So for some reason yesterday I did a deep dive on old Led Zeppelin bootlegs.
Led Zeppelin were my first "favorite band". From the time I first heard a record of theirs when I was in seventh or eighth grade - a story I've told countless times before and will probably tell again, but won't retell today - up through my senior year of high school, they were the only band I listened to. More than that my entire wardrobe was, for all of high school, made up entirely of Led Zeppelin T-shirts.
I've never quit being a Zep fan. Never stopped listening to their records, in fact. At the same time, though, my love for them has never deepened, has never grown, which has happened with a lot of the music I listen to. I listen to Led Zeppelin precisely because it evokes the same feelings in me at age 44 that it did at age 13. It's timelessly adolescent.
I was never really into Zep boots, though. I dabbled in them when I first started getting into bootlegs, in my senior year of high school, but they were all disappointing. For all of their reputation as a mighty live band, most of the boots I had of theirs were unremittingly dull. I remember most vividly a long, long three-cassette show I had of a show in Seattle in 1975. They played "Dazed and Confused" for 45 minutes! At this time I was fully convinced that longer equalled better, and it took probably several times listening to that fucking thing to persuade myself otherwise. There were better boot tapes - I remember fondly one from the Texas International Pop Festival in '69 - but compared to nearly any other bootleg tape I could think of Zep tapes sounded interminable and lethargic.
It's only recently - in fact, as a conscious realization only just now - that it has occurred to me that live Zep can't possibly get any worse than live Dead, that it might be amenable to the same cherry-picking approach that has paid off so well with the Dead. What started as a random tangent in my mind turned into a day-long trawl through their corpus of dodgy audience tapes. One thing led to another. I found a guy who, in 2008, blogged his impressions of every extant Zep boot take. He's not the world's best writer, and our tastes don't overlap entirely, but if someone's listened to them all, I can take some time to check out the things he names as exceptional, particularly when they overlap with my personal taste.
So here's a rundown of some of the stuff I've found. I mostly focused on the first couple of years of their existence; after that my knowledge is mostly cherry-picking.
1969-01-26 Boston - The Train Kept A Rollin'/I Can't Quit You Baby: This show looms large in Zep mythology. The story goes that they played for four and a half hours, and the tape here is only the first third of a much longer tape. I'm not sure how plausible I find this story - while the tape does cut off, it does so after encompassing nearly every song in their repertoire at the time. Maybe they did spend another three hours playing rock and roll standards - it's not out of character for them, frankly - but on a tour where they were mostly playing 50 minute sets opening for the Vanilla Fudge? Regardless, what is on this audience tape is suitably incendiary; the sound is not polished and, like many tapes of the era, is a bit overdriven. I like the overdriven sound - it sounds authentically "live" to me. The instruments are also clear and well-mixed, with Jones's bass sounding really good. It is very likely the finest document of Zep on their first US tour as a young band lighting the world on fire.
1969-04-27 San Francisco - As Long As I Have You: This is one of the more famous tapes on the list, one of the many Zep tapes that circulate as an excellent quality soundboard. Which is fortunate because this is also the consensus finest performance of their never-studio-recorded cover of the Northern Soul classic "As Long As I Have You", which served as a vehicle for one of their early medleys. This medley has latterly been most notorious for including Spirit's "Fresh Garbage", which became germane Randy California's estate sued Zep for plagiarizing "Stairway" from one of Spirit's songs. (The openings of the songs are similar in sound, but in terms of composition there's not much to hang a plagiarism charge on... once Zep's lawyers succeeded in the motion to exclude actual recordings from the trial, the suit was dead in the water.)
Anyway, had I came around to this famous boot tape earlier I might have been more bullish on Zep's live work. This medley is a fantastic performance of material that's nowhere to be found in their "official" catalogue. It's not "original" material, but then again neither is most of their first LP...
1969-08-08 San Bernardino - entire tape! This is probably the most exciting tape I came across during the whole trawl, and justifies all the time I spend digging through stuff that is labelled as "fanatics only". Zeppelin fans tend to lament the "poor quality" of this tape - it is clearly a fantastic performance, and Jimmy Page in particular is absolutely on fire, but the tape was apparently made from inside of Jimmy's guitar amp, and you can't hear anybody else in the band!
