by Mark Morford

Created on: November 30, 2008

Led Zeppelin saves the world

Because your kid deserves 'Kashmir' as a ringtone. Hey, at least it's not the Beatles

There's this moment in "The Song Remains the Same," the often wildly cheesy yet still utterly groin-tingling epic 1976 Led Zeppelin concert film/fantasia where a reed-thin, black-clad, heavily sequined Jimmy Page is so violently violating his Les Paul with a shredded violin bow it sounds like demons f-ing in a hurricane.

Meanwhile, Robert Plant is swaggering in skin-tight bell-bottoms and stack-heel boots and a massive mane of blond curls with his spine arched so far back and his bulge so prominent it surely inspired a million fertility rites, as late Zep drummer John Bonham beats the meaning of life out of his kit and bassist/keyboardist John Paul Jones looks like Jesus rising from the dead and pretty much the entire sold-out Madison Square Garden crowd is lost in some sort of deep mystical hard-rock trance the memory of which will certainly be burned deep into their very cells forevermore.

If you've seen this concert footage, you know. It is, I have to say, one of those images, one of those seminal moments in recorded music history where it does not matter what your gender or what your age or what level of teenage sexual neurosis you might've suffered back then.

Because if you claim to enjoy hard rock music in the slightest, you witness something like this and the divine forces of sex and god and fire and electricity all come together to stab you straight in the gut of your id, and suddenly it all makes some sort of perfect cosmic rock 'n' roll sense and you go oh oh OH, this is how it's supposed to be.

Call it the Rock God Moment, that epiphanic instant where you cannot help but recognize that what you are witnessing is not merely special, not merely unspeakably cool, not just fist-pumpingly righteous. It is downright otherworldly. It is beyond your ability to fully comprehend because, well, it is not of this existence. It's just that good.

This all comes to mind (and groin) as news slides down the wire that the remaining members of the mighty Zep have agreed to release their entire back catalog for digital download, and have also signed with Verizon to release the whole monster package as a big pile of ringtones. Yeah, I know, whatever and who really cares and oh great, just what we need, a bunch of aging Boomers beeping out "Black Dog" on their RAZRs at Whole Foods. Yeesh.

But wait, it gets better. Far more importantly, the remaining members of Zep

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