Nine To 10 Butts & That Magical Floating Dust

hint: it's Zeppelin.

As always, the following events are told through the author’s flawed, time-worn, THC-wracked memory. Please, enjoy:)

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Unlike The Sound of Music, Saturday Night Fever, or a collection of JFK’s presidential speeches(?), this wasn’t some lost heirloom found in my grandma’s attic, it was really mine. With Houses of the Holy – Led Zeppelin’s most contentious album – a devoted slice of my future officially commenced, foretold by nine (or 10) butts I once clocked in a used back-alley bookstore.

……

I was a tweenager – lanky arms, multicolored braces, pimplz – plopped down in a coastal town I did not know. One of those places you just end up because it’s summer and your mom is driving. She was checking out the “shoppes” with a friend when I wandered off, stumbling forward in compliance with a mighty, unknown force. I passed yarn stores, patisseries, a post office. Tripping on loose bricks toward some fated destination.

It was down a gravely side street, the used bookstore, with blue-grey shingles, two single-pane windows, and an open door. The inside was bathed in light, with a warm golden-hour glow. I remember watching individual dust particles drif past the register like snowflakes falling in reverse. “Mykonos” by Fleet Foxes played dreamily on chunky analog speakers, filling the room with angelic harmonies and a thumping beat.

A handful of people mulled around. It smelled like a musty closet. It was a heaven I hadn’t yet known.

At this point, I’m a child who no longer wants to be a child. That period of life when you’re old enough to jerk off but not legally allowed to drive a car. My identity was forming, I was frustrated, and I was taking it all in.

Earlier in the summer, while helping my grandma move out of the house she’d lived in for 50 years, I’d glimpsed a pale blue crisscross pattern glowing in the back corner of her attic. The Who’s rock opera, Tommy, with my mom’s initials sharpied into the bottom right corner. Despite having nothing to play it on, I brought the album home and displayed its insides on my bedroom dresser – an animated hand pushing through a dark magical underworld. Since then, I’d been secretly wondering if trippy triptychs lurked within other album covers.

Seconds inside the book shop, my body felt magnetized by something lurking beyond the stacks. I moved through the room like a man on the moon, hanging mid-air between long delirious steps, eventually steadying my gaze upon a beautiful row of worn-out records. Little gems forgotten to time and space, discarded, tattered, marked up, each with their own personal history. It was a measly selection, but to me, at the time, this was the motherload.

Drooling, I flipped past polka and bebop compilations, and probably something by Gordon Lightfoot, until I recognized a tangerine tint. Its hue mimicked the rays of sun now bursting through the front of the store. I ran my palm over the cover, sweeping away a streak of dust. The bleach-blonde locks of the climbing children matched my own. Their naked butts reminded me of the Copper Tone sunscreen bottle I’d stuffed into my backpack after the school year ended in June. Even before flipping the record over, song titles filled my head. I knew the track list intimately, having slipped the Houses of the Holy CD from my dad’s desk drawer a couple years prior. Just as puberty sank its claws in, I’d become acquainted with the CD’s moody (and oftentimes jarring) twists and turns.

But what I was holding now was no plastic recreation, it was from back then, decades before I was born, when song ideas were being toyed with on the manicured lawn of Mick Jagger’s English country estate. Pressed, released, and played on tour to tens of thousands of screaming fans, I was struck that these songs now lived within chipped paperboard disintegrating at the seams — a priceless, sonic time capsule.

Literally. There was no price sticker to be found.

So I carried it up front, confronting the greasy-haired boomer hunched behind the counter. “Um…excuse me…how much is this?”

My voice was too low for how young I was (it had dropped earlier that year; my feet had grown 3 sizes; and I was suddenly 4 inches taller). Its timbre and particular willingness to crack produced a flinch in the book store gremlin.

I studied his wrinkled hands as they softly but quickly ripped the record from its sleeve, manipulating the thing from its sharp outermost edge. “It’s scratched to shit, bud…2 bucks.” I emitted an audible sigh. The shock of relief became a fitful cough. I couldn’t believe it. An all-time favorite album, a treasure I could actually afford.

I didn’t know it then, but when I purchased Houses of the Holy – my first vinyl record – it was the start of what Wikipedia now deems the “Vinyl Revival.” In 2007, The Guardian reported on the unforeseen boom in record sales, naming “Icky Thump” by the White Stripes the highest weekly seller for a 7inch single in over 20 years.

Turns out being doused with technological wonders, with iPods and the internet and piles of CDs was not enough — my generation wanted more. We wanted something that didn’t need inventing.

Now, almost 20 years since Jack and Meg White unleashed those devilishly demented bagpipes on vinyl, record sales are booming, up 10% year-over-year in the US, with 43 million newly pressed albums sold in 2023 alone (and, praise the Great Gramophone God, record stores are everywhere).

For me, it sure felt like a beginning. A forgotten medium I was naturally drawn to, something I needed to delve into, and I couldn’t say why. That first $2 find sparked years of searching, exploring, hosting, sharing, and, of course, listening. In my current apartment, I’ve decided to ditch a dresser for a wall of shelves to house my findings.

My shirts are on the floor.

I’m living sensibly.

……

There’s still nothing quite like listening to that original copy of Houses of the Holy. It’s a deeply scarred version of a deeply imperfect album. Yet, it perfectly encapsulates the age I was when I found it.

The album derives its title from the song “Houses of the Holy” (featured on their following record, Physical Graffiti) written by Lord of the Riffs, Jimmy Page. The freewheeling lyrics, according to Rolling Stone, honor the “‘sacred’ places of teenage communion.” Spaces inseparable with those first outposts of youthful freedom – the movies, the mall, the record store.

Another music critic says that looking back, the record’s unexpected amalgam of styles reveals “a band eager for change.”

Which is what tweenagehood is all about; I wanted to grow up (and out), I wanted to decide things for myself, I wanted to…whatever…

Eventually, I bought a cheap turntable fashioned with small built-in speakers and listened to Houses of the Holy full-blast in my childhood bedroom, headbanging to “The Crunge” – a ridiculous horned-up James Brown rip — and air-picking Page’s acoustic intro to “Over the Hills and Far Away,” scream-singing Robert Plant’s vocal: many times been bitten! many times I’ve gazed along the open roooooad. And that long psychedelic dirge, “No Quarter.” A chilly psychedelic song that will forever be wrapped in the warm memory of discovering the transformative effects of weed.

What remains most special to me, though, are the record’s physical flaws. The scratches, which always zigzagged wildly across the grooves, have multiplied with years of play. When I pull the record out now and place it on the turntable in my living room, the spontaneous crackle, the sharp breaks in sound, bring me back to that disheveled store in godknowswhere, the gremlin owner, nine to ten butts, and that magical floating dust.