Well once I read that description I had to hear it, and it didn't disappoint. You see, for anyone who is unfamiliar, there is a famous Velvet Underground bootleg called "The Legendary Guitar Amp Tape" that was recorded in precisely that fashion. This tape is absolute peak bootleg ethos. It is, in fact, more or less all Jimmy's guitar, blazing, noisy, blown out. Me personally? I am a noise rock FIEND. Jimmy Page on a good night in '69 is absolutely the equal of Lou Reed on an average night in '69, the equal of any Les Rallizes Denudes recording you can think of. Maybe there's something going on in "Flames of Ice" that isn't resent in the "Dazed and Confused" here but I don't know what it is.
The best part? The best part has to be when Jimmy breaks a string at the end of "I Can't Quit You Baby". The rest of the band goes into an impromptu blues jam while he changes it. The tape isn't hi-fi, but the instruments are, again, well-balanced and clearly comprehensible. At the very end Jimmy, string repaired, jumps in and because of the way he's mixed it is utterly apocalyptic and amazing, even though he's literally just throwing in some stray notes at the end of an impromptu blues jam. And then they do "Dazed and Confused".
This tape deserves to be legendary.
1970-04-09 Tampa - White Summer/Black Mountain Side: Jimmy Page gets a lot of shit from folkies, mostly I suspect because of his habit of blatantly stealing credit for songs and arrangements he had nothing to do with. Black Mountain Side, for instance, in its studio recording, is a complete cop of Bert Jansch's arrangement of "Blackwaterside", and most Zep fans don't know this, haven't ever heard "Blackwaterside", don't know that the song has lyrics, haven't heard Sandy Denny's stunning rendition. This seems absurd to me, I feel like these people are missing out something fierce, but ahh, you know, one only knows what one knows?
Page as a folkstyle player... he was more than a Jansch/Graham copyist, and I think this comes through live. Hell, one can hear this on the BBC "White Summer/Black Mountain Side" released as part of the '90 box set. It's a great performance. I love it. He went on to do better. For a long time my go-to performance was Montreux 1970-03-07, a fine quality audience tape patched with a poor-quality soundboard (poor-quality enough that it was used as a patch to an audience tape and not the other way around!). It's a renowned, well-known gig, and one of the things I wanted to do is hear if the less-renowned gigs had anything going for them. Which is how I came across this tape. White Summer/Black Mountain Side expands to 13 minutes here. We did establish here that length is no indicator of quality, particularly with Zep. The recordings I'm talking about here aren't just long - they earn their length. This performance is very creative. Page is still searching, experimenting, incorporating new riffs, new approaches. Bonham's drumming - Bonham did provide sporadic drumming for live versions - is propulsive. It sounds on paper like Bonham would have the wrong approach for a "folk" number like this, that his lack of subtlety would overwhelm it, but Page had moved well beyond "folk" at this point. He was, indeed, playing electric, and while this was one more reason for folk purists to scoff at him I find his adaptation of folk music techniques to electric guitar to be super fucking exciting. I'm told Jansch experimented with playing electric in one phase of Pentangle's career. There are no tapes. That's really unfortunate IMO.
1970-04-17 Memphis - How Many More Times: I never much rated Zep's lengthy blues medleys, of which How Many More Times was the first and, on record, one of the longest. The only two Led Zeppelin studio songs that top eight minutes, pre-1975, are How Many More Times and Stairway to Heaven.
Live, Zeppelin were much less succinct. My MP3 of this performance runs to 33:33, and yes there is a tape cut in the middle. If you were to tell me that I would listen to like 35 minutes of "How Many More Times" I'd be... skeptical. And does it entirely earn it? No. As medleys go, there's a certain stop-start nature to it, and at their best Zeppelin was a little more organic than that.
The circumstances here were perhaps a bit exceptional, though. You know it's gonna be a good "How Many More Times" when Peter Grant has been arrested by the end of it.
