Posted By BillHeise on April 6, 2009

Last week I talked about the terrible music of the 1970s. This week, I’ve been listening to some of the great 70s music that I was introduced to by my friend Larry. These bands were important to me in the 1970s, and they shared a distance from politics that was general before the 1980s. This was because of their having been fostered in the age of High Modernism, rather than in the age of Postmodernism.

The Who

Larry introduced me to the Who, whose Won’t Get Fooled Again took the position that revolutions came and went–every 20 years, according to Thomas Jefferson–but that music was a permanent feature of the landscape.

I’ll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I’ll get on my knees and pray
We don’t get fooled again

This is perhaps why Pete Townsend wrote Long Live Rock, with his vision of the never-ending death-and-resurrection of rock ‘n’ roll. I wonder what he makes of the rise of rap?

Led Zeppelin

I had never heard of Led Zeppelin when Larry dragged me off to see The Song Remains the Same. This band had borrowed the Modern take on mythology as a transcendent theme, as well. The Song Remains the Same had borrowed the the never-ending death-and-resurrection of rock ‘n’ roll theme, as well.

It didn’t end there, either. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant laced their lyrics with grand mythological themes, as here in Achilles Last Stand:

I was never very impressed with Plant’s lyrics. He had written:

Oh to sail away, to sandy lands and other days
Oh to touch the dream, hides inside and never seen.

Into the sun the south the north, at last the birds have flown
The shackles of commitment fell, in pieces on the ground

And:

Days went by when you and I, bathed in eternal summers glow
As far away and distant, our mutual child did grow

Oh the sweet refrain, soothes the soul and calms the pain
Oh albion remains, sleeping now to rise again

His lyrics seemed to me a weak version of the “truths” put forth by W. B. Yeats in (modern) poems like “Sailing to Byzantium. In that poem, Yeats had (like the Hare Krishna scene in Hair) given up his individual existence for a higher form of consciousness:

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Being educated in the 1970s, I went to school looking for better versions of the Modernist movement that I was introduced to in the lyrics of the Who and Led Zeppelin (and others).  Pete Townsend and Robert Plant, I thought when I entered graduate school, were just late and weaker versions of a previously great movement. I wanted to climb the mountain of the greats. And I did. But during the course of graduate school, I had to confront the shortcomings of Modernism itself. That meant facing the demon I had begun to confront when I put down Joseph Campbell.

But that doesn’t mean I turned my back on the music of the 1970s which led me down a false path. I define myself by means, not ends. The fact that the Who and Led Zeppelin had misconstrued the ends of inquiry does not affect my continuing passion for their music

Categories: What I'm Listening to This Week
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