R.I.P. Bobby Keys. A true rock and roll original and a Texas-sized legend. Forget the Rolling Stones...just consider that the man played with Buddy Holly, ferchrissakes! That guarantees rock and roll badass status, right there! The man played hard and he partied hard...he lived every one of his 70 years to the fullest, no doubt and no complaints. His passing reminds me how fortunate I was that I bit the bullet and payed the money to see the Stones on their last tour, providing me with one last view of the man and the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to hear him and Mick Taylor trade solos on "Can't You Hear Me Knocking". To think I came this close to missing that...thank god I came to my senses. I hope the bar is well-stocked in heaven.

A lot more people seem to be willing to share their New York experience than the Los Angeles one. Or maybe I was just the only forum member who went to the L.A. Barnes & Noble event. Hans, you lucky devil, getting to be #1 in line. Good stamina on your part. Super Dave and Morgan and everyone else who has shared their time, thank you, and how cool for all of you to get to meet each other and share the Zeppelin LOVE.

Still plenty in the bookshops around town. Just saw a stack at a Barnes & Noble tonight.

"Better than advertised"? Ha! Not on the road...and this game is in Green Bay.

The Cubs? Why? Just because they hired Joe Maddon? Here's the problem I have with that and the questions that should be running through anyone's mind who thinks Joe Maddon automatically makes the Cubs a contender. Does hiring Joe Maddon mean his baseball knowledge and managerial expertise will lift the lowly Cubs to his level? Or will the stench of inept, incompetent loserville status that has surrounded the Cubs for more than a century drag down Maddon to their level? My bet is on the Billy Goat Bartman curse to continue. Besides, St. Louis ain't going anywhere...as long as they are in the NL Central, they will reign.

Well, that's a very mature and well-adjusted attitude to take, Dd. WHAT THE HECK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!? Don't you know you are supposed to froth at the mouth when your team loses? Have to say I was very surprised how the USC Trojans took Notre Dame apart. At halftime, when USC was up 35-7, all I could think of was 40 years ago in 1974 when USC was down 24-0 at halftime and came roaring back in the second half to thump the Irish 55-24. So I wasn't taking anything for granted until the final whistle blew. After losing to crosstown rivals UCLA, a 49-14 beat down of Notre Dame ends the season on a brighter note. Not sure what kind of Bowl Game is in store for USC...Holiday, maybe? Wonder how mack took the loss?

Week 14 Schedule Thursday Dec. 4 Dallas @ Chicago (Dallas on Thursday again! WTF?) Sunday Dec. 7 (Remember Pearl Harbor) Pittsburgh @ Cincinnati St. Louis @ Washington New York Giants @ Tennessee Carolina @ New Orleans New York Jets @ Minnesota Baltimore @ Miami Indianapolis @ Cleveland Tampa Bay @ Detroit Houston @ Jacksonville Buffalo @ Denver Kansas City @ Arizona Seattle @ Philadelphia (Game of the Week?) San Francisco @ Oakland New England @ San Diego Monday Dec. 8 Atlanta @ Green Bay

Those deals kind of suck, though...Boston won't be seeing much production out of either of those two pickups.

Miami finally realized they were playing the stupid J-E-T-S and eeked out a win, so everyone picked up another win to their totals last night. mack is the last man standing...the only one who has yet to win a week. Walter moved past Anjin-san alone in second place, while jb126 maintains her lead. And everybody is above 100 wins for the season. Week 13 Results in_the_evening: 12-4* Strider: 12-4* zepscoda: 12-4* jabe: 11-5 LedZeppfan77: 11-5 ebk: 10-6 jb126: 10-6 mack: 10-6 apantherfrommd: 9-7 paul carruthers: 9-7 Walter: 9-7 Anjin-san: 8-8 Bong-Man: 7-9 * = Winner of the week Season Standings After 192 Games 1. jb126: 131-60-1*** 2. Walter: 126-65-1**** 3. Anjin-san: 125-66-1***** 4. apantherfrommd: 122-69-1*** 5. in_the_evening: 121-70-1** 5. Strider: 121-70-1* 6. paul carruthers: 118-73-1* 7. Bong-Man: 116-75-1* 8. ebk: 115-76-1** 8. mack: 115-74-1 9. jabe: 114-77-1* 9. LedZeppfan77: 114-77-1** 10. zepscoda: 106-84-1* * = Weekly wins

Well, are you talking about the photos used as backdrops or the inspiration for the black obelisk? Obviously, the black monolith in Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" was a main inspiration for the Presence artwork.

