Remembering Leo

From NYT:

Some rock bands accelerate their tempos when they play their old songs decades after the fact. Playing fast is a kind of armor: a refutation of the plain fact of aging, all that unregainable enthusiasm and lost muscle mass, and a hard block against an old band’s lessened cultural importance.

But Led Zeppelin slowed its down a little. At the O2 arena here on Monday night, in its first full concert since 1980 — without John Bonham, who died that year, but with Bonham’s son Jason as a natural substitute — the band found much of its old power in tempos that were more graceful than those on the old live recordings. The speed of the songs ran closer to those on the group’s old studio records, or slower yet. “Good Times Bad Times,” “Misty Mountain Hop,” and “Whole Lotta Love” were confident, easy cruises; “Dazed and Confused” was a glorious doom-crawl.




It all goes back to the blues, in which oozing gracefully is a virtue, and from which Led Zeppelin initially got half its ideas. Its singer, Robert Plant, doesn’t want you to forget that fact: he introduced “Trampled Underfoot” by explaining its connection to Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues,” and mentioned Blind Willie Johnson as the inspiration for “Nobody’s Fault But Mine.” (Beyond that, the band spent 10 luxuriant minutes each in two other blues songs from its back catalog — “Since I Been Loving You” and “In My Time of Dying”).



Ahmet Ertegun, the dedicatee of the concert, would have been satisfied, sure as he was of the centrality of southern black music to American culture. Ertegun, who died last year, signed Led Zeppelin to Atlantic Records; the show was a one-off benefit for the Ahmet Ertegun Education Fund, which will offer music students scholarships to universities in the United States, England, and Turkey, his homeland.

By the end of Zeppelin’s two-hour-plus show, it was already hard to remember that anyone else had been on the bill. But the band was preceded by Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings—a good-timey rhythm-and-blues show with revolving singers including Paolo Nutini and Albert Lee, as well as a few songs each by Paul Rodgers (of Free and Bad Company) and Foreigner — all of whom had recorded for Atlantic under Ertegun.

There was a kind of loud serenity about Led Zeppelin’s set. It was well-rehearsed, for one thing: planning and rehearsals have been underway since May. The band wore mostly black clothes, instead of its old candy-colored wardrobe. Unlike Mick Jagger, Mr. Plant — the youngest of the original members, at 59 — doesn’t walk and gesture like an excited woman anymore. Some of the top of his voice has gone, but except for one attempted and failed high note in “Stairway to Heaven” (“there walks a la-dy we all know{hellip}”), he found other melodic routes to suit him. He was authoritative; he was dignified.



As for Mr. Page, his guitar solos weren’t as frenetic and articulated as they used to be, but that only drove home the point that they were always secondary to the riffs, which on Monday were enormous, nasty, glorious. (He did produce a violin bow for his solo on “Dazed and Confused,” during that song’s great, spooky middle section.)

John Paul Jones’s bass lines got a little lost in the hall’s acoustics — like all such places, the 22,000-seat O2 Arena is rough on low frequencies — but he was thoroughly in the pocket with Mr. Bonham; when he sat down to play keyboards on “Kashmir” and “No Quarter” and a few others, he simultaneously operated bass pedals with his feet, keeping to that same far-behind-the-beat groove.

And what of Jason Bonham, the big question mark of what has been — there’s no way to prove this scientifically, but let’s just round it off — the most anticipated rock reunion in an era full of them? He is an expert in his father’s beats, an encyclopedia of all their variations on all the existing recordings. And apart from a few small places where he added a few strokes, he stuck to the sound and feel of the original. The smacks of the snare drum didn’t have exactly the same timbre, that barbarous, reverberant sound. But as the show got into its second hour and a few of the sound problems were gradually corrected, you found yourself not worrying about it anymore. It was all working.

Led Zeppelin has semi-reunited a few times in the past, with not much success: short, problematic sets at Live Aid in 1985, and at Atlantic Records’ 40th Anniversary concert in 1988. But this was a reunion that the band had invested in, despite the fact that there are no plans yet for a future tour; among its 16 songs was one the band had never played live before: “For Your Life,” from the album “Presence.”

