Mrs. Henry's Julep Hootenanny: 2012

Land of the Lost (and Found)

Before there was Mrs Henry, there was high school.

Not high school like today, where the guys all have their hair cut like Justin Bieber and the girls all think Madonna’s old and the eighties are just a bunch of John Hughes movies that their parents insist are funny even though they’re so, like, not. Not like today when everyone zombie-walks through the halls with eyes fixed on their social-life-in-a-box, too busy twiddling away with their thumbs to scan the halls ahead for some beautiful face to hope will say hello or some scary dude to hope is not in the mood to noogie. Not like today when MTV is showing “Drunk People Eating Each Other’s Faces and Talking Shit” 24 hours a day. Not like today when you no longer have to sit through Girls Just Wanna Have Fun for the hundredth time in hope that Hot For Teacher or Unchained will be up next.

Back then, in the before time, if we knew one thing about music, we knew we had missed the chance to see the greatest band of all time by mere inches.

Zeppelin was gone.

They were just the other side of a fissure in time that separated us irrevocably from the golden-age of rocking. We were like Dark Age villagers scavenging in the ruins of an ancient fallen city, once glowing magnificently with incomparable vitality and power. Or like Charlton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes, on the beach way out in the Forbidden Zone, knee deep in the surf, angrily pounding sand and cursing the bastards who had blown it all up, there in the shadow of the broken torso of the Statue of Liberty washed ashore in an utterly irremediable future. All that was left to us were posters, records, and midnight showings of Song Remains the Same.

The Song of What Remains

Before you could watch anything you wanted whenever you wanted, courtesy of the intertubes, there was only one way to see Zep in their glory days, and that was to go to the little movie theater in Fort Lee at midnight, pay three bucks or whatever it was and plop yourself down in a seat, and stare at the screen, waiting for the past to live again.

The movie starts out weird: a Prohibition-era fantasy sequence in which pinstriped gangsters with Tommy guns (played by Zep’s management team) mow down some baddies, whose heads pop off, shooting vari-colored liquid into the air, like decapitated soda fountains. (I am not making that part up. Check the internets if you don’t believe me). Then telegrams go out to all the band members, each seen in his “home.” Jimmy Page sits with his back to us by a peaceful lake, turns when he hears us coming and shoots glowing beams from his eyes like a battery-powered Godzilla. Robert Plant frolicks with his beautiful family on a lush Welsh hillside, looks up from the telegram he’s just received and says, “but that’s tomorrow….tomorrow…tomorrow” and off we go, rushing with the band into Manhattan, into the bowels of Madison Square Garden.

Then we’re in a vast, pitch-black space. It’s incredibly disorienting, like trying to find your way around a big dark room, feeling with your arms in front of you for some landmark or light switch. There are occasional whistles and shouts, which give you the sense that there are people out there in the distance whom you can’t see. Someone says “let’s go” and the drums bash into that great open-hi-hat beginning from Rock and Roll, the lights go on and bam, there they are. Led Zeppelin, live and in color.

The four of them on a tiny, bare stage, right up on top of each other like they’re playing in someone’s basement.

Plant bare-chested and golden-haired, with a cucumber stuffed down the front of his jeans, Bonham, pure Barbarian Drummer, Jones with the Carol Channing hairdo, and Page, wearing his wizardy dragon-suit, more full of wiry, agitated motion than we could have suspected from studying his frozen rock-god gestures in our posters. It was as if Michelangelo’s David had shook-off his marble-calm, leaped down from his pedestal and gone gyrating into battle with Goliath right before our eyes.

From this point on we sat with jaws dropped, the past momentarily a living, breathing, peerlessly highly-rocking thing.

To the Battle of the Bands

In high school, the members of Mrs Henry played in separate bands. McKenna played in Face Down, about which I will say more in a separate post. But Koslow and Reilly played together in the RB Laurence Band (named for a classmate who was not, in fact, part of the band, a fact which seemed to confuse literal-minded teachers and classmates who puzzled as to why he wasn’t going to be onstage with the band that bore his name. To his credit, he shouldered this burden with equanimity and even a kind of perverse pride--the best kind, really).

