On This Day 31 May

John Bonham was born on this day in 1948.

1969 31 May On This Day Led Zeppelin - New York, NY at Fillmore East

• 1948 John “Bonzo” Bonham born
• 1968 The Yardbirds - Los Angeles, CA at Shrine Auditorium
• 1969 31 May On This Day Led Zeppelin - New York, NY at Fillmore East
• 1973 Led Zeppelin - Inglewood, CA at The Forum
• 1977 Led Zeppelin - Greensboro, NC at Greensboro Coliseum

John Bonham

Led Zeppelin played the LA Forum on John Bonham's 25th birthday. When George Harrison and wife Patti dropped by to help celebrate at the hotel afterwards, Bonham threw both of them, fully clothed, into the swimming pool. (as reported by Newswire, June 1973)

John "Bonzo" Bonham, arguably the world's best rock drummer, was a core part of Led Zeppelin's success.

Around the same time in 1968 that Jimmy Page asked Bonham to join the new band that would become Led Zeppelin, "John had also been receiving other tempting offers from esteemed artists such as Joe Cocker and Chris Farlowe who were in positions to offer John more financially lucrative prospects. Plant and Grant bombarded Bonham with telegrams of persuasion (eight from Plant and fourty from Grant) sent to John at his favourite local pub: 'Three Men in a Boat' in Walsall. Bonham finally decided to accept Grant's offer, joining the band in early September 1968. Bonham said: "I decided I liked their music better than Cocker's or Farlowe's." Quote from http://www.johnbonham.co.uk/

1967 A young John Bonham and Robert Plant with Band of Joy

Bonzo at tea time

1971 Bonham & Page in Japan

1973 31 May John Bonham takes a bow on his birthday at LA Forum

1974 14 Feb Bonham presenting Keith Moon with a fake award
on stage during a concert featuring Roy Harper and Friends
at the Rainbow Theatre, London

1975 Bonham Earls Court

The essential John Bonham

John Bonham portrait by Jan Perssons

♪

♪ Happy Birthday Bonzo (Led Zeppelin, LA Forum 1973) YouTube
♪ Bonzo's Montreux (Led Zeppelin, CODA, recorded 1976 released 1982) YouTube

♫ John Bonham, Traps Magazine article by Chris Welch PDF 25 page download

♪ Mage Music 1 playlist at YouTube
♪ Mage Music 2 playlist at YouTube
♪ Page & Plant playlist at YouTube

On This Day 31 May

John Bonham was born on this day in 1948.

1969 31 May On This Day Led Zeppelin - New York, NY at Fillmore East

Led Zeppelin played the LA Forum on John Bonham's 25th birthday. When George Harrison and wife Patti dropped by to help celebrate at the hotel afterwards, Bonham threw both of them, fully clothed, into the swimming pool. (as reported by Newswire, June 1973)

• 1948 John “Bonzo” Bonham born
• 1968 The Yardbirds - Los Angeles, CA at Shrine Auditorium
• 1969 31 May On This Day Led Zeppelin - New York, NY at Fillmore East
• 1973 Led Zeppelin - Inglewood, CA at The Forum
• 1977 Led Zeppelin - Greensboro, NC at Greensboro Coliseum

John "Bonzo" Bonham, arguably the world's best rock drummer, was a core part of Led Zeppelin's success.

Around the same time in 1968 that Jimmy Page asked Bonham to join the new band that would become Led Zeppelin, "John had also been receiving other tempting offers from esteemed artists such as Joe Cocker and Chris Farlowe who were in positions to offer John more financially lucrative prospects. Plant and Grant bombarded Bonham with telegrams of persuasion (eight from Plant and fourty from Grant) sent to John at his favourite local pub: 'Three Men in a Boat' in Walsall. Bonham finally decided to accept Grant's offer, joining the band in early September 1968. Bonham said: "I decided I liked their music better than Cocker's or Farlowe's." Quote from http://www.johnbonham.co.uk/

1967 A young John Bonham and Robert Plant with Band of Joy

Bonzo at tea time

1971 Bonham & Page in Japan

1973 31 May John Bonham takes a bow on his birthday at LA Forum

1974 14 Feb Bonham presenting Keith Moon with a fake award
on stage during a concert featuring Roy Harper and Friends
at the Rainbow Theatre, London

1975 Bonham Earls Court

The essential John Bonham

John Bonham portrait by Jan Perssons

♪  Happy Birthday Bonzo (Led Zeppelin, LA Forum 1973) YouTube
♪  Bonzo's Montreux (Led Zeppelin, CODA, recorded 1976 released 1982) YouTube

♫  John Bonham Traps Magazine article by Chris Welch PDF 25 page download

Jimmy Page Birthday

We all know whose birthday it is today!  Happy 71st birthday Jimmy Page and MANY MANY more!

