The Ballad of Jimmy Page's Solicitors

Date

February 22, 2012

Miracler

Greg "Buns" Mills

Location

Detroit

Last time we heard from GBM,

He lived in Berkeley, had medium-sized kids, and made mixes like September 09's More Embarrassing Hippie Music and June 08's The Well Tempered Badonkadonk, which you described as, 'Uh, best title ever!,' 'Manfred Mann sings 'Duce' as 'Douche' but he's South African, so we should make allowances for accent,' 'Yes, and that point confounded me and my pre-adolescent friends for some time,' 'My fave mix yet—a nice variety,' 'Pure awesomeness,' 'Oh man, someone FINALLY put Hallo Gallo on a comp! Stereolab owes their whole career to this one song,' 'Yep, between the Neu song, The Fall, VU, and Bee Gees, you've pretty nearly covered Stereolab's reason for existence,' 'The Konichiwa song had me in stitches,' 'I would not even know where to start handing out the cred—great mix,' 'I feel like I've heard all of these songs before. In this same order. Yes—it was the night you asked me to come over to listen to music on your new hi-fi stereo. Then we drank that funny smelling kool-aid. Then the lights flickered, and I woke up with a tattoo on my badonkadonk. Ah, sweet youth. Thanks for bringing it all back.' And so on.

Now the kids are big and Greg's in Detroit, but he's still the same kook that cranks out eccentric mixes like today's, which represents the latest in a most enjoyable string of thematic Season 5 mixes. Collected and analyzed (we don't say 'curated' here) as though for a PhD thesis, this thing also totally holds together. Without further adieu, may I present...The Ballad of Jimmy Page's Solicitors.

Liner Notes from GBM

There is no Led Zeppelin here.

There's some early Robert Plant. There's Jimmy Page performing with the Yardbirds (performing a song that Page ripped off twice - once as a Yardbird, the second time as a Zep)

Some songs were "covered" by LZ. Some melodies or bass lines or lyrics were "appropriated" by LZ. Much here was "ripped-off" wholesale by LZ. Obviously, barrels of ink have been spilled by greasy ponytailed Mojo writers about this topic, and we could have a multivolume set if we pursued this theme further.

And there's one cover of "Whole Lotta Love", though that song is more or less the Willie Dixon-penned Muddy Waters joint, "You Need Love", which appears here. The Small Faces also did a version called "You Need Loving". Led Zep got sued successfully by Dixon in '86. The Small Faces managed to duck any sort of litigation. Well done, Steve Marriott!

The first song here is the original "Dazed and Confused", by the American folksinger Jake Holmes. He opened for the Yardbirds in NYC, and I guess Jimmy took very careful notes. A pretty frigging awesome live Yardbirds version finishes off the disk. Mr. Holmes went on to be a successful jingle writer, writing "I'm a Pepper" and "Be All That You Can Be".

#2, “You Shook Me” - Jeff Beck's take on the Dixon/Muddy track of the same name, featuring Rod Stewart on vocals. Beck's version appear on his album Truth, which came out in '68, a year before Led Zep's debut album.

Track #3, “As Long as I Have You” was covered by Led Zep, though it's only been released on rarity compilations. They credit Garnet Mimms for it, too!

#4: King Curtis, playing the aforementioned "Whole Lotta Love" like a completely mad bastard. Withnail and I fans should note that the album this track appears on, Live at the Fillmore, also features the amazing cover of "Whiter Shade of Pale" that opens the movie. So, fun! Withnail and I!

#5: "Nobody's Fault But Mine" John Renbourn from Pentangle's cover of a Blind Willie Johnson song that Led Zeppelin covered on Presence. Note: Renbourn is pretty awesome.

#6: "You Need Love" - Muddy Waters. Enough. Done talking about it.

#7: A John Fahey track, because, why the hell not? And it sounds sort of Page-y. Or Page sounds sort of Fahey-y. I don't know.

#8: "Killing Floor" - Howlin' Wolf. The bridge and most of the lyrics from the "Lemon Song"... can you hear it, yer honor? The Lemon Song also manages to shave off a little melody from Albert King’s “Crosscut Saw”, a Ma Rainey lyric and of course, Robert Johnson’s nasty lemon reference that gave this song its name.(Johnson sang about his ‘lemon’ in “Traveling Riverside Blues”)

#9: Davey Graham. Woof. Merged Ragga, delta blues, Django Rheinhardt, pop schmaltz and was indirectly responsible for Black Sabbath, if only for influencing Tony Iommi. He also influenced every other folk-inflected guitarist in Britain. A lovely version of "She Moved Through the Fair" appeared on that album Van Morrison did with the Chieftains.

#10: "Nervous Breakdown". "Communications Breakdown". Just listen, okay?

#11: Another British folkie of the era. Pretty, yes?

#12: Alexis Korner, father of British Electric Blues, with a pre-Zep Robert Plant.

#13. The Yardbirds doing an extremely tuff version of Dazed and Confused. My fav.

Mix is UP. Same password

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