Led Zeppelin bass player/keyboardist John Paul Jones, at home, early 1970s.
Tag: Music
Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/17/23: Let’s Talk About Led Zeppelin
As in, why did the band pick that name anyway? Logic might tell you it comes from a long line of band names that change one or two letters of an ordinary word to become something wacky and eye-catching. As in The Beatles, The Monkees, The Byrds, Cyrcle, Def Leppard (a Led Zeppelin imitator if …
Father of the Four Winds
Oh Father of the Four Winds fill my sails… A young Robert Plant blows some gentle breezes in this evocative illustration by Morgan Rogers. Unfortunately her site is retired and not being updated, but the Zep artwork is still there. A scanned page from the artist’s sketchbook. There’s a quality to her work that is …
Bandfics, Part 2
Not every band inspires a busy and passionate fandom. Using Archive of Our Own as a bellwether, I noticed several things by looking at the stats. One is the sheer amount of material. Excluding Elvis (450 stories) most of it dates from bands active from the early 1960s on. There’s no Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/10/23: Led Zeppelin Songs
When it comes to Led Zeppelin songs, their titles recall mostly about one thing: Blues, Blues, Blues. Unlike Beatles songs, they didn’t dabble in storytelling or psychedelia. This makes the song titles themselves not too interesting, but they’re also easy to recreate. Maybe there’s a bootleg of these around somewhere… Led Zeppelin Songs, what …
Bandfics, Part 1
When discussing rock band fandoms, there are two types. The first is the “typical” one of love of the music, which also includes listening to albums, attending concerts, and discussing these with other fans who share the same passion. It can run along a scale. At one end are those who buy an album or …
Zeppedee-doo-dah May: Led Zeppelin Fandom
It’s time for another themed month, and for May it’s… LED ZEPPELIN FANDOM! NOT musical fandom as in discussing the pros and cons of Jimmy Page’s various guitars or the band’s performances over various tours. I mean Led Zeppelin as people, characters, who inspire fiction and artwork, most often by female fans. Ready? Let’s go!
Elric: Acid, Goth, or Heavy Metal?
[Previous posting on Elric art here.] Another way portraits of Elric can classified is by the musical genre they evoke or were influenced by. Elric was born in 1961 and matured over the decades since, which means his teenage years, the most musically-influenced period of a young person’s life, ran through the 1970s and …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/11/22: Random Playlist Songs
Sometimes, when you’re writing, you need an imaginary playlist, or a song from someone’s playlist. Here’s a few that were originally randomgenned as spells, but didn’t make the sense they should have. I intended these to be in the Song – Artist format (Hey Jude – The Beatles) but you could reverse the order, …
Birth of a Dark God
Neural Nets are a great way to improvise some heavy metal lyrics. A few sessions on one produced this masterpiece. Which I can’t really take credit for completely… because the AI did the work. But I was the one who strung it all together and made it make sense. I mean sense enough to sit …