The Battle of Evermore

Oh dance in the dark of night,

Sing to the morning light.
The magic runes are writ in gold to bring the balance back.

Bring it back.

At last the sun is shining,

The clouds of blue roll by,
With flames from the dragon of darkness,

the sunlight blinds his eyes.
 

From: "The Battle of Evermore."

For guitar and mandolin; written by Robert Plant

When I was a teenager records cost $7.95.

They were so expensive we could only afford a record every few months - so we'd share them or tape them. We'd a small library of records going, and so it turned out that each member of our social group knew all the words to a small bunch of songs. This knowledge was a unifying factor, a kind of tribal subconsciousness.

Pink Floyd was up there. The Doors. Jethro Tull. Frank Zappa. And Led Zeppelin.

The Led Zeppelin IV cover is the genesis for my image - you might have seen it, with it's framed picture of a wood gatherer hanging poignantly on the wall of a half demolished house. (see small images below).

Downstairs in our library, amongst a gaggleous mountain of books, we have a large shelf of records crammed together so tightly that it's almost impossible to pry them apart. Looking for the album cover, I started at one end of the shelf, then worked my way toward the middle, prising and peeking. 

In a way it was a sad experience. While I was sorting through the records it struck me how so many of the people who had made them were dead. Obviously, for me to buy a record was the kiss of death for the artist. Literally.

Thank you for looking. And thank you to everyone who played the music while looking at my last post.

Oh, I forgot to say, the subject of this image is a wood gatherer, gathering 'fuel', which by strange coincidence just so happens to be Illustration Friday's prompt of the week - well I think it is ;)