So when I heard the first Led Zeppelin album a month or two after hearing Jeff Beck’s Truth, recognising similarities between the two, and knowing that Beck had been ahead of Jimmy Page in the Yardbirds I just assumed that I was hearing a cardboard imitation of Mr Beck and subsequently ignored the entire oeuvre of one of the major acts in rock & roll history.
Snap judgements R us....
Of course, there was probably also a financial element in that judgement, because there was no chance that a Led Zep album was going to end up in the dollar bin...
Unlike the other sections of this exercise in reminiscence there’s no obvious transition point between this part of the overall story and the next. People came and went, new friendships formed, people changed along the way.
While the old University College of Townsville (it didn’t become James Cook University until the following year) wasn’t a hot bed of music freakdom much the same thing applied at University.
Those two factors brought new figures onto the scene and neither of the next two episodes, Hughesy’s less than distinguished career as a performer and what could be termed The Underworld Years would have happened without them.