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Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Secret to Immortality
Caroline B. Glick Silencing dissent in America
Oct. 29, 2009
Lini S. Kadaba: Do tactics avert flu or reduce humanity?
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: Atheists in Bubbleland
JWisdom.com Why what we wear impacts who we are With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir: Damaging disclosures with a twist
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: Are you ready for the ultimate pleasure?
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
Steven Emerson: Terror Cases Share Desire to Kill Americans
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really? By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: The Perfect Number
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick How Turkey was lost
Oct. 15, 2009
Jeff Jacoby: Peace vs. the 'peace process'
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review Dec. 13, 2007 / 4 Teves 5768

Deflating ‘Zeppelin’

By Diana West


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | I've learned a lot about Led Zeppelin lately. For instance, it wasn't just any concert the rock band played in London this week for the first time since breaking up 27 years ago after the 1980 death of drummer John Bonham (a death Rolling Stone magazine notes was caused by his ingesting "forty measures of vodka"). In the words of the Financial Times, the concert was a "heritage rock event." This is another way to describe an onstage reunion of rockers who qualify for AARP membership.


But fear not. 59-year-old Robert Plant has "an impressively taut backside," the FT assures us, even if 61-year-old John Paul Jones wears his hair short and looks, according to The Spectator magazine, like a "bank manager," and 63-year-old Jimmy Page delayed the concert's — sorry, the heritage rock event's — play date for some weeks by breaking his finger, according to Timesonline.com, "falling over in his garden."


But back to the, er, bottom line in the Financial Times: "There aren't many heritage rock events where the shape of one's bottom matters. But Led Zeppelin is different. If sex is one of rock and roll's prime motivating factors, then no band has managed to sound as horny as them (sick — I mean, sic). Their groupie-chasing days may be long gone, but they still manage to convey magnificently the roiling, hormonal urgency of their songs."


"Magnificently" or not, is this a good thing? Not in the Gershwin world of "We may never, never meet again on the bumpy road to love." But in the Zeppelin world of "Way down inside, woman, you need it!" there is no higher compliment. And no matter how old and grizzled these rockers (and others like them) get, we live in a Zeppelin world.


Not that Zep is merely "Still Sexy After All These Years," as the FT titled its review. Amid the decibels, The New York Times detected what it saw fit to describe as a "loud serenity." As in: "There was a kind of loud serenity about Led Zeppelin's set." Hmm. As for Mr. Plant himself, The New York Times said: "He was authoritative; he was dignified."


OK. I'll pretend I haven't seen concert pictures of Mr. Plant, his face contorted over his hand-held microphone and under his disheveled perm. In fact, maybe "authoritative" works, at least in the way a street person yelling at a bus is authoritative. But "dignified"?


No doubt "dignified" is in the eye of the beholder — in this case, the concert audience, some 10,000 strong. Among them was the Washington Post's reviewer, a self-described attorney "staring down the barrel of 40," who wrote of the "palpable sense of community" in the crowd around him, and more. "It appears that all the tickets to this concert went to couples who care about each other deeply," he wrote. "Fathers and sons. Mothers and daughters. Lifelong friends who bonded all those years ago to the music of the men onstage." I can hear the old song now: "Should auld acquaintance be forgot, woman, you need it!"


Of course, we're not talking about just any lifelong friends — just the ones who, out of 20 million online lottery applicants, won the chance to plunk down $500 (or more) for two Zep tickets. "The randomness of the lottery system guaranteed that nearly all the tickets went to true fans, not a bunch of corporate stiffs," the Post attorney-reviewer wrote. Then again, who but "corporate stiffs" could afford them?


Corporate, likely, but "stiffs" — whatever that means — never. And that's the point. In our post-grown-up age, the middle-aged men who buy Zep tickets never think of themselves as "corporate stiffs," especially when they are exactly that. Rather, they cling to what the Post described as an "adolescent faith in the redemptive power of rock-and-roll." To wit: "With every note, as the night goes on, the weight of the years melts away and we are transported closer to our adolescent selves." And this is one scary sight. "As the band settled into a series of songs old and new," Timesonline.com reported, "grown men in the mostly middle-aged and male audience began playing air guitar."


Question: If our "grown men" are busy transporting themselves closer to their adolescent selves, who guards against the barbarians at the gate? Nero got a very bad name for fiddling while Rome burned. But at least he wasn't playing air guitar.

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