I can't hear that

On this day in 1970, Led Zeppelin performed two evening shows at the International Center Arena in Honolulu, Hawaii.

"Whole Lotta Love" was performed at both shows but, the audience response differed between the two. At the early show, during "Whole Lotta Love," when Robert Plant yelled, "Woman," there was no reply from the audience. The 15,000 partying fans at the late show, however, shouted back at Plant.

Enjoy the following video I compiled using fan-shot 8mm footage that has circulated on bootlegs, along with an audio recording also available on bootlegs. Both come from the early show.

Live on Blueberry Hill

On this day in 1970, Led Zeppelin played a concert at the L.A. Forum that has become the stuff of legend, mostly because of several audience tapes of the show that first surfaced on vinyl within a few years.

The record set of this concert was called Live on Blueberry Hill, named after the rare encore Led Zeppelin played that night, "Blueberry Hill," popularized by Fats Domino in 1956.

The recording also includes a rare live performance of "Out on the Tiles," also played during the encore.

Live on Blueberry Hill was sold in some record stores in the United States and England, and so people assumed it was a legitimate release. It was actually released by a bootleg label called Blimp.



Robert Godwin, a published author on subjects including Led Zeppelin bootlegs, says the Blueberry Hill release was an important milestone for the myth of Led Zeppelin. Asked in 2009 to list his favorite bootlegs, Godwin said:

"I have a special passion for Blueberry Hill because it was one of the first bootlegs I ever bought. It wasn't the first, but it was certainly -- when I heard it, it was the first opportunity that I'd had to hear them playing other people's songs.

"There was this cool aura to having a bootleg album, especially if it had stuff on it that was not on any of their studio albums -- and especially when it was so hard to get tickets to see them! So I believe that Blueberry Hill actually helped them, despite what was being said at the time."

After Led Zeppelin's show at the Forum, Led Zeppelin moved on to the Troubadour club in Los Angeles, where the British folk band Fairport Convention was appearing that night in front of a couple hundred, to record a live album.

During Fairport's second set, members of Led Zeppelin sat in to jam on the song "Hey Joe," plus "Morning Dew" by Tim Rose, and some Elvis Presley tunes including "That's Alright Mama" and "Mystery Train."

The bands shared each other's instruments. Fairport guitarist Richard Thompson borrowed Jimmy Page's Les Paul, and John Bonham pounded away at the drum kit that belonged to Dave Mattacks.

When Bonham first sat down at the kit and stepped on the bass pedal, Mattacks watched in horror as his bass drum flew forward a half a foot. By the end of the night, after Bonham had worn out his welcome, the drum heads needed a good changing and the toms needed a good tuning.

Some say the jam session went on as long as three hours, and afterward Janis Joplin met up with Bonham at the after-hours bar Barney's Beanery to square off against him in a drinking contest.

'Cause you're too loud, too loud

On this day in 1970, Led Zeppelin performed at the Sports Arena in San Diego. The acoustic set went over so poorly with this particular audience that they dropped one of the acoustic songs from the set list.

Robert Plant repeatedly tried to hush the audience to no avail while they tuned up, saying, "Shut up. ... You've all got acoustic guitars at home, and you know what it's like trying to play it with the television on."

When the San Diego Union ran a concert review written by music critic Donald Dierks, there was no mention at all of the attempt at playing any softer material. Instead, Dierks focused only on the loudness. He wrote:

"As for the music itself, the principal expressive attribute was volume
-- wave after ear-splitting wave of volume. ... Suffice it to say that the music
was so loud it made the seats shake until they felt like therapeutic vibrator
chairs -- literally."

Restless in Oakland

On this day in 1970, the audience was restless while Led Zeppelin debuted some acoustic songs destined for Led Zeppelin III at Bill Graham's Oakland Coliseum in California.

Robert Plant joked onstage, "We pray for your indulgence, ladies and gentlemen. Tom Jones is next."

I call that a bargain

This newsletter edition focused on a music festival Led Zeppelin played two years in a row (1969 and 1970) on exactly the same date (June 28).

On this day in 1969, Led Zeppelin participated for the first time in a music festival, one of 19 bands appearing on two different stages.

Blues bands Fleetwood Mac, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and Ten Years After were the headliners at the Bath Festival of Blues. Zep was fourth on the bill, ahead of the Nice.

