There’s a point in this recording where Alison Krauss yelps like she’s having the orgasm of a lifetime!  She digs down deep, into the netherworld of her pudenda, and from down below the feeling courses up her body until she vocalizes in a near-scream akin to having that girl in "Stray Cat Blues" drag her fingernails across your back, it’s more Maggie Bell than Sandy Denny.

I was cruising the music blogs, and I came across a recording of the second night of Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton’s soiree in Japan.  I clicked to hear "Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers", and as I scrolled down the set-list, I was stunned to find out Jeff covered the Henry Mancini classic, "Peter Gunn".

But that wasn’t the only show on this site.  There was a July 1970 recording of Traffic’s "John Barleycorn" tour, which I saw at the Fillmore East a month earlier, before the album came out.

And even an alternate "Bookends".

But what raised the hair on my back was Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ version of "The Battle Of Evermore" from last June at the Merriweather Post Pavilion.

"Stairway To Heaven" might be the most famous track off the fourth Led Zeppelin album, but it’s not my favorite.  For a long while, that was "Going To California", but I switched over to "The Battle Of Evermore" sometime in the nineties, after the boxed set was released, and I could hear a remastered version again and again.

"The Battle Of Evermore" is the best of rock.  Something so ethereal, so otherworldly that it would confound Top Forty programmers and the other mainstream gatekeepers.  The best music has no precedent, it cuts its own path, it leaves its mark after its release, as opposed to the cookie-cutter fare that is just a rehash of what’s already broken through.

"The Battle Of Evermore" sounds like it was cut a hundred fifty years ago, long before the advent of recording, when lords still lived in castles and fog crept forebodingly across the heath. And I never tire of the original take, but this live version from last summer has got a whole new vibrancy, with the voices upfront and personal, bringing us right back to 1971, 1871, yet startlingly fresh, positively today.

I hear the horses’ thunder down in the valley below
I’m waiting for the angels of Avalon, waiting for the eastern glow

Well one angel has just arrived, she’s trading lines with the Greek God, she’s evidencing a sexuality we never knew she possessed.  Yes, Alison Krauss has done intimacy, most famously with her take on "Baby, Now That I’ve Found You", she’ll bathe you and towel you off, but will she take off all her clothes, spread her legs and take you for the ride of your life?

These country acts are too sanitized, as if they’re afraid of being Dixie Chicked and banished from the airwaves by an establishment fearful of alienating one theoretically chaste Christian who fornicates in the privacy of his own bedroom, but refuses to admit that sex takes place in the outside world.

I know she’s got a kid, but Alison Krauss started out as a barely pubescent teenager, she’s never traded on her sexuality, but in the presence of a man who built his reputation on sexual innuendo, she locates his lemon and not only squeezes the juice till it runs down his leg, but demands he mount her and demonstrate he can not only receive, but give!

Bring it back.

Bring back the pulse of recorded music.  Rather than polish the official version, make available the live takes, warts and all.  After winning that big Grammy in the sky, Rounder should have immediately released the Zeppelin covers from the Plant/Krauss show.  Not only as an introduction to the music of the duo, but to satiate those who’ve already been converted.

Alas, awash in rights and permission issues, the public has had to take matters into its own hands, the public has seen fit to make these recordings available, not to rip off the artists and the company, but to fulfill the wishes of fans, of listeners, to enrich their lives!

No, I’m not going to tell you where to find these recordings.  Either you know how to surf the Web, or you don’t.  Why tip off the rights holders, who are too stupid to find these sites themselves. Isn’t that the problem, the old men decrying the new world are completely unfamiliar with it?

But it’s not about the Internet, not about MP3s or payment, but music.  We’re living in a heyday of music.  The recordings being pushed by the mainstream have been so sanitized, they’re so bereft of imperfections, that we can’t relate to them, we can’t connect.

Those pictures in the magazines are pure artifice, I’ve seen many of these actresses and models up close and personal, and you’d be stunned, many wouldn’t even turn a head.  Real people, like real music, breathe, they sweat, they’re not perfectly symmetrical, but it’s their unique qualities, their idiosyncrasies that draw us in.

We don’t want to fuck the girl in the magazine, we want the one who’s going to take us on that E Ticket ride, to an X-rated Disneyland where our wildest fantasies come true.

I now know Alison Krauss has been to the dark side, because on this live take of "The Battle Of Evermore", she’s taken me there.