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Lez Zeppelin at the Colony Cafe
Friday, May 9 2025
Fortunately, my concerns yesterday evening of possibly coming down with an illness were not borne out, and today I was perfectly healthy. I was feeling so good, in fact, that I took a semi-recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine.
As usual for a Friday, I worked from home. Of course, our guests were still here and they were doing what they did downstairs. I like them, but I tend to get sick of guests quickly, particularly when I feel like I have to engage with them every time I see them or, even worse, if I feel like I need to hang out with them some fraction of the time. For that reason, the excuse of having to be at work up in the laboratory was definitely a good thing. Mind you, I wasn't always working on workplace work; I took the opportunity of being away from our guests to work out some glitches in a new feature I was adding to the energy graph of my ESP8266 Remote Control system: color-coded segments at the bottom of the graph showing what the weather conditions are as solar energy is being collected and consumed. I was using ChatGPT of course, since I otherwise would have no idea how to Google what specific features of Chart.JS I needed to take advantage of. ChatGPT had me make a Chart.JS plugin, which turned out to only work in version 3.0 of Chart.JS, and upgrading that also forced me to change how scales work in graphs. This led to a new software dependency just for the scales alone, something I'd definitely hoped to avoid. But the resulting time scales looked much better than what had been displayed, so I will probably migrate all the Chart.JS charts in this system to the latest version eventually.
For lunch, Gretchen would be taking our Scottish guests across the Hudson to get falafel in Rhinebeck, and Gretchen wanted me to come as well. But I didn't want to go, and not just because I didn't want to have to worry about being away from my virtual workplace (which wasn't really much of a concern). Instead, the prospect of being trapped with our guests for what would end up being hours was definitely not something I was looking forward to. It's bad enough just going out to dinner with friends and feeling trapped as they order rounds of desserts or after-dinner drinks long after I would prefer to pull a ripcord on the evening. But having to be there first for lunch and then as we all stroll slowly though my least-favorite village, that was not something I wanted to be anywhere near. And Gretchen really should know me well enough to know that this would be the case. But still she asked me in front of the guests if I wanted to go and I still said that no I did not.
I still got to enjoy a delicious falafel sandwich, of course, as Gretchen brought me one back when they returned, which happened about a half hour before my workday was to end.
This evening the four of us drove to Woodstock to see Lez Zeppelin at the Colony Café. Lez Zeppelin is an all-women Led Zeppelin tribute band that Gretchen had seen at Bonnaroo back in 2008 and thought was amazing. (I was at that Bonnaroo too but had somehow missed that performance.) We arrived at the venue a little early so we could get prime seats near the middle of the balcony looking down at the stage.
There were no opening acts; the ladies took the stage and holy shit, they were amazing! On this particular tour, Lez Zeppelin was performing all of the album Physical Graffiti, which provides a good demonstration of Led Zeppelin's range from middle-eastern-tinged prog-rock to boogie to folk. As for Lez Zeppelin, they were four women with a simple set of instruments, each of them replacing specific members of Led Zeppelin. The guitarist was virtuosic in her abilities and even looked a little like a youngish Jimmy Page (though, at this point, Lez Zeppelin has been around longer than Led Zeppelin). It turned out the guitarist is the only member of the band who had been part of the original Lez Zeppelin lineup and what Gretchen had seen at Bonnaroo had been an almost entirely different band. The current lineup seemed to have great chemistry, ranging from the obvious joy of the drummer to the charismatic swagger of the vocalist. Since their name is "Lez Zeppelin," I wondered if there was any sexual intrigue between them, but I didn't see any evidence of that. As for their performance, it kept true to the original material, with the vocalist having a natural range very much like Robert Plant's. Despite this, though, the band made the music very much their own, if only because they were all women. I turned to Gretchen at some point and observed that this definitely undercut the inherent sexism of much of the material.
Physical Graffiti has some weak songs near the end, and it would've been bad to end the show there. But Lez Zeppelin knew better than that an proceeded to play a few classics from the catalog, including "Black Dog," and "Whole Lotta Love." For that last one, a theremin was brought out, and it kind of worked, though it also seemed to have technical difficulties, which seems to be baked in to such primitive electronic instruments.
While Gretchen and I thoroughly loved the show, the music was perhaps a little too fast and upbeat for the likes of Kelly, if not Brian. Still, it was a spectacle, and they could tune into that aspect of it. At the end of the show, as they settled up their bar tab. Gretchen went downstairs and bought a $40 tour teeshirt that the guitarist signed in front of us.
On the drive back home to Hurley, Gretchen played several Led Zeppelin songs that hand't been covered in the show, including "The Battle of Evermore," "What Can I Do?", "the Ocean" (one of my favorites, despite its lapses into Doo-Wop), and "In the Evening."
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Lez Zeppelin tonight at the Colony Café. Click to enlarge.
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