There’s a new rockumentary out now about Led Zeppelin, and I have to go see it. Because I have cancer.
I know, you’re thinking yet again that I’m a wacko, and while that is true, let me explain.
Like every other teenager I knew, back in the Dark Ages before people even had pagers, I was a fan of legendary rock band Led Zeppelin. For those of you who recall only vaguely through a drug-induced haze, they were simply everything. They burst onto the scene with a new brand of music that mesmerized everyone who heard it. It was sophisticated and sexy and fresh and somewhat mystical, and people couldn’t get enough. They even made movies that fans stood in line to see. Sadly, they disbanded quickly after their famed drummer John Bonham died in 1980, after choking on his own vomit, but their fame continued.
In those days, we lived on Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico, where my dad was stationed. Like everyone else I knew, we had one large console stereo in our house that took up half of our tiny living room. This was the only way to hear music in our house, except for listening to the AM station on the Armed Forces Radio & Television Network.
I know some of you are shaking your heads and doubting this story. No Spotify? No Apple Music? No YouTube? No Pandora? But, yes, it was sad but true.
Even worse, the only way for us kids who lived on the base to get any of the new must-own rock albums was to ditch school at lunchtime and head to the Base Exchange (the base version of Wal-Mart) just before the stockers put out out the new albums that had just arrived from the states. My investigative skills that came in handy as a journalist were honed there, because our lives were dedicated to finding out when exactly these albums would be stocked. We needed to be there when they were, because we high-schoolers had to battle with the young airmen on the base to get our hands on them.
We all waited with bated breath by the empty record racks in the back of the store. When the stockers finally walked out with stacks of the coveted releases, we’d all surge forward and try to get one. There were only a limited supply. Even though I wasn’t particularly strong or bold, somehow I managed to score a copy of 1969’s “Led Zeppelin II.”
In those days, my mom stayed home, because my dad wouldn’t let her get a job. She was so bored that she cleaned and scrubbed our tiny house from morning until night. You could have eaten off the floor under the couch, everything was so clean. (Later in life, she cleaned hospital rooms for fun.) In those days, she never really paid any attention to anything I did as long as my report card was OK, so I didn’t think twice when I excitedly put my new album on to play for the first time. However, for once, my mom was actually listening.
As I lay on the couch, listening ecstatically to “The Lemon Song”, my mom looked at me in shock and said, “WHAT did he say? Squeeze my lemon until the juice runs down my leg?” She was stunned and confused and dismayed, all at the same time. I took advantage of her confusion.
“Um, no mom, he’s talking about cooking,” I stuttered, took the album into my room and never again played it in front of her.
After the group disbanded, I moved onto other things and really didn’t think any more about it.
But then, 50 years later, I got cancer. To beat back the looming prospect of an early death, I tried nearly every bizarre treatment available, in addition to the ones the oncologist proposed, which were equally bizarre but familiar, as in “Let’s put you in a chair and flood your body with heavy metal chemicals to see what happens.” As in platinum-based chemotherapy. It didn’t work but on the plus side, it made my fingers stop working.
And then a friend recommended that I try cannabis therapy. “Why not?” I thought. I found a practitioner and started the treatment, which consisted of putting a miniscule amount of cannabis tar under my tongue in the morning, and a stronger type at night. During the day, this meant I was pleasantly and lightly stoned. No big deal. At night, though, the dose was very strong and sometimes I was so high I couldn’t sleep. That’s when I’d turn on YouTube to find something to watch, to keep my thoughts from soaring off into the stratosphere.
That’s when I rediscovered Led Zeppelin. It was the perfect music for my state of mind. I became obsessed with the band, read up on them, learned their entire history, watched all their movies and videos, and endless concerts online at night, when I couldn’t sleep.
Everything was fine, except that the cannabis therapy didn’t work. It wasn’t killing any cancer. And I was tired of being out of it all the time. So I stopped using it. (I know it works for some people, so give it a shot if you want.)
And that was the day that I lost interest in Led Zeppelin. I never again turned on their music, although I do still like “Stairway to Heaven” when I hear it playing in a store.
However, I do think I have to go see this movie in IMAX, don’t you? I might drag one of my kids along, just to show them how groovy we all were back then.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
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