Happy Birthday To Us!

Mage Music is two years old just about... now.

Mage Music 83

I say happy birthday to us rather than just to Mage Music because this blog has not only been about Magick and about the music of Jimmy Page, but it's been a journey of revelation as well as a Working of personal Magick. It is also a gift to you, the reader, that feels in many ways like a gift to me, the author.

Two years ago I wrote "I'm curious about music - why it works, why it generates the responses it does. I'm not educated in music theory, but I want to know more about music than just that I like it or that it seems powerful. I want to know why. I'm hoping you do, too."

I didn't think back then I'd be talking more about Magick than music, but I've let the writing lead me where it wants to. After all, writing is a creative act, just as music is. And all creative acts can be used as ritual for Magick.

So mote it be.

It's Your Magick Too

"A rock concert is in fact a rite involving the evocation and transmutation of energy."
~ William Burroughs, Crawdaddy Magazine, June 1975. Rock Magic: Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, And a search for the elusive Stairway to Heaven 


Mage Music 43

This week's Mage Music came about because of a birthday playlist request.  You may have noticed I stopped doing playlists in these posts.  I realized how much time choosing the right music takes and, as important as this blog is to me, I nevertheless decided I needed to use that time for other things.  That makes this playlist a little more special.

I wanted to pick songs that have Magick for me personally (even though the list is meant for someone else), not just songs that are well performed.  The songs are not necessarily beautiful, the playlist doesn't even flow well from one song to the next.  I picked the songs because it seems to me in each one Jimmy Page was pushing, exploring, reaching for something deeper and more meaningful than ordinary music conveys.  I chose these particular songs, too, because the more closely I listen, the more they prompt me to join in that reaching.

This made me think about Mr. Burroughs' comment about what a rock concert is about, and what music brings to us, the audience - or, more specifically, about the Magick from the audience point of view whether or not the audience is at a live concert.

But I'm not going to talk about any of that this week.

You'll have to forgive me - or be PO'd if you prefer - for my not going further with these ideas right now.  I'm taking a little time off for other work.   Perhaps some of you have thoughts on this - I welcome them.  Right now, though, I'm leaving you with the birthday playlist and getting back to my other work.  Enjoy!





PLAYLIST

Note:  I recommend not looking at the visuals, and not paying attention to lyrics.  These songs are about the vision of Jimmy Page as expressed through the music produced by his own guitar.

White Summer Black Mountain Side	1969 (live)  Led Zeppelin June 27, 1969 London's Playhouse Theatre First released on LZ 4-disc boxed set 11/08/90
Lucifer Rising Outtake 2	1972 (studio) Jimmy Page, Album: Lucifer Rising
Guitar Solo	1977 (live)  Led Zeppelin  May 30, 1977 Landover MD (from bootleg Double Shot - sorry, the end of the song is cut off for some reason)
Cadillac	1986 (studio)  The Firm, Album: Mean Business
Emerald Eyes	1988 (studio)  Jimmy Page, Album:  Outrider
Saccharin	1993 (studio)  Jimmy Page, David Coverdale.  Unreleased.
Domino	1999 (live)  Jimmy Page, NetAid Benefit Concert.  Unreleased.
Nobody's Fault But Mine	2007 (live)  Led Zeppelin + Jason Bonham, Celebration Day O2 Concert
Ramble On	2008 (live) Foo Fighters, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones.  Wembley Stadium.
Summer's Day	2011 Happy birthday, Sue Clement.  Hope your day is special.

Muse Music Magick - and a Happy Birthday

2013 - Year of the Muse

~jimmypage.com, January 1 2013

Before all the sweat equity that a Mage must put into Magick - or a musician into music - there must be inspiration to provide the goal, the end point of that journey. But where does inspiration come from?

