TIME TO RAMBLE ON

Arms and hands up in the air, fist pumping, air drumming, singing every word, screaming like we were on roller coasters, we gathered last night as a group of old rockers.

Finally. After a year without music gatherings, my friends and I used our — one year later — postponed tickets to go see GET THE LED OUT, a Led Zeppelin tribute band.

It was nice to feel normal for a few hours last night. Not sure if it was the right thing to do from a Covid perspective, but I leaned in and danced my ass off like it was my last concert for another year.

From the opening song of Good Times, Bad Times, it felt like every song on their set list had the intention of symbolizing the year we have just lived through — no live music and our hopeful return to living wholly again.

How many of you are seeing us for the first time? The lead singer, Paul Sinclair, screamed into the mike.
Screams, shouts, finger pointing with the NUMBER 1 high up in the air, loud and proud.

How many are REPEAT OFFENDERS? And the crowd went wild! It sounded like most of us screaming were at an actual Led Zeppelin concert. We had found our way from a year of lying in wait to literally led it out after being jailed from live music concerts. Maskless, forgetting about what we just went through and potentially may go through again for a few hours of our lives.

It was exhilarating, joyful, sad and happy and all kinds of other emotions as I stood there singing every word with strangers like they were my family.

On the ride to the music venue, Indian Ranch in Webster, Mass., my friends and I reminisced about the Led Zeppelin songs that made up our young lives and the stories that went with them.

The first time I heard the song, Stairway to Heaven (7th grade with Cheryl Texiera). Tangerine, (smoking a joint in my stepmother’s car, not paying attention as I passed it to my passenger and drove the car into a ditch — much longer story but no sense in replaying teenage idiocy) All My Love (at one of my first school dances with simmering sexual energy I didn’t know what to do with at the tender age of fourteen). Trying LSD for the first time and thinking I was actually part of the Houses of the Holy poster hanging in my friend’s bedroom door.

The endless list of memories tucked away in the music vault of our brains until the first strum of the guitar allowed them their freedom at last.