But nowhere near so exciting

It was March of 1969, and John Mendelssohn, a Rolling Stone critic, was just sitting down to write about the debut album of a band called Led Zeppelin - and he was not impressed.

The band, he wrote, "offers little that its twin, the Jeff Beck Group, didn't say as well or better three months ago." Jimmy Page, he continued, struck him as "a writer of weak, unimaginative songs," and lead singer Robert Plant was "as foppish as Rod Stewart, but nowhere near so exciting."

Well, now. (Ahem.) We might point out, at this point, that the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2004, and that in the past twelve years Rolling Stone itself has twice given the record the number 29 slot in its list of the 500 greatest records of all time. Critics, undoubtedly, are entitled to their own view. But there's a reason that if you Google "infamous music criticism," Mendelssohn's review appears as the most relevant hit.

And yet, there's something wonderfully admirable, too, about a critic who sticks his head out, takes a stand, and speaks honestly. And that's no mere truism. Just yesterday, in fact, I was on the receiving end of such criticism. I was trying to explain to Cleo that I've been writing these thoughts about us for five years now, and that I'm going to bring the blog to a close tomorrow. Doubtless oversentimental, I then added that I hoped she might look at it at some point in the future. And if she did, I wondered out loud, what might she think?

She didn't hesitate. "A little funny," she said, "and a little boring."

Ah, Cleo. Years after the release of Zeppelin's first album, John Paul Jones tried to recall the band's reaction. "In our naivete," he said, "we thought we'd done a good album and were doing all right, and then this venom comes flying out. We couldn't understand why or what we'd done to them. After that we were very wary of the press...  We avoided them and so they avoided us."

Well, there are many, many ways in which I am not Zeppelin (for one thing, this blog will never reach number 29 on any top 500 list). But here's one more: I don't plan to avoid you, ever, regardless of the sting of your criticism.