+1 Ditto. Coming up on the next episode of "Unsolved Mysteries", just how did the Kansas City Chiefs lose to the pathetic Oakland Raiders? I have seen some bad Raiders losses in my lifetime, but yesterday's 52-0 shellacking by the Rams takes the cake. It reminded me of the 51-3 blitz the Bills put on the Raiders that cold day in Buffalo in the 1990 AFC Championship Game. But there was no snow blizzard in yesterday's game...the Rai-DUHS couldn't blame the weather or the stadium conditions, only their own incompetence. And still, Tony Shithead shows up wearing sunglasses, as if his future is so bright. It's bad enough when you win, but wearing sunglasses indoors when you are losing is even more of a douchebag look. Kansas City should be catatonic after losing to the Raiders...which maybe explains why they looked so bad again last night against Denver. Why in the hell did I pick Kansas City? I forgot my own mantra: Andy Reid is the most overrated coach in the NFL and his teams are always frauds.

You're not the only one who picked Jacksonville, Rick. Because everyone took Miami in tonight's game, the winners for this week will not change no matter what happens tonight. Only the final numbers and season numbers will be affected. So, without further ado, here are the winners for Week 13...in_the_evening, zepscoda, and me! We all stand at 11-4 going into tonight...depending on the Dolphins, we either finish at 12-4 or 11-5. zepscoda and I join the winner's circle for the first time this year. It's about time, hehe. I'll post final numbers and season standings tomorrow. If you think I am going to waste a night watching the stupid Jets, you've got another thing coming.

I guess God didn't like his shitty music either.

It is the first of December, which means I can crank my "Houses of the Holy" remasters for the first time! Since November was the anniversary of IV's release, I spent the last days of October and all of November listening to my IV box. Now I can bust open "Houses of the Holy".

9-3 ain't nuthin' to sneeze at; Whole lotta schools would kill to be as good as 9-3. Is he graduating early? That's great news. Any post-graduate studies in his future plans?

Replace the word 'Phillies' with 'Angels' and you have my prediction as well.

Happy birthday (belatedly) to Laura!

Yes I do...including a lot of nice people from Australia. This has been the season of the Aussies, no question. Every week brings a fresh plane-load of people from Down Under. What has been especially interesting to me is that the groups from Melbourne have outnumbered all the rest by nearly 3-to-1. There have been 1 couple from Bells Beach, 2 from Brisbane, 2 groups from Perth, 5 or 6 from Sydney...and 28 different families or groups from Melbourne!!! All nice as peaches. Maybe people in Melbourne can afford to go on vacation more than the other Oz cities. Oh, and I had a grandmum, mum, and daughter visiting from Auckland, New Zealand.

Yes, yes, yes, and yes to all of the above. As soon as I saw the thread title, I knew what the problem was...but I can see that I am late to the party as everyone has already answered ZoSo925's question.