The excitement in the hall felt extreme, and genuine; the crowd roars between encores were ravenous. At the end of it all, as the three original members took a bow, Mr. Bonham knelt before them and genuflected.

Rolling Stone 1, Rolling Stone 2 / FOXNews.com / NME / Guardian Unlimited / Reuters / Time / USA Today

Here's some news that would've brought a smile to Leo's face: 'Rock group Led Zeppelin are to reform for a tribute concert to the Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun. Singer Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist John Paul Jones will perform together for the first time in 19 years. Tickets for the one-off show at the O2 arena in London on 26 November will cost £125 and be allocated by ballot. Pete Townshend and Bill Wyman will also perform. Ertegun, who signed Led Zeppelin in 1968, died last year.' (BBC News) More / Millions rush for tickets

Led Zeppelin - Black Dog (1971)



Bonham-Plant TV interview (1970)

From 'The Song Remains the Same' film. (Click on Play button to view.)

Another musician friend of ours has been summoned to the Music Heaven where Leo dwells now. Here's a touching tribute by a bandmate of his:


By Rafil Elyas
03-10-2006

Kumaresvara (Jack) Nathan, 360° Head Rotation co-founder, musical collaborator, and my very dear friend of almost 15 years, is dead.

Jack was cremated with his beloved ‘Frankenstein’ custom ‘Jack Series’ guitar on Monday, 25 September 2006, at around 4pm. On Saturday, 26 September 2006, his ashes were taken to his favourite spot, a friend's dusun near Kuala Kubu Bahru, and released into a stream running across the property. The tribute gig shall be held once we manage to shake the fog of extreme grief that is now clouding our heads.

Sometime between twelve and one in the morning of Sunday, 24 September 2006, Jack was riding a bicycle home to Mutiara Damansara’s Palm Springs Apartments when he was hit by a car. An eyewitness, driving behind this vehicle, clocked its speed at over a 100 kilometres per hour. It was speeding away to avoid a police roadblock. The car hit Jack and did not stop. I later learned that the driver has since turned himself in, and is now out on bail.

Jack would have turned 41 on 6 October 2006.

In all the years that I knew Jack, he hardly spoke about his personal life. Most of our discussions revolved around music and musicians. Once in a while, he'd fill me in with bits and pieces:

Jack was born in Bukit Mertajam, Penang. Youngest in a family of four, he had two elder brothers, Nathan and Steve; and a sister, Devi. His father was a headmaster and his mother a housewife. All the boys played guitar well; in the family, there appears to be a genetic disposition and an almost-instinctual inclination when it comes to that instrument. Nathan started Jack on what was to be a lifelong passion for the blues --namely of the Eric Clapton brand.

After completing his Ordinary Levels, Jack travelled to Singapore and studied industrial design. He later found himself in the Klang Valley, and began his career as a professional musician. I understand he had a brief stint with the legendary pub band Streetlights. Sometime in the early nineties, he hooked up with Victor, Joyce, Roger and Bino to form a group called the Country Hearts. They were a resident band of the now-defunct pub Longhorn, and alternated sets with seminal KL country band Os Pombos.

In the last few years, Jack was living with his sister Devi and her husband Ranjit. He lived a blues player's life: a rollercoaster alternating between extreme joy and the bleakest rock bottom.

Jack and I met, sometime in 1992, through our mutual friend, Victor. Jack played lead guitar and fiddle. He fit the Wild-West frontier-town-saloon theme at Longhorn: belt buckle the size of a motorcycle hubcap, cowboy boots, jeans, checker-ed shirt, ten gallon hat.

He sported shoulder-length hair and had a sinister scar running down the left side of his face. Mean guitar and fiddle playing motherfucker. He got the scar in a bar fight -- he was hit with a glass beer pitcher, trying to defend one of the waitresses from some customers who were roughing her up.

They allowed guest artists to jam at Longhorn, on Sunday nights. I'd go there and do Bob Dylan's ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and Jack would go totally Hendrix. Sometimes, we would play a few original numbers I'd written. We came from totally different backgrounds, Jack and I: he worshipped Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix; I was on the Bauhaus and The Cure sector of the musical universe. Nonetheless, when we jammed, there was a connection -- two totally different musical directions had merged to create what can only be described as Punk Blues Goth Rock.

