Led Zeppelin: Classic Or Dud?

honestly I have mad respect for any guitarist who can play for hours and maintain any level of precision, my anxiety makes my fingers sometimes twitch and then I mispick something. my hand cramps too. this is why I never really played in a permanent band outside of one show.

the first time I met Slayer, we were told not to shake their hands, as they would be picking so much they needed their hands at 100%.

i mean how many people came out of that show utterly transported vs. how many came out thinking 'well i survived that'

I mean, they had been touring for years by that point and people were still paying to go, surely?

the first time I met Slayer, we were told not to shake their hands, as they would be picking so much they needed their hands at 100%.

Haha wow, that's amazing!

Hey Zep-heads, I know next-to-nothing about live Zep, so please confirm if this is true: Back in high school my friend was heavily into bootlegs and he was like, “there’s this awesome Led Zeppelin bootleg out there of a concert where for some reason they had to end the concert early, so they played all their songs much faster than normal, so it sounds pretty wild. I think it’s one of the Destroyers.” Not being into Zep or bootlegs at the time, I thought nothing of it. So, is this true? Did Zep really play a speeded-up concert? Or (more likely) the bootleg was just mastered at the wrong speed?

Doesn’t ring a bell

Can’t think of one like that and I’ve listened to a lot of ‘em.

Good to know. Thanks!

As a follow-up to that, who can give a list of the most essential Zep live bootlegs? I'm interested in the ones with the best sound quality above all, so mainly soundboard or FM shows. Thanks.

There was a really awesome site I saw recently that broke them down into best performances vs. best sound, I'll try to find that.

the first time I met Slayer, we were told not to shake their hands, as they would be picking so much they needed their hands at 100%.

I interviewed DJ Q*Bert once, and he was the same way. He had a little portable mixer with him that he warmed up with while we talked.

Oh, that was easy, it was on reddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ledzeppelin/comments/9dvz2s/a_beginners_guide_to_led_zeppelin_bootlegs/

Perfect, thanks! Now to track these down...

I downloaded the Madison Square Garden 1975 show (soundboard) and holy fuck, it sounds amazing. Not far into it yet, though.

St Louis 1975 —— essential IMHO

Never thought I'd say this, but Ben Shapiro OTM:

I hope everybody really enjoyed that 1968-1980 period, because we're about to repeat it.

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) June 8, 2020

A lot of US stadium bootleg recordings from that mid/late 70s era sound kind of aggro to my ears, endless whooping and catcalls, firecrackers going off, ppl yelling at others to 'sit the fuck down', can anyone confirm/deny?

There are a few Floyd boots from '77 that sound a bit hair-raising, for instance.

xpost lol, that's some great meta punchline recontextualizing.

There's a classic 1981 Springsteen show that recently got released as part of his live series where someone lights off a firecracker. Rolling Stone wrote this about it:

Prior to “This Land Is Your Land,” an unruly fan set off a firecracker. This was a recurring issue at arena concerts during this time and the incident understandably enraged Springsteen. “If anybody was around that guy, point him out, and throw his fucking ass out of here,” he said. “If you don’t have the respect for yourself, you ought to at least respect the people that are sitting around you.”

on the LA forum 77 show you can clearly hear fireworks during JPJ's jazz odyssey section on No Quarter...no respeck

Worth noting of course that Lennon was shot in 1980, might have made musicians even more sensitive to loud pops at their shows.

xpost
Hey, it coulda been raspberries!

If I had to sit/stand through a 30-minute"No Quarter" I think I'd be lighting things on fire, too. It's like the '70s version of "You Made Me Realise."

as far as unsettling audience remarks on live shows, there's a couple of shows from the Stones' 69 tour where you can hear people yelling "BRIAN!" over and over between songs.

^^I love that bit on Live-Er Than You'll Ever Be where Jagger casually banters the word 'shit', and then you hear these two guys freak out, "He said 'SHIT'!".

forgot about that one! I think it's the Baltimore show after Stray Cat where a guy says to his friend, "That's even better than the album version!"

that rules

If I had to sit/stand through a 30-minute"No Quarter" I think I'd be lighting things on fire, too. It's like the '70s version of "You Made Me Realise."

um I would happily spend an enormous amount of money to sit through that in person

Speaking of, this sb clip of Bonham/JPJ buildup and solo is just....

https://youtu.be/LHmKuDklnqw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHmKuDklnqw&feature=youtu.be

these 1975 No Quarters are straight fire, embed be damned

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWI22TmjgQU

Just catching up with Listen to this Eddie, goddamn this comes out of the gate like a racehorse

I like the live indulgences! I still marvel that a band who were among the biggest pop stars of their time could throw in things like a 15-minute unaccompanied guitar noise/theremin jam into a stadium gig.

