Patrick Donovan

'Zeppelin images plant artistic seeds and revisit page from rock history'
The Age, 24 May 2008, page 11.

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A new exhibition offers more than just a whole lotta love, writes Patrick Donovan.

Image: excerpt from article

A MEMORABLE rock concert can inspire in many ways. Some sing and others dance, and in the case of artists involved in The Led Zeppelin World Tour Exhibition, some are inspired to paint and sculpt.

While some of the exhibiting artists saw the band's only tour of Australia in 1972 — considered by many to be the greatest rock tour to Australia — others, such as former Mental As Anything guitarist Reg Mombassa, experienced it vicariously though photographs taken by Ted Harvey on that Sunday, February 27, at the Sydney Showground.

Mombassa reacted to one of the photographs of strutting, cocksure Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page cranking out a thunderous riff by painting a phallic-looking guitar between Page's legs with sumptuous lava spewing out of the amplifier.

"I can relate to the photo of a gyrating Rock God, even though I'm a bit more restrained these days with my band Dog Trumpet," says Mombassa. "When you first hold a guitar, you don't feel like such a nerd and a loser. There's this illusion that you are impressing the girls, but it's more like your spotty mates."

Harvey's black-and-white pictures, capturing the band in all of its pouting, thrusting glory, were never published because of a pay dispute. But from this Wednesday, they will be exhibited for the first time, along with the works they inspired, at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery.

"I had lost them for 35 years and I was about to take some rubbish to the tip when I saw them and did a double take," says Harvey, who believes many of the newspaper photographers focused more on the crowd than the show, excited about the cultural phenomenon of 28,000 young people gathering to see a rock band.

Many budding musicians in the crowd that day, including future members of the Hoodoo Gurus, were inspired to form bands after seeing the show. But for those with no musical ability, the music offered something else: escapism.

Craig Waddell says his painting, Wings of Desire, represents "a flight of freedom, a passageway out of the darkness associated with confinement and conventions. Zeppelin blasted light and shade into the adolescent years of confusion."

Geoff Harvey was inspired by the band's riff-heavy Black Dog to sculpt a canine out of wood and found objects.

"The band represented everything that was great about being of that generation," says Harvey. "We were truly liberated by Zeppelin's music."

In an environmental statement, Lucille Martin's Inside the Words of Stairway to Heaven juxtaposes the song's ambiguous lyrics with trees and birds on a tapestry. The lyrics, Martin says, were "a promise to our future". "We had been liberated from the generation of the '60s, no wars to fight, just the expansion of freedom and a whole lifetime ahead of us."

For Misty Mountain Hop 2008, Euan Macleod painted a landscape of mist and mountains, inspired more by the band's dynamics than its lyrics. "I've never been that interested in the lyrics — too hippie — but love the contrasts of soft/heavy, quiet/loud and delicate and raw, which is also a strong element in my work," he said.

Adam Cullen's Male Grooming 1&2 analyses singer Robert Plant's alpha-male bravado and narcissism, while Alan Jones' work On the Rock 'n' Roll highlights rock's transcendental powers. "It shows human figures morphing into another life form as they ascend into another reality," Jones says.

Danius Kesminas' installation Houses of the Holy pays tribute to two different founders of heavy metal: Zeppelin and artist Richard Serra, in particular his 1969 lead-plate sculpture One Ton Prop (House of Cards).

http://mprg.mornpen.vic.gov.au/

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related pages

painting The Led Zeppelin World Tour

essay Steven Alderton, 'Doing it the Zeppelin way', The Led Zeppelin World Tour Exhibition Catalogue.

essays Glenn A. Baker, 'Sydney and Zeppelin' The Led Zeppelin World Tour Exhibition Catalogue.

media release National Trust S.H. Ervin Gallery