The neat, clean hard-wired explanation

Scientists today are discovering some incredible information on how communication and creativity work in our brains. They are getting a picture of how truly hard-wired we humans are for what we are capable of. The actual physical pathways of electrical pulses and brain structures involved during acts of creativity are being mapped.  This is very exciting stuff - but what scientists are doing is confirming what many of us have already understood:  Music is something that not only we all can do or at least appreciate, but is a basic and necessary part of the human communicative experience that evolution shaped the brain to do.

But as nice and neat as that sounds, that still doesn't explain the source of inspiration.  Science is remarkably chary of addressing the hard questions:  Why does life exist at all?  What started it?  What's it all for?

The mushy, non-scientific explanation

Like with Magick, music is a process and an experience. Like with Magick, the musical process requires desire and will and ritual (performance). And like with Magick, in spite of what science would say, the source of music is not ultimately to be found in the hard-wired world but in something much vaster than electrical pulses in the human brain. 

Science has yet to venture into to the scary territory of the Mysteries and pretty much either pretends that part of the human experience doesn't even exist or that it's hogwash (although quantum physics is making that avoidance harder and harder to maintain). Even when attempting to categorize, quantify and otherwise pin down psychic phenomena science clings to the notion that there is no difference between the mind and the brain.  

The ancients tackle the hard stuff

Some thinkers have always known better.  To them - particularly the ancient sages of mythology and philosophy -  the mind/brain sameness claim would have been considered ignorant in the extreme.

Which is not to say that human attempts to explain the unexplained (and likely unexplainable) have been 100% accurate either, but at least they tried, and so those of us today with broader vision benefit.  There is much to learn from mythology, and thus we come to Muses, the goddesses who embody inspiration and the arts.

The Muses

In western mythology there were originally three muses: Practice, Memory and Song. However, traditional mythology gives us nine muses - either daughters of Gaia and Uranus, or of Zeus and Mnemosyne (goddess of memory, daughter of Gaia and Uranus). No matter what the genealogy, the Muse we are most interested in is Euterpe ("giver of delight"), originally the muse of music and later of lyric poetry. She is most often depicted holding a flute or sometimes a lyre.

Diodorus Siculus (Greek historian 1st century B.C.) said of Euterpe, "she gives to those who hear her sing delight in the blessings which education bestows."  The bringer of musical inspiration bestows the blessing of knowledge. But we knew that.

The point of the mythology is not that there is a goddess named Euterpe hovering in the background tapping the head of a musician with a magic wand and knocking inspiration into the otherwise vacant mind, but that the inspiration is a connection from the human mind to another realm, one that is vaster than humans. It is a blessing of enlightenment and delight that appears to spring from outside the musician, in mythology from a Muse.

Truly, inspiration comes from and through the musician, as does Magick. The source isn't the human being exactly - the Mage or the musician opens the way, is a conduit of the infinite and, necessarily, a filter that cannot help but distort (that pesky infinite/finite issue).

Background mosaic of  Euterpe
appears on the front
of a concert hall,
"la salle Rameau",
in Lyon, France.  Click here for full image. 

Who needs a Muse?
So what's with the Muse, then?  If a Mage or musician can do it without one, who needs an ancient goddesses of mythology?  Well, to put it simply, there's the audience issue, too.

The Muse not only provides an explanation for the seeming Magickal blossoming of an idea but is also an audience to bounce ideas off.  All artists, all creators, need an audience - someone impartial who will experience and validate the work. But while in the process of creation, an actual human and fallible audience can be a bad idea - an uneducated comment, or even a good comment at the wrong time, can squash the artist's creative flow flatter than a bug under the sole of a Dr. Martens boot.

While some artists and Mage have a living, breathing person as Muse who provides inspiration and feedback, those extraordinary individuals are rare.  For the solitary artist or Mage, the work in progress must be bounced off of the vision of the heart and soul. It can be done, and must be done that way for the highest-level Mages of Magick, music or any of the arts or advancements in knowledge - new work means going where no Mage has gone before.

The Muse, then, is a metaphor for the artist's or Mage's process of tapping into the infinite and letting the light shine through.  Jimmy Page has declared this is the year of the Muse: A year of inspiration, of creation, of new music and of Magick.

Listen for your own Muse, for you surely have one if you want one.  If not your own, then Jimmy Page's will do.

Happy Birthday Jimmy Page January 9