The five minutes I spent seeing the band below play on the L train platform at Union Square were way better than the hour and a half I spent in the theater watching “Bruno” immediately afterwards.

But this isn’t a film review here – this is exactly why I live in New York. I just spent a little time in Missoula, and while there were plenty of dirty dreadlocks and bongos out in the street out there, there wasn’t NOTHIN’ like this. This was like The Flaming Lips meets Soul Jazz with just a touch of the bear-and-a-BJ clip from the Shining.

I accidentally covered the mike on my phone with my thumb there for about 30 seconds or so. The sound’ll come back, don’t worry:

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Get over FM radio, forget black lights and cheap weed and wait until that awful memory of slow-dancing to “Stairway” dies a quiet, smothering death deep in the frustrated folds on your 9th-grade brain. Get past indie rock, forget techno and see punk rock for the marketing technique it’s become.

Then try Led Zeppelin again.

They never changed, they never died, they never had any goals or grand artistic mission beyond forming up like five fingers on the hand of God and rocking you like a giant floppy sock puppet. They do it time and again, year after year and squeal after squeal — they are thunder, they are the thudding ocean and a perfect glass of bourbon on a hot summer evening.

Talk about Page all you like — his guitar was hot lava, but Bonham’s drums were the plate tectonics that let that lava squirt up so pretty in the first place. Every beat was perfect and every hit was an asteroid making a crater. Bonham did for drums what Leatherface did for chainsaws — nobody will ever hear them the same way again.

I found these tracks, outtakes from Zeppelin’s recording of “In Through the Out Door.” Bonzo’s totally isolated from the band, apart from studio chatter and the faint sound of Zeppelin down the hall in their soundproof cubicles.

These things are dense, luscious snapshots of perfect rhythm and a window into a time long dead, a time when rock was a dinosaur and dinosaurs ruled the earth. Listen in bed, in the dark, with your eyes shut. You can see the smoke curling up from a cigarette, smell the sweat spreading across a shirt and hear the engineer sigh.

And man, are these ever ripe for mashups, remixes and some incredible hip-hop. Go nuts if you’re inclined, send me what you make with ‘em and I’ll definitely post it here.

Here’s the link, crammed with SEO keywords:
Bonzo bangs out Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door

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I got on the wrong subway last night and it turned out so right — while navigating through the Times Square catacombs I heard this incredible clanking funk like a groovy factory or Tom Waits in the late ’90s. Turns out it was a spectacular pots-and-buckets drummer, the godfather of all buskers knocking out rhythms simultaneously organic and industrial.

I broke out my camera to take some video and the drumemr stopped the beat to point at me with a stick and shout “Five dollars for the video!” at the top of his lungs. I didn’t get it at first, and he had to shout a number of times, to the terrific enjoyment of the crowd. Then I got it and gave the guy ten bucks. He was that good by himself, but his dancer was amazing.

You can see the drummer and dancer in my video, below. The dancer is cold stole by the rhythm at first and it is giving him a sickness that is gonna turn real good. Like how a flu shot wears you out a little but toughens you right up — this man goes from a twitching rhythmic allergy into an incredible, fluid poet.

Again, I can only shoot 30 seconds at a time, so this is cut together from a number of smaller pieces.

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