― Feel a million filaments (Sund4r), dimanche 7 juin 2020 02:19 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Indeed. This huge commercial band despised by most "serious" critics as a joke for suburban US teenagers playing these 20min tracks with jazzy/soul/funk/blues breaks...
Like what would be the equivalent today ??
BTS having 15min baroque music jams in their sets ?

Oh yeah, that's a good one. 2xp

Worth noting of course that Lennon was shot in 1980, might have made musicians even more sensitive to loud pops at their shows.

Bootleg OPO: Listen to this Eddie vs Listen to this Brad

This Eddie boot is indeed pretty damn fierce!

I like the YT commenter's transcription of Plant introducing Bonham:

Right now, the man who fought, the man who fought against the elements. The man. The man who... who fought food poisoning. The man who drinks Heineken. The man who doesn't get out of bed. The man who hasn't got a cymbal. The man who's having a chat with his man who knows the man who tunes Jimmy's guitar who comes from Scotland, and doesn't know the man they call "Tim"... but does know Audrey from Dallas. Thank you. Shh, hang on. The man who now learns how to construct his own drum kit. The man who's not very professional. Shut up, wait a bit, shhh. The man who said he could go back to a building site anytime, and we all agreed. The man who's holding up the show. The Rhinestone Cowgirl! Come on Bonzo, get on with it. That's what the Quaalude stagger is. The man who played the Los Angeles Aztecs and beat them 10-1 by himself. The man who, one wonders, is he worth waiting for, and doesn't really realize there's a curfew here. A childhood friend. A man of whom, many people once said, "never heard of him"... John Bonham!! Over the Top!!"

The 20-minute "No Quarter" from the 1975 MSG boot is amazing. And the 10-minute "Trampled Under Foot" that comes right after it is pretty great, too.

Just catching up with Listen to this Eddie, goddamn this comes out of the gate like a racehorse

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Monday, June 8, 2020 4:36 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

bonham is really on one for this whole show. i'm listening to kashmir and i'm not sure how the drums physically survived the night.

Plant’s banter annoys some but it cracks me up

I love "No Quarter" (the song), but listening to a 30 minute version of it the same night as a 20 minute Bonham solo and a 20 minute Nigel Tufnel solo ... I like all those musicians so much, but I do want to hear so much of those musicians.

lol do *not.*

Loved the part of Calstars video where

ROBERT PLANT: Well, good evening.

*pause*

ROBERT PLANT: I mean [in Robert Plant voice] GOOOD EEEVENIN'!!

https://youtu.be/lGNljiG0Kwc?t=786

XPS "I'm not believin' that shit about Bonham's one-hour drum solo...A whole hour of drums? You couldn't handle that shit on strong acid, man..."

i saw them three times (nassau coliseum '72, msg '73, coliseum again '75) so probably *cumulatively* saw 60 minutes worth of drum solos? most people used those as an opportunity to hit the bathroom. highlight was probably "kashmir" at that february '75 show, a few days before the album came out. the upper deck of the nassau coliseum isn't good for many things but one thing it's good for is as the first place to ever hear kashmir.

I would not have expected my estimation of the Zep to have increased from my teenaged years but it surely has

who knew you could age in to a band who named a song "Moby Dick"

Like few bands other than probably just the Beatles, every Zeppelin album is equal to or greater than the entire career output of most bands.

yes!

like, one of the things I long for is for my focus to narrow, instead of wanting to explore more rather to want less, to want to listen to just a few things, to get lost in them forever, to look for novelty inwardly, well, basically just to listen to Zep. I want to want that.

I would not have expected my estimation of the Zep to have increased from my teenaged years but it surely has

Same, it's kind of amazing.

The other day I was thinking about starting a thread for those old person moments you have when you hear something that you had previously played out to such a degree that you stopped listening to it for years, only to hear it again and realize "it doesn't get any better than this." Because Over the Hills and Far Away came on when I was in the car, and yeah.

I also had the revelation that the seemingly off-beat intro is actually in straight 4/4 time.

Age is an energy!

I also had the revelation that the seemingly off-beat intro is actually in straight 4/4 time.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Wednesday, July 15, 2020 9:56 AM (four minutes ago)

except that it's not, there's definitely some shifts of the beat happening going on, let me see what I can dig up...