Back from Asheville

I got back from Asheville last night, having cleaned out the bunker. Since I don't have a place in Chapel Hill yet, everything's in storage. The weather in Asheville was nice and cool, a welcome break.

I took along a copy of Hammer of the Gods, the Led Zeppelin biography. I was hoping for a lot of juicy stories of appalling behavior, but there wasn't so much of that, at least for a group whose leader was sleeping with a 14-year-old model. Some things I didn't know:

1) Jimmy Page was even more of a guitar prodigy than I realized. He picked up a guitar for the first time at 15 years of age, and by the time he was 17 or 18 was known around London as a hot guitarist.

2) I knew Page spend the early/mid 60's as a session player, but didn't know he got rich doing it, while the rock stars on whose records he anonymously played had trouble making ends meet.

3) Starting a heavy blues/rock band was a marketing decision on Page's part. Cream had broken up and Jeff Beck's new group seemed unlikely to last, so there was a niche to be filled. Page and Plant's personal favorites: Joni Mitchell and Crosy, Stills and Nash.

Related Oceanography Fun Fact: the fish with which Led Zep road manager Richard Cole molested a groupie at the Edgewater Inn in Seattle was not a mud shark (Frank Zappa notwithstanding), but a red snapper.