When there’s background music at a yoga class in Chicago, it’s usually a Ravi Shankar raga, hotel-lobby-style acid jazz, or New Age crap from Windham Hill Records. But Sara Strother, an instructor at Bucktown yoga studio Yogaview, does things a little differently. For “Living Loving Yoga,” a class that was held on Thursday, May 5, she set her instruction to the music of Led Zeppelin, giving students an opportunity to rock out while doing asanas (poses and stretches).
She began the class by telling a story about a drunken karaoke party she attended in a Japanese trailer park during her two-year stint in the country teaching yoga. After her companions sang their hearts out to J-pop tunes, she did her best impression of singer Robert Plant’s cock-rock swagger while belting out Zep’s “Whole Lotta Love.” “The others went from being red in the face to looking like they’d just seen a ghost,” she recalled.
Predictably, the ultimate Zep track for yoga was “Kashmir.” The song’s trudging rhythm synched perfectly with our vinyasas, which are breath-based movements. On the other hand, the percolating bass and drums on the chorus of “Ramble On” set heads bobbing and toes wiggling. The lyrics include a laughable, Lord of the Rings reference (“‘Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor / I met a girl so fair / But Gollum, and the Evil One crept up / And slipped away with her”).
