“ ‘Scuse me while I kiss this guy…” “There’s a bathroom on the right…”
Those are some of the better known cases of “disk-lexia” – lyrics that people THINK they hear.
Hendrix, of course, wasn’t gay. He said, “Kiss the SKY”. And CCR wasn’t pointing to the lavatory. They sang “There’s a bad moon on the rise”.
In marketing, music and life, perception may be reality, but what you see and hear ain’t necessarily what you get.
Over the course of conducting his interviews, Frank learned this right quick. One of his subjects was rather surprised when he got Frank’s first draft transcript for approval. After all, he was pretty sure that he would never have described Jimmy Page’s playing of the Theremin as “pathetic”.
Houston, we have an oops.
So it fell to me, as Frank’s editor and resident linguist, to go back and unravel the threads of that original conversation. The troublesome phrase turned out to be “He was moving his hand back and forth in the path of the Theremin”.
But hot damn! It sure sounded like “pathetic” to me, too. Good catch by our esteemed interviewee. And that’s exactly why we asked everyone to review what they’d told Frank before we published it.
I don’t know about you but, in any job I’ve ever had, you can sweat bullets over the big stuff. And it’s ALWAYS the little things that raise their ugly heads to bite you in the derrière.
Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones had the studio smarts to know this. As renowned Zeppelin author, Robert Godwin, explained to Frank: in 1968/’69, when Led Zeppelin’s first two albums were recorded, there was a universal flaw in recording techniques. No one had figured out how to successfully capture the “bottom end” of bass guitar and percussion.
And by the way, in those days, “stereo” was cutting edge in America but still mainly foreign in the UK where Zeppelin recorded.
If the recording engineer put too much bottom end on the master, the lathe would skip when cutting the lacquer and it’d drop out. However, the folks in Motown had figured it out. And, thanks to John Paul Jones’ passion for Motown, he knew exactly how they did it.
It was largely this attention to detail – not only in performing the music, but also in recording it – that made these early Led Zeppelin albums so sensational. They sound as fresh and exciting today as they did back then.
Funny, the things you can learn when you talk to people, huh?
