Saturday, November 10, 2007

XM Update and the Worst Zep Song Ever

Been checking out this XM Zep channel on XM Radio. They have played some solo stuff - I heard a few Plant solo songs as well as a pretty sweet live cut from the Black Crowes with Jimmy Page, something I posted about a while ago.

The inclusion of solo material makes this a bit more legit and reasonable. So now this begs the question - will they play anything off of Jimmy Page's soundtrack to the movie Deathwish 2?

Also, I've heard some nice nuggets they'd never play on the "real" radio, like "Tea for One," "Carouselambra" and "Hots on for Nowhere." But I also just heard the worst Zep tune ever, called "Hats Off to Roy Harper." It's the last cut off of Led Zeppelin III and is a total novelty that is fun for the first minute you hear it and forevermore it's the worst Zep song ever.

It reminded me of a funny take off Voxmoose and I did in high school called "Hats Off to Charles Obscure." I dialed in an obnoxious guitar tone, broke out my first all-slide song ever on tape (meaning, it was bad, and by 'bad' I mean 'not good'), and Voxmoose ran a vocal mic through a number of effects, screechingly emoting lines such as "Little fishy got no brother...!"

It was as classic as the original! If I can figure out a way to post audio here maybe you'll get that soon.

8 comments:

harmolodic said...

Funny, I had gotten so sick of Led Zep II over the years due to overexposure, that I preferred "Hats Off To Roy Harper" to anything on the second album. I still do, actually! It's the weirdness factor. I latch onto that stuff.

The XM station sounds excellent, especially if they're playing those Presence songs. That album is my favorite. Does XM have a similar station for the Beatles?

If you can get your performance encoded as an mp3, you can simply upload it to sendspace.com and post a link. I'm curious about this one!

Isorski said...

Well, if you can stand more than 30 seconds of this, I commend you:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/fi1lkl

VoxMoose said...

I'm totally with harmolodic on this one. I must admit that I actually like Hats Off To Roy Harper for the sheer double-take factor. It is obviously some kind of blues tribute gone terribly amok. One would like to assume it is an inside joke, but the fact that you can't tell makes it even more interesting.

And oh, man, in the name of all that's unholy, Hat's Off To Charles Obscure is one serious blast from the past! I had totally forgotten about it. Now that it's posted for the world to hear, there go my political aspirations :) I'm just happy the ONLY thing you can 'understand' is "fishy got no brother..."

An important bit of trivia; on the Led Zeppelin III notes for this song it says Hats Off To Roy Harper was "Arranged by Charles Obscure." Thus the title of our tribute.

What was the name of that circa 1979 hypersensitive non-linear digital delay you had Isorski? Generally useless for bread-and-butter tunes, when that think came out of the box, you knew the creative result was going to be something special...

VoxMoose said...

If on December 10 I suddenly feel a disturbance in the force like millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, I'll know the Led Zeppelin reunion show opened with Hats Off To Roy Harper.

Dr. John said...

Oh my God, that is just too funny. What did you bake in your brownies that day??? I like the scream and the yee hah at the end.

neddrum said...

"Hot Dog" off of In Through the Out Door is the worst Zep song ever.

Isorski said...

Hot Dog? I love that song!

There is some dross on Coda I forgot about. Poor Tom and Darlene come to mind...

harmolodic said...

Oh yeah, this is hilarious! How did you get that vocal effect? Thanks for posting.