I don't care what anyone says - Dread Zeppelin are fucking awesome! Back in 1991when I lived in a dorm, a few of us sat on the lawn playing cribbage with my roommate's stereo pointed out the window blaring DZ's first album. Someone shouted, "What the hell is this reggae/Led Zeppelin crap?!?" I thought the whole point of college was to explore new things, learn esoteric knowledge, drink, and fuck. Well, we were doing half of those on that fine spring day. (The exploration and the drinking.) Close-minded fucks.
So I've got Dread Zeppelin's version of "Moby Dick" playing. Fucking classic. Over the drum solo, Tortelvis reads from Melville:
"'Give way!' cried Ahab to the oarsmen, and the boats darted forward to the attack; but maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven. The wide tiers of welded tendons overspreading his broad white forehead, beneath the transparent skin, looked knitted together; as head on, he came churning his tail among the boats; and once more flailed them apart; spilling out the irons and lances from the two mates' boats, and dashing in one side of the upper part of their bows, but leaving Ahab's almost without a scar."
Come on! How can you not like Dread Zeppelin? While I liked Jane's Addiction, some guy from Marinette played them and (seemingly) only them constantly. It would be a year or so before I discovered Nirvana and I wasn't interested in the alternative scence. Most of the people who listened to Jane's Addiction, Sonic Youth, and that ilk did so just to get out of listening to other music. They reveled in and proclaimed their alternativeness at every given moment.
"Yeah, yeah - you're cool."
Personally, I got along with the rednecks listening to The Replacements better. And Husker Du. (Where does the umlaut go?) This is probably because they listened to such bands for the music and not for any scene. They had no pretensions that they were somehow hipper than the rest of us. This is why it took me so long to get into Nirvana: I dispised all the hype surrounding "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and the media making blanket statements about me and my peers. Finally, some months after grunge broke, I saw Nirvana doing "Territorial Pissings" live on MTV and that got me interested. After all was said and done, I had fallen in love with Nirvana's music, Bleach becoming my probable favorite. Nevermind was too slick-sounding and most of the songs lacked the raw power of their first album. I was sorrowed by the news of Kurt Cobain's death but I shed no tears and had no need to call an MTV-sponsored suicide hotline. Cobain wrote a bunch of great songs but I never really felt like his lyrics somehow chronicled the inner workings of my mind. Some of his lyrics were fun while others were meaningful in generic kind of way. In the end, he was a great songwriter but also a fucked-up person who was so troubled that he turned his back on his daughter, his wife, his friends, and his life.
Back in 1990, alternative music still had a modicum of alternative to it. But, ya know, I've always like music that was alternative. That is, music that most of the world's population hated. Going around telling people that you listen to old Genesis, King Crimson, and Gentle Giant is not a good way to be popular in high school, especially when there are only 200 students in toto. And everyone hated Marillion.
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