This performance is, like many rock concerts of the era, many Zeppelin concerts of the era, a scene of high tension, and this tension comes through on the tape. It was Memphis, and the Southern police were, well, acting like Southern police. I don't want to go into detail, not out of decorum, but because you either know what I'm talking about, it's enough for me to say that this was a couple weeks before Kent State, or you're gonna get really mad at me if I go into more detail. So I'm going to try and be polite about this.
I wasn't there, but it was clearly an intense fucking scene, and Plant, Plant the inveterate hippie, is just trying to keep the peace. He can't. It's beyond him. He pleads with the crowd some, and he sings, because that's what he's there for, that's what he knows how to do, but his otherworldly screams don't seem to do much to calm down the crowd, the band launching into a full rendition of "Memphis Tennessee" doesn't calm down the crowd, Page going into an impromptu run-through of Ravel's Bolero (Jeff Beck? Who's he?) doesn't help, Plant launching into "Ramble On" doesn't help, none of it helps but it all sounds fucking fantastic.
So yeah. It's great music _and_ it's an invaluable historical document. Can't fucking go wrong there.
1980-08-21 Tulsa - Communication Breakdown: That's audience tapes, right? Zep don't have the reputation the Dead does for blowing major gigs, but they kind of did? They headlined Knebworth in '79 and it's widely agreed that the Danish "warm-up" gigs were way better. The whole clusterfuck of the concert movie, the lackluster New York gigs, the botched Earls Court gigs that didn't even get used tor the film... yeah, Zep had a talent for blowing it, for doing their best work when nobody was looking. So here's Zep fucking killing it at a show in goddamn Tulsa Oklahoma. This is the final encore and they stretch it out a little bit - in the breakdown section we get a fuckin' bass solo! And it's a good one. I do love Jones's bass, and Page dropping the odd theremin whoop on top doesn't hurt things. I haven't heard a lot of versions of Communication Breakdown but this is a good one.
1971-09-23 Tokyo - Whole Lotta Love: I'm pretty sure I started with the '71 Japan gigs. I had fragments of the stage tape of the 09-29 Osaka gig as filler on an old tape, and it did immediately did jump out to my ears as exceptional. It's not just that it's the only ever live version of "Friends", one of my favorite Zep songs - the whole vibe is that of a band at their absolute peak, firing on all cylinders. I don't particularly _like_ the "tight but loose" descriptor that gets applied to them often. I think "inconsistent" is frequently a better descriptor. Here I'm tempted to actually accept it. Zep go through Whole Lotta Love for fucking forever, and it's glorious for a change. The crowd here is considerably more animated than they were in Osaka, and Zep are clearly feeding off the energy here.
1973-01-22 Southampton - Thank You: '72 was a good year for Zep, but honestly, the best shit they did that year was released on "How The West Was Won". Possibly someone could at some point convince me there's live stuff worth listening to that's _not_ on their release, but I'm not there yet. So we're on to early '73. This is a long gig that was professionally recorded and was considered for release, but whoever made the decisions decided (correctly) that the '72 gigs were just a better performance. This performance is a long one, but it doesn't have the raucous energy of those mid '72 gigs. What it does have, the reason I jumped on this, is the Mellotron. Starting with their Japan tour in October of '72, Zep started incorporating the Mellotron into their set - primarily for their new number "The Rain Song". However, Jones also started playing it in lieu of the traditional organ solo on the now increasingly-rare number "Thank You". I am so fucking there for this. There may perhaps be better performances of "Thank You" - I'm not an expert - but there aren't any with Jones killing it on the Mellotron in pristine soundboard quality, jamming on MacArthur Park and shit.