This is the earlier L.A. Times article from November 20 referred to in the above article...sorry I didn't post it until now. Jimmy Page finds there's still whole lotta love for Led Zeppelin BY JOHN CORRIGAN November 20, 2014, 6:00 a.m. There's a pre-concert vibe outside the Ace Hotel theater in downtown Los Angeles, people spilling off the sidewalk into the street as they wait for the doors to open. Once inside, they jam the bar and try to be heard above the din. It's a rock 'n' roll crowd, except there's no band on the card tonight. The draw: a 70-year-old Englishman talking about his new collection of photographs. Jimmy Page, mastermind of Led Zeppelin, is on a book tour. Trim as ever, he gets a standing ovation when he comes on stage, elegant in black with his silver hair neatly fixed in a short ponytail. Over the next 90 minutes, the audience hangs on every word as Chris Cornell, the frontman for Zeppelin-evoking Seattle band Soundgarden, projects images from the guitarist's new photo-autobiography, "Jimmy Page by Jimmy Page" (Genesis Publications), on an overhead screen and asks the guitarist for the stories behind the pictures. There's Page as a choirboy, Page as a session guitarist, Page prowling the world's concert stages with Led Zeppelin, the dominant band of the 1970s and the No. 2 bestselling group of all time after the Beatles. If hard rock had a logo, Page would have a strong claim to be its icon with his mane of black hair, his rail-thin frame and his road-beaten Gibson Les Paul hanging almost to his knees. Still, Led Zeppelin disbanded 34 years ago after the death of drummer John Bonham, and there has been just a handful of partial reunions since. How then to account for the 1,400 people at the Ace, who have paid $100 or $150 simply to hear its former guitarist talk? Or how to account for Led Zeppelin cracking the Billboard Top 10 four times — this year — with rereleases of its first four albums, remastered by Page and augmented with alternate takes and mixes? For the answers, start with the songs. "The music is memorable. It's hook heavy. Unlike so many other bands, these songs stand the test of time," says Bill Sagan, who runs Wolfgang's Vault, an online retailer of rock memorabilia. Sagan isn't a rock critic (many of whom never cared much for Zeppelin anyway), but as a merchant, he knows something about the band's wide and enduring appeal. In the male-dominated world of hard rock, about 40% of the Led Zep T-shirts he sells are for women. He sells a lot of smaller men's sizes too, suggesting that teens and young adults are the buyers. T-shirts are worn to make a statement, he said, and young people looking to project an outlaw image get that with Led Zeppelin. "When you think of hedonism, you think of Led Zeppelin," Sagan said. "They had this edge." The band's road antics are, indeed, the stuff of legend. The 1985 bestseller "Hammer of the Gods" by Stephen Davis is a saga of trashed hotel rooms, groupies and controlled substances. Although much of the book has been disputed by band members and others, it no doubt contributed to the group's notoriety. There are few glimpses of that in Page's book, aside from one image of him chugging from a bottle of Jack Daniels backstage at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis in 1975. "Maybe the photographers couldn't keep up the pace," Page says with a smile, sitting down to talk one morning last week. Page said a book of photos appealed to him more than written memoirs, the route taken by Keith Richards, Pete Townshend, Neil Young and others. "If there were autobiographies of my contemporaries, I would always have a look to see what photographs were in there," he said. "I'd go straight to the photos. And I think a lot of people are like that. I have been approached to do a written book, and I like the idea, but it's probably something to release posthumously," he said, his voice turning serious for a moment. "I want to be able to say everything. Everything." Until then, there is the photo book. To support it, Page has done appearances in Paris, London, Tokyo and New York, where artist Jeff Koons interviewed him at the 92nd Street Y. His book is 512 pages of sweets for Zeppelin fans. The 1970s glory days are there, as is Page playing "Whole Lotta Love" at the 2008 Summer Olympics closing ceremony in Beijing. Los Angeles is also well represented. There's a young Page playing the Casino ballroom on Catalina with the Yardbirds in 1966, and epic scenes at Inglewood's Forum. (Cornell showed one at the Ace event. "You can see it's full," Page pointed out, to hearty applause.) "We had lots of friends here, and there were lots of other musicians here," Page said earlier in the day. "And there are good music shops for instruments. There's a guitar shop here called McCabe's [in Santa Monica]. I went to McCabe's at the time I came over here the first time in '65." It's hard to talk about Page without talking about guitars. Rolling Stone ranks him No. 3 on its list of greatest players, after Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. Yet it was his skill as a songwriter and producer that seals his place in rock history, said Brad Tolinski, editor of Guitar World magazine and author of "Light & Shade," a collection of interviews with Page. "He really is the architect of modern music," Tolinski said. "His bit of genius wasn't just as a guitarist — it was how he recorded John Bonham's drums, and where he put John Bonham in the mix. "If you go back to the '60s, and listen to where the drums and bass were in the mix, they were sub[servient] to the vocals," he said. "Jimmy pushed the drums way up front, with the guitar and the vocals. What do you hear now on the radio? Why do you think hip-hop sampled Zeppelin early on? It was a profound shift in popular recording." So, what about a reunion? Page quickly dismissed reports last week (since discredited) that the band had been offered $800 million to reunite by Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson. "I never saw a contract," he said. Led Zeppelin hasn't played since a one-off 2007 tribute concert for music executive Ahmet Ertegün in London, and singer Robert Plant, after winning multiple Grammys for an album with singer Alison Krauss in 2009, is touring with new songs and a new band. "We're talking seven years later, and there hasn't been any sort of will, if you like, to do that," Page said of a reunion. The band's reissued albums, being released by Warner Music's Atlantic label, will have to do for now. But why does Page see a need to hear subtly different versions of the same, decades-old songs? "It presents more information to people about what was going on at the time of the recordings," Page said. "I was in the studio more often than the others because I was producing the band, so I had far more points of reference that were needed to make this project seriously play. For the recording history of Led Zeppelin, it was my thing to do. For the fans, it gives them more information." Some of the alternate takes are stripped-down versions reminiscent of how the band played live, without backing musicians to play the extra guitars and other instruments added in the studio. He pointed to a new cut of the blues number "Since I've Been Loving You." "What you hear is just the four of us going at it," he said. "It's fantastic, the energy. It will make your hair stand on end. This is the whole point of having these things out." Asked to name his favorite Zeppelin songs, Page demurs. He cites "Achilles Last Stand" as a "guitar epic" and says "Tea for One" features some of his best playing as a lead guitarist. But favorites? Some songs were more successful than others, he concedes, but that doesn't make them favorites. "The Led Zeppelin legacy is that everything that was recorded was recorded for a purpose," he said. "All of the songs are very different to each other, and that's undisputed. The motivation behind each track, and the memories behind each track, and the reasoning, and the atmosphere, are very different." Still, with his book and reissue project now mostly finished, Page says he's ready to focus once again on making music. "I've had quite a lot of material under my belt that I haven't recorded, because I wanted to be really sure that I could really put the blinkers on and really focus on it," he said. "I think I'll come back here next year doing my own [music]. I'd be showcasing things from the past, which people know me more, and also I've got new music that I'm really, really keen to present. And there would be some surprises." At the end of his L.A. swing, Page was feted with a dinner at the Sunset Marquis hotel in West Hollywood. Ringo Starr was there, along with four of the biggest names in rock guitar — Kirk Hammett of Metallica, ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, Joe Walsh of the Eagles and Joe Perry of Aerosmith. "The best thing I can say is thanks — thanks for being a ... genius," Perry said. "He raised the bar on our kind of guitar playing, and our kind of rock 'n' roll, and I don't think anyone's touched him." Twitter: @jtcorrigan