Led Zeppelin's popularity in England having just taken off over the course of its first proper tour of the country that month, the band's booking as the fourth act on the bill is a remnant of the final days Zeppelin would support other bands. Promoter Freddy Bannister recalls in his memoir, "There Must Be a Better Way," that he heard the people attending the festival all talking about Zeppelin on their way out -- not any of the three acts that closed the festival.

In fact, it now made sense to him why Zeppelin manager Peter Grant had been keen on renegotiating the band's fee, which was originally booked to play the festival for the minuscule amount of £125. Bannister, who mentions this nonchalantly in his book, agreed to a renegotiated fee of £200 for the band. He said this was still a bargain, particularly in light of the fees the group would eventually be demanding.

It is easy to demonstrate the progress Led Zeppelin made within the following year by comparing its appearances on this June 28 and on the same date the following year. The 1969 event, held on one day, was called the Bath Festival of Blues, and the 1970 event was called the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music. Led Zeppelin returned to headline a three-day festival over Santana, the Byrds, Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa, to name a few. The crowd in 1970 was five times larger, and most people arrived just in time on the third day only to see Led Zeppelin.

Zep's longtime tour manager, Richard Cole, remembered the Bath Festival in a recent interview with Dave Lewis conducted for the syndicated U.S. radio show "Get the Led Out." "The [Bath Festival] in 1970 was enormous," said Cole. "It was outside in a big field. That was, I should think, their biggest show to date at that time." It was, in fact, held not at the Recreation Showground as in 1969 but at the Royal Bath & West Showground in Shepton Mallet.

As for the band's act on this day in 1970, it may have been the first concert with the newly written "Immigrant Song." At that time, Led Zeppelin had just "come from the land of the ice and snow," where they performed a single concert in Reykjavik, Iceland. Robert Plant has said the show in the unusual destination of Reykjavik gave the band some much-needed street cred to fend off the endless stream of naysayers. "It was always like that with Led Zeppelin: 'Who do they think they are to be so pompous?' And we weren't being pompous. We did come from the land of the ice and snow. We were guests of the Icelandic government. We were on a cultural mission representing the musicians of Britain, and we were invited to Reykjavik to play a concert."

After Led Zeppelin kicked off its concert at the Bath Festival in 1970 with "Immigrant Song," it then proceeded to open shows with the same tune at every show for exactly the next two years: Today's date not only marks the Bath festivals of both 1969 and 1970, with the first known performance of "Immigrant Song" taking place on the latter; it also marks the last time "Immigrant Song" opened a Led Zeppelin concert, on June 28, 1972.

One final thing to mention about the Bath Festival in 1969 is the poster, which Bannister said had an image of a stereotypical female flower child whose waistcoat was blowing around in the wind, revealing an abundant amount of flesh. He recalls in his book being told some ticket outlets considered the poster obscene and therefore weren't displaying it. This didn't hurt ticket sales, however, as he was elated to find out tickets for the 1969 festival had completely sold out.

This poster image is now available on a T-shirt than can be ordered through the Bannister family's online store at www.rockmusicmemorabilia.com. The site also has replica posters available, including for the 1969 Bath Festival and the later Knebworth festivals, including the two Led Zeppelin performances whose 30th anniversaries approach just over two months from now. In fact, the Bath Festival in 1970 was the last major outdoor U.K. gig for Led Zeppelin until the Knebworth Festival in 1979.

Special journalism edition part 1 of 2

This newsletter edition, published on the 36th anniversary of a Led Zeppelin concert that was reviewed in a questionable manner, detailed numerous other instances of questionable journalism relating to Led Zeppelin members.

On this day in 1970, a staff writer for a newspaper in Salt Lake City, Utah, couldn't make up his mind about Led Zeppelin's performance at the city's Salt Palace for a concert review published the following day. Meanwhile, the music critic of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver was complimentary of the entire band in a review of the previous night's show.

At a time when the band had only two albums to its name, George Raine of the Salt Lake Tribune evidently had mixed feelings about Led Zeppelin's March 26 concert in his town. Although Raine found Jimmy Page worthy of being called a "virtuoso," he wasn't as complimentary of the rest of the band.

