Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1998 10:04:05 -0400 (EDT)
From: William E. Arnal <wea1@is7.nyu.edu>
To: M.S.Goodacre@bham.ac.uk
Cc: "Crosstalk (list)" <crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com>
Subject: Re: Original GThomas & Led Zeppelin


On Mon, 6 Apr 1998, Mark Goodacre wrote:

>     1. Listening to Led Zeppelin themselves performing the songs
>     live // hearing the evangelists and their predecessors orally
>     performing the Gospel material before the Gospels were written
>     down.
> 
>     2. Hear the Led Zeppelin songs on record // hear the Gospels
>     read.
> 
>     3. Read written versions of the lyrics [I dare say there is a
>     web-site now which has all the lyrics] // read the written
>     versions of the Gospels.
> 
>     4. Hear later versions of the same songs (e.g. live performances
>     by  Led Zep., by members of Led Zep. and by others) // hear
>     performances of the Gospels by the evangelists themselves and
>     then by others. 

Thanks for laying this out Mark -- it's great.

> Now each of these can interact with the others and points, I 
> think, to a complexity in Gospel origins that is not often 
> appreciated in the simple appeals to 'oral' and 'scribal' or 
> 'written'.  Oral and written interacted, and Bill's Led Zeppelin 
> parallel is a far better one than he realised.  Thanks, Bill.  And I 
> am delighted to hear that you have such good taste in British music.

Ah yes -- I'm gonna have to break out all my old tapes now.
In part, I must say, I WAS cognizant of the complexity of
the parallel (although not to the degree that Mark has
brought out), but my main point was this: my MEMORIZATION of
these songs was a function of SCRIBAL transmission, that is,
the "oral performance" of a fixed exemplar. The parallel is
precisely that of oral readings of a written work. I can't
imagine that seeing various oral performances would have had
the same effect. There would have been no single, "correct,"
versin TO memorize. I'd probably pick the one that impressed
me most.

>     When Led Zeppelin performed "Stairway to Heaven" at Live Aid at
>     Wembley in ?1986, Robert Plant had clearly forgotten the words! 
>     No verbatim copying / memory there, even from the original
>     author.

Bummer. This is depressing. Of course, one presumes that
Robert Plant does not spend his spare time sitting around
listening to Led Zeppelin albums!

Bill
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