1973-03-24 Offenburg - Dazed & Confused: Over time this show has become legendary. The tape I have is the Eddie Edwards version. For this Eddie used the stereo source tape. A lot of releases reduce it to mono because the stereo tape has some weird stereo imaging, but for Eddie the stereo image gives it a depth that the mono can't give, and for me weird? Weird is good. Look, if Jimmy is going to do a bow solo and there _isn't_ psychedelic phasing I'm gonna be a little disappointed. This show wasn't legendary when I was younger, it wasn't known. This was a small gig in an obscure suburb of Strasbourg across the Rhine in Germany, and Zep being Zep, they killed it. A growing consensus has it that this is, in fact, the best Dazed and Confused ever. I'm struck by how _different_ it is from the "How the West Was Won" version. Here there's no "Walter's Walk" or "The Crunge" riffs. Instead we get Jimmy doing an early version of the "Achilles Last Stand" riff, we get Jones and Bonham in unison going into Hendrix's "Machine Gun", we get... well, I don't need do a blow-by-blow, because it's Internet Famous now. It's the equivalent of the Veneta Dark Star.
I also took the guitar solo from "Stairway". Uploads of gigs to Youtube appear to be unmolested unless, for some reason, they contain "Stairway", so uploads tend to cut it to only the guitar solo. Me, I do have the whole tape of Stairway, but I'm rather unimpressed with the audience member loudly yelling crude epithets at a woman at the start of the tape, and Plant's voice has rather started to slip by this point in Zep's career. I do find Page's solo exceptional, though, so kept it.
1973-04-02 Paris - The Song Remains The Same: Now, one would think that Paris '73 would be a fairly big gig, at least compared to Offenburg. And the perfomance, the performance is quite fine. it's a good one. But the tape? The tape is not as good as Offenburg. It's distant, a bit echoey, got that "through a glass darkly" feel a lot of '70s audience tapes in big venues have. Still, I have to say I'm sold by this "Song Remains the Same" - and it's not a song that usually sells me live. Here's the thing, Page wrote these blazing lightning riffs and he couldn't play them consistently. Most of the time he's just fucking sloppy, and I'm sorry, I'm not impressed by hearing Jimmy Page fuck up a riff, even if it is a really cool and fast riff. This version? Yeah, it's sloppy, because Page is always fucking sloppy, but it's not a disgrace like some versions of it. Oh, God, I was listening to the first live performance of it in Tokyo '72, and Page just makes a complete fucking hash of the intro riff. I guess if he had any self-respect he couldn't have played a lot of the amazing shit he did, I'm not saying I want him to be fuckin' Joe Pass or anything, but oh God his fucked up ass can be so painful to listen to sometimes. Not here, though. This version is good.
1975-01-25 Indianapolis - Rock and Roll: OK yes, this is a troll version. Zep are playing at the good old Market Square Arena in Indy, where Elvis played his last concert. It's a parking lot with a plaque now. This was fairly early in Zep's 75 tour, when they were still doing numbers they'd drop later on like "The Wanton Song", and...
Look, Plant didn't always take care of his voice. Zep had a decently strong commitment to not cancelling concerts, at least early on, but he'd do a concert even if he blatantly couldn't fucking sing at all. One can hear this on multiple occasions. In this case Plant decided that even though Zeppelin were touring through Midwestern America in January he wasn't going to compromise his sense of style, which consisted, for those of you who have seen "The Song Remains the Same", of loose, flowing, open shirts, and he caught the fucking flu. So we have here "Rock And Roll" as sung by guest vocalist Tom Fucking Waits. Zep could frequently be embarrassing, I've heard tapes of any one of them individually playing while profoundly ill or fucked up, and most of them are just sad. This one is kind of funny. When he hoarsely croaks "It's been a long time since I rock and roll", you fuckin' believe it!
1975-03-12 Long Beach - Whole Lotta Love -> The Crunge -> Black Dog, Heartbreaker: The neglected companion recording to one of the most famous Zep audience tapes, made by the renowned Mike Millard. The complete tape of the show the day before is widely circulated and renowned. This performance is better, but Millard's tape didn't completely turn out. All that survives in his recording is the ending.
Well, except it's a great ending. I know a lot of people give Zep's attempts at whiteboy funk shit, but hearing Zep do some fake James Brown shit in 9/8 is my jam, particularly like here when they go into "Licking Stick".
The whole show is out there from another source, but fortunately it does seem like Millard got the best part of it.
Well, fuck. I just wrote 3,000 words on Led Zeppelin bootlegs. I guess I have a strange idea of fun. :(
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