We both got to know each other well. On a fishing trip, I learned that we shared the same birthday. Jack was a year older than me.

The first recording we made together was sometime in 1993. It consisted of two songs I had written, ‘Just One Morning’ and ‘Sunrise’. Jack had to feel what he was playing, so he asked me to describe each song; the meaning and imagery I hoped to evoke. I sat down and told him ‘Just One Morning’ should conjure this picture: Laura Ingalls Wilder in her Little House on the Prairie, enjoying a nasty ménage a trois with two farm hands, in a hay cart in the middle of a bunch of chainsaws caught in a twister.

That essentially set the way we wrote songs together: I'd paint a situation in words and a basic melody; Jack would bring it to aural life.

Between 1994 and 2003 Jack and I hardly saw each other. I had become an oil and gas consultant and was living out of a suitcase. Jack was working for an advertising company and was doing production work. Occasionally, I'd go on set and watch him work -- there would almost always be a guitar nearby; he'd get possessed by Hendrix and launch into a 30-minute solo.

Sometime in 2003 we reconnected. One evening, I wandered into the old Paul's Place, in Damansara Utama. Amir Yusoff was jamming on drums; another guy, neatly dressed with a corporate haircut, was playing guitar. I told Amir: “That guy looks a lot like an old buddy of mine, Jack Nathan.”

Turns out it was Jack. He had been helping Paul build the stage, and was doing some handyman work around the venue. Many beers followed that night. Later that year, when Peter Hassan Brown organised a gig in Jam Asia and asked if I'd be interested in performing, I told him to give me a couple of days to think about it. I immediately called Jack.

360° Head Rotation’s first line up was me, Jack, Edmun Anthony and Paul Millot. We practiced once. At the end of that practice, Edmun gave me a look of what I can only describe as horror, and politely declined to participate in any future rehearsals. Paul had commitments with his band Brown Sugar. Both Paul and Edmun would return to perform with us as sessionists, but this was later.

Jack got headhunting duty. He had three weeks to find a rhythm section. In a couple of days, he nabbed Mohd Nuhi “Monkey Boy” Selamat on drums and bassist Nazrul Ahmad. They were performing with the local Seattle Sound outfit Hike.

Between 2003 to the present day, 360° Head Rotation played over 20 gigs and started recording our debut album. The band was fun for me: a diversion from the world of oil and gas, a chance to pander to the right side of my brain.

To Jack, this was serious work. He threw himself at the task of arranging and perfecting the instrumental parts for our songs. We would spend hours getting the proper sound levels and quality in the studio -- and even more hours mixing and engineering the tracks with recording engineer Meng at Standing Wave Studios. Over the years, 360° Head Rotation developed a Sound: thundering drums, Mephistophelean lyrics, driving bass. Amps up to 11. Sweat and spit on stage. The signature Jack Nathan blues punk guitar.

For more genteel audiences, Jack and I developed some acoustic arrangements and deployed them in venues like La Bodega and No Black Tie. They were interesting, but nothing like our full electric sets.

Over the years, Jack Nathan has come to be recognised as one of the most innovative guitarists in the Klang Valley. He was held in high esteem in both the pub musician and independent music communities. Jack loved all aspects of music: the playing, the lights, the glamour photo shots -- don't ask.

He was one of the most gregarious and amiable people I knew, always making new friends. For 360° Head Rotation, we made up a bunch of business cards with snarky titles. Jack was Sex Symbol & Lead Guitarist.

I am neither spiritual nor religious. I do not subscribe to afterlife models proscribed by scripture or divinely inspired text. However, in light of this tragedy, I now see the benefit of having that sort of faith.

Because I would then be able to comfort myself with an image of Jack, passing through that proverbial tunnel, walking toward the bright white light, holding his Frankenstein guitar.

Approaching the light, he sees a wild haired man wearing an old military jacket. He smiles, extends his hand, and says: "Hi Jimi, I'm Jack."

"Lemme show you how we play blues guitar."

(Rafil Elyas builds simulation models for the petroleum industry, and fronts punk blues goth rock outfit 360° Head Rotation.) SOURCE: Kakiseni.com