While Face Down pursued a more varied repertoire (Blue Oyster Cult, The Eagles, Pat Benatar, Bad Company), The RB Laurence Band focused increasingly over the year or so of its existence on one thing: playing Led Zeppelin. The reason for this was simple enough. Its singer sounded amazingly like Robert Plant. A sophomore when his bandmates were seniors, David Simon had the lungs of a rock-god. His friend, fellow sophomore, Jason Reilly, rounded out the lineup on bass with dependable groove and a bass-player’s poker-faced calm in the face of the perpetual chaos that seemed always to surround the RB Laurence Band, truly a band that never quite knew what it was doing until it was done.

If you played in a band at Tenafly High School in 1986, there was one major event which dominated your existence as a band, and that was the Battle of the Bands, held in the spring, though the precise date now escapes memory. Usually, there were four bands. There was an ongoing jazz-fusion ensemble, Anonymous, which endured like a guild or a secret society, older members choosing new members each year as if they were Skull and Bones or Masons. The initiation rites were shrouded in secrecy but we were all pretty sure that bonghits and Spyro Gyra were crucial elements. Apart from Anonymous, in 1986 the bands that year were Face Down, The Shade (playing Genesis, Duran Duran, Phil Collins) and Couleur, who played Talking Heads and some other stuff your chronicler can no longer recall. The RB Laurence Band came to play Zeppelin (and one song by The Firm, the band Jimmy Page formed with Paul Rodgers the lead singer from Bad Company, our one concession to the fact that it was, in fact, no longer 1975).

And what Zeppelin songs did the RB Laurence Band play? Well, in a nod to sanity, we did play a couple of short and tight ones, Immigrant Song and Rock and Roll (with an intro lifted from a bit of live noodling between Plant and Page in Song Remains the Same). But in a nod to obsession, and in a characteristic embrace of projects that were at most a nail’s breadth either within or beyond our capability, we performed our own version of the monstrous live Dazed and Confused that we’d spent hours watching on the big screen in that seedy theater in Fort Lee, hours more listening to in our rooms.

Koslow bought a violin bow and an orange satin footman’s coat, in an effort to be as Jimmy-Page like as possible.

Everyone else in the band stood up at his full height and agreed to imagine for a half hour that he was, in fact, Led Zeppelin. The results were, to judge by the feeling the band had themselves and the reaction of others, both plausible and raucous.

There was video taken of the show (of the entire 1986 BOB, in fact), which this blogger would be happy to once again get hold of. Inquiries have been made and I continue to hope that it will turn up. In the meantime, however, here is another kind of document. Audio from the soundcheck done the day of the BOB paired with photos from the BOB itself.

The videos are crude, but hey, it was the eighties, when it wasn’t perceived as a particularly weird or antisocial thing to perform a fifteen-minute live Dazed and Confused complete with violin bow solo, when in fact an audience of high-schoolers knew exactly why you were waving that bow around. Because in 1986 Zeppelin were six-years and a world ago gone, but, for a few minutes in that high-school auditorium we kinda sorta made it seem they weren’t.

The Set:

1. Immigrant Song

Simon wails like he's come to loot and plunder. What else can you say?

2. Rock and Roll

Acapella Simon to start, then a little call and response lifted from live Zeppelin antics. Abrupt beginning to the song which is then played like a stampede. Koslow plays the solo like someone is giving him a hotfoot.

3. Closer

Believe it or not this was an actual hit in the eighties (The Firm's version, I mean. We used to go see Firm concerts in the desperate hope that somehow Page would finally play some Zeppelin songs. Everyone would get horribly drunk in anticipation, then drunker still in disappointment). This one has a sax solo by a freshman named Marco Schnabel (yes, the guy who went on to direct Love Guru.) His friend and fellow freshman, Andy Markham also sometimes played drums for us when we'd do No Quarter or Stairway and Russ played the keys. Now he's an actual real-live drummer. Apparently we did not stunt his growth as a musician, only perhaps, as a human being. Matter for a future post.

4. Dazed and Confused

Here's where it all. . . ends. . .

Violin bow solo, the works. Listen for the way the band comes tumbling out of the guitar solo at about 10:18, Simon wailing like a banshee. Nuts.