Labor daze and Led Zeppelin!

I heard Heartbreaker by Led Zeppelin, the live version off Song Remains the Same just yesterday. It never fails to blow me away. I listen to Led Zeppelin a lot lately, even if I am just slightly younger than its remaining members.

Today is Labor Day in the U.S. - the holiday that traditionally marks the end of Summer. When last ditch beach trips are taken, desperate picnics are held and the kids squirm at the thought of heading back to school. Fall is coming, the air starts to cool and the rest of the remaining year goes faster than a steel marble down a playground slide. It goes like this over and over.
Life is short, and Labor Days come and go with the quick turning of the seasons.

 Every year we wait for the Summer - for the feel of the heat on our bare feet and a cool drink in a shady place,when laughter carries on sunbeams and rock and roll is the best soundtrack. I used to carry it with me on a boombox every where I went.

The boombox is gone, the Summers are speeding up, but the memories and the songs remain the same.

I have always loved Led Zeppelin, who hasn't? Even when I went through my {more} snobby phase in the late 70s and early 80s and listened to punk and new wave and was supposed to eschew the old grand-dads, I never did. I just never told my erudite record store colleagues.

The riff in Heartbreaker is arguably one of the greatest in rock and roll. {Sir Page is the father of many of the greatest} And hearing it, even when I have heard it a million times before, in the basement caves of my youth, in cars, walkmen, boomboxes, never ever does not make my every hair stand on end. It hits the gut, it hits the heart, it kicks your soul. Rock is like that. And God knows there is not enough of it around. I just don't see the kids getting absorbed in anything like we used to. Just to make the effort to get a record out, dust it off, set the needle in the groove, read the dust-jacket over and over again would seem too much these days. I am grateful we had it. It makes us who we are. Old.

The Summer has come and gone again, and each moment is one moment less. But there is still rock and roll. There is the life we made around it. There is every feeling you have ever had condensed in a lick, a drumbeat, a lyric. 

This is one way I make memories.