I discovered Led Zeppelin my freshman year of college.

Well, wait… no. That’s not entirely accurate. I was aware of Zeppelin as early as middle school; it was pretty much impossible for a young person not to be at that point in time. Lots of kids were wearing t-shirts with the “Swan Song” logo on them, and if you listened to Rock 103 or Rock 99 — which I did — it seems like either “Black Dog” or “Rock and Roll” played every single hour on the hour. And of course “Stairway to Heaven” got a lot of attention during the Great Satanism Hysteria of the early ’80s. Many of my classmates seemed to believe that listening to that “Stairway” song while playing Dungeons and Dragons under a blacklight would open a direct portal to Hell in your closet, or something like that. So, yeah, I knew of Led Zeppelin. But I didn’t really start to appreciate them until one beautiful fall afternoon when I was driving along 13th East in my little VW Rabbitt — what, you think I drove the Galaxie or my old T-Bird to the U of U everyday, and then left it in one of those tiny little parking stalls to get all dinged up? Not even.

Anyhow, I was driving along that day with the westering sun flashing and winking through the trees and golden leaves the size of salad plates fluttering down to the road from the stately trees overhead, and onto the radio came the Zeppelin song “Ramble On.” That’s the one that mentions Gollum from The Lord of the Rings, which, I will admit, was the thing that first caught my attention. But it was the overall mood of the song and the non-Gollum imagery that stayed with me and was still on my mind later that evening. It was one of those rare moments when you hear some random piece of music that seems so perfectly suited to the setting or the activity that it feels as if your life has a genuine soundtrack. Before long, I’d bought a copy of Led Zeppelin IV and a paperback copy of Hammer of the Gods and was on my way to becoming at least a casual fan of what was once called “The Biggest Band in the World.” (To be clear, I never got really into Zep, but I enjoy a lot of their stuff.) To this day, their music always seems to remind me of back-to-school time no matter what season I actually hear it in.

So it seems perfectly fitting that one of their songs happened to come up on my iPod tonight as I was walking around the dark subdivisions that crowd the Bennion Compound on three sides, reflecting with much melancholy on this, Labor Day, the last night of a summer that never seemed to get started for me. Doubly fitting that it was one of their mellower, slightly sad ones as well. Ladies and gentleman, to note the coming crisp evenings and yellowing of the leaves, I give you “Going to California,” one of my all-time favorite Led Zeppelin tracks:

Zeppelin predates the music video by quite a few years, so the most visually interesting version I could find on YouTube was this live clip from one of the five sold-out nights the band played at Earls Court Arena in London in 1975, when they were at the very peak of their popularity and creativity. I think this is a beautiful song, even if the lyrics about girls with flowers in the hair are incredibly dated at this point. It’s startling to realize that Led Zep was actually contemporaneous with the whole flower-child thing, considering that they don’t really sound like a typical “Sixties band.”  In fact, for a long time while I was in high school in the ’80s, I thought they were a current band, because their music was still so ubiquitous on the radio. (They actually broke up in December of 1980; I was in my first year of middle school then.)

You know, it just occurred to me that I really don’t hear Zeppelin on the radio much anymore…