what is and what should never be

so to highlight yet another greatest hits release, the best band ever, led zeppelin, have announced that they’ll finally be making their catalog available digitally, thru itunes and other outlets.

wonder if that means i’ll get to stream stuff from my yahoo music subscription. we’ll see. not that it matters, of course. most people with a true hardon for zep have already managed by hook or by crook to get em on their ipod.

this one’s strictly for the kids, and if you’re gonna be bothered by the shameless marketing ploy of the timing, you don’t know zeppelin very well. jimmy page has always walked a fine line between never passing up on a buck, and an admirable reticence to ruthlessly mine zep’s legacy. rumor has it that he still has stacks of great recordings of old shows, and compared to other artists, they’ve been fairly limited in the licensing of their songs for films and ads.

well, that is up till now. in their announcement today of releasing their catalog digitally, the surviving band members (through page) announced that they’ll be working with verizon and providing ring tones and crap.

all very commercially oriented news, of course, but fans will get sugar for taking their medicine - there is, of course, the please-god-let-it-be-recorded “reunion” show for ahmet ertegun’s charity foundation, with bonzo jr. pounding the skins (wonder if he’ll do as well as ?uestlove supposedly did when he back john paul jones at bonnaroo recently). fun fun fun. hope the setlist is inspired and not too brief.

even more fun for the common fan (considering only a relative handful of the million fans who applied for tix will see the show) is the total “revisitation” (pagey’s word, and apt, i’ll say) of ‘the song remains the same,’ with engineer kevin shirley giving it the same attention he gave the amazing ‘how the west was won’ package. hope this means those gay ass out-of-synch bits from the film will be fixed, too!