In today's Los Angeles Times: Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page on playing live and Los Angeles BY JOHN CORRIGAN December 1, 2014, 5:00 a.m. Our story on Jimmy Page’s recent swing through Los Angeles resonated with many readers, who wanted to hear more from the legendary guitarist and founder of Led Zeppelin. Here’s more with Page on a few topics that did not make it into the original story. How did you get started in music? I wanted to emulate music from America – young punks playing rock ’n’ roll, is what it was. I read part of Keith Richards’ autobiography, and it was totally parallel with me, learning from American records. It was the same with Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck . . . we were weaned on rockabilly and moved to the blues, people like Big Boy Arthur Crudup and Sleepy John Estes. You often overdubbed several guitars on each Led Zeppelin track, yet live you didn’t use a second guitarist. Do you ever regret that? No. There’s the studio recordings and the live shows, and the live shows were so different. If a number was in the set, it was going to get beaten up, and made to mutate because we were working it over every night. We weren’t a band going on stage doing every song note-for-note perfect, that was far from it. The nucleus of everything was always as a four-piece. If you go out with a second guitarist, people think that you are taking it easy. And I never took it easy. I never would, and I never will. Do you wish there were more live recordings of Led Zeppelin? In the day of having live recordings, you needed to have a big truck. But now even that wouldn’t be good enough. You would need the concert footage as well as the audio. We did document things along the way, but not the way you could do now. Led Zeppelin spent a lot of time in Los Angeles. Was it a favorite city? I would say New York, Chicago, Memphis and Los Angeles were my favorites. I first came here in 1965 when I was a studio musician. [Record producer] Bert Berns brought me out. He invited me to stay at his place. I met Jackie DeShannon, I saw the Byrds play at Ciro's, which I think is now the Comedy Store. It was a magical time to be here. It was really happening. We played "Stairway to Heaven" [with Led Zeppelin] at the Forum before it had been released. It got a standing ovation here, and I’ll always remember that, because it’s tricky to hear new material from bands. The Forum was always special. After the Yardbirds broke up, you could have gone out as a solo artist, like Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. The musicians you chose for Led Zeppelin -- Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham -- were relatively unknown. They were not relatively unknown – they were not known at all. No one knew who they were. When the Yardbirds folded, I heard the news here in L.A. I wanted to get a band together in which everyone was phenomenal. The first album was a guitar tour de force – that is what it was supposed to be – but I didn’t want to do that at the expense of the other musicians. I wanted it to be a band. It was a band. Twitter: @jtcorrigan

The World Series is over (Congratulations San Francisco) and the awards have been passed out. 2014 is in the books and in the rear-view mirror. It is time to look forward to 2015... And Nelson Cruz and the Seattle Mariners just dropped a bombshell to start the new season off. I can hear Rick and ebk screaming from here. http://m.espn.go.com/mlb/story?storyId=11963217

I think of Charles every time I see Dennis Leary or hear his voice on those commercials.

That sounds like a cop-out excuse.

It's not that hard, actually, if you stitch it up. Actually, because of health issues, we stopped cooking the stuffing inside the turkey years ago. We cook it separately in the oven, which gives it a nice crusty top. I'm happy to hear that. Thank goodness she doesn't work at a Wallmart. I need to get that Tom Petty issue. Love your new avatar.