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Utopian Turtletop. Monsieur Croche's BĂȘte Noire. Contact: turtletop [at] hotmail [dot] com

Wednesday, June 20, 2007


Various musical thoughts lately -- when I sit to set them down they flutter away like startled butterflies, they evaporate like nascent rainclouds, and so I'm left hoping for a cloudburst before too long, or a prolonged visitation with the butterflies.



The image is 10th century musical notation, if memory serves. I stole the image from a web site without making note of the image or the site, thinking I could find it again, and now I can't. Much like the notation itself -- can anybody read it?
(I can't read the writing either.)



One afternoon in late 1999 I was taking a group cab from Petra to Amman, Jordan, with a bunch of European tourists I had recently met. A young woman from the Netherlands put a cassette on, which the cabbie agreed to. It was '90s Euro-techno-dance music; I enjoyed it. Then the Netherlandish woman got tired of it and put on Led Zeppelin. "Led Zeppelin is like the Beatles," she said (she was in her early 20s), "Everybody likes them, and you can put them on in any mood or situation and it's fine."

Years before, 2 musician friends and I had discussed who set the industry standard in the '70s as the Beatles had (in many respects) in the '60s. I proposed the Eagles, which I regretted later (though I do like the Eagles).


Led Zeppelin -- they were it.

They sounded great across the Jordanian desert.







-- Jordanian desert above the Dead Sea, courtesy of these people.
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