huge and shaped contempory rock music. I would give you a history of music but I think it would be lost on you and to be honest i would just get excited and write a whole web site on the stuff.
I would say Paige himself wouldn't apeal to the youth entirely but compared to opera???? And the song is a classic song that most people can recognise...unlike some chinese bird and some bloke in a beard singing some pants load of wank.
The point of using Paige was to 'rock n roll' up the olympics...and personally that's not a bad think...People jumping through hoops might be your thing, smiling asian kids waving before they go to the sweat shop might do it for you and fireworks might excite you but the fact is to the average kid out there...those things are pretty weak.
I would not DARE to assert I know anything about rock music, though I DID see Led Zeppelin when they were all alive, on more than one occasion, and even as a callow teenager saw Page playing with Beck in The Yardbirds in a club, which I doubt you could claim, Mr. Pisspot.
I would charge nevertheless that "shaped contemporary rock music" is not only enthusiastic hyperbole and blatantly ignores the contribution of the Chicago blues to the genre (now Jimmy never ignored that, even though the band stole blind from the likes of Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin' Wolf, and Willie Dixon...), but also forgets that the excesses of bands like Zeppelin also paved the way for the apparently irresistible
decline of guitar rock from the mid- to late-70s, and that in the eyes of MANY (perhaps not of my generation, but younger) Page is just another example of a rock dinosaur whom they thought died years ago. Or as another elderly and moderately influential artist once said... "Now you would not think to look at him/But he was famous long ago/For playing the electric violin/On Desolation Row".
Besides, as his mate Roy Harper once told me with guffaws of laughter, he could never take Jimmy quite seriously for having written songs with Jackie deShannon.
It also rather goes against your "Big 3" theory (surely your two others cannot be the Black Sabbath and Deep Purple you referred to?) that Zeppelin took so long to get inducted into the UK Hall of Fame, being passed over on two occasions before that twat from Queen wangled them in. Frankly I think you are muddling up rock music with riff-rock, and in that department, however shortlived they were, Cream could blow Led Zeppelin off any stage where they chanced to meet.
But if you believe Sabbath and Purple are your other cornerstones, well, it's understandable. You'll fit in real well in Finland, a genuine heavy rock Jurassic Park.
"Appealing to youth" is an incredibly difficult act to carry off. The entire concept of rock music is (or should be) that it is ephemeral, and that yesterday's artists are about as useful as last week's
Sun. By bowing to the likes of you who happen to think
Stairway to Heaven is still the greatest thing ever written, you will moon those people who regard it as a bloated bit of coke-drenched self-indulgence. I have the feeling the "average kid" out there knows which he or she thinks it is.
Things have changed. Sad but true. They'll have to come up with something a lot fresher than the 70s and
The Lemon Song.