Raine's concert review praised the guitarist: "There is seemingly nothing he cannot do in the technical realm," he remarked. "He plays one of the fastest guitar necks to be seen. His intonations, his vibratos and his sense of time and syncopation probably are matched by only a handful of contemporary guitarists." His thoughts on the whole band, however, was that "it is not particularly hot, nor is it cold. Led Zeppelin is not good, nor is it bad." The headline summed up Raine's comments, saying, "Group is nothing to get excited about."

The write-up in the March 26 edition of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver was more favorable for the band. The headline of Music Critic Thomas MacCluskey's review said the band "has arrived."

Denver was also the location of Led Zeppelin's first U.S. concert, about 15 months earlier. MacCluskey reported on the increase in "the value of LZ's performances" between the two Denver appearances: The value had "risen from $1,500 to $32,000," the article said.

A separate piece in the same issue of the Rocky Mountain News focused mostly on a dozen broken window panes at the Denver Coliseum. According to that article, the police had expected more trouble "for a crowd this size." What size? The article quoted promoter Barry Fey of Feyline Productions as saying the attendance was more than 11,500 people.

It was not only the largest assembly ever gathered for a concert in the city, but it was also Denver's first concert to be officially recognized* as sold out. Fey said it sold out two weeks before the show.

* Officially recognized: A Beatles concert at Denver's Red Rocks Amphitheater on Aug. 26, 1964, is thought to have sold out although it was not officially recognized as such. It seemed to be a sold-out show because 10,000 people were crammed into a 9,000-capacity venue. Only 7,000 tickets were sold, and still 2,000 remained unsold, so it's estimated that about 3,000 fans must have used counterfeit tickets to gain admission.

The attendance at other Led Zeppelin concerts was also becoming quite impressive. After Denver and Salt Lake City, the band traveled to California for a March 27 show at the L.A. Forum in Inglewood. Led Zeppelin welcomed 20,000 people, earning $71,000 for the single appearance.

The second part to this edition of "On This Day In Led Zeppelin History" carried on the "Special journalism edition" theme.

35th anniversary of the Bath Festival 1970

On this day in 1970, John Paul Jones was almost late to one of the most important Led Zeppelin gigs of the year, a headlining appearance at the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music.

The festival was a smashing success in its second year as 150,000 fans gathered to hear the main attraction perform some songs that would be included on the next Led Zeppelin album. Spread over two days, 19 other hot bands appeared over two days at the festival, the lineup featuring the Jefferson Airplane and its subgroup Hot Tuna, the Byrds, Santana, the Moody Blues, Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention, Dr. John, and Country Joe.

Exactly one year earlier, on June 28, 1969, Led Zeppelin appeared fourth on the bill of 19 bands crammed into what was then a one-day event called the Bath Festival of Blues. At the event's inaugural year in 1969, Zep shared the stage with blues groups Taste, Fleetwood Mac and Ten Years After, and festival attendance was somewhere between 12,000 and 30,000.

But for 1970, promoter Freddy Bannister expanded the festival to two days so that each act could play longer a longer set. He also tacked on the phrase "And Progressive Music" to allow a naturally wider range of acts to perform. The first day of the 1970 festival included repeat performances from two 1969 acts -- John Mayall and Keef Hartley -- in addition to newcomers Canned Heat, Pink Floyd, Steppenwolf, Johnny Winter, Fairport Convention, Colosseum, It's a Beautiful Day and Maynard Ferguson's Big Band.

However, many of the 150,000 fans there at the end of the festival had arrived just in time to see the headlining act, Led Zeppelin. The attendance in 1970 was at least 500 percent of the previous year's, aided by the fact that it was being held at the Shepton Mallet, more favorable in size than the smaller Bath recreation ground used for the 1969 festival.

One of the people who arrived dangerously close to Led Zeppelin's set was the group's own bassist, John Paul Jones. The members of Led Zeppelin hated arriving at festivals long in advance, just to wait around while other bands played. And apparently, because so many fans chose to arrive to the festival just before Led Zeppelin's set, the roads to the Shepton Mallet were packed with stopped traffic.

"You couldn't get near the festival," John Paul Jones said in my interview with him for LZ History on Dec. 10, 2001. "I think Peter Grant spent nine hours in a car getting down there. At Denham Airport, 10 minutes away, ... I looked in the yellow pages. 'Can you get a helicopter?' It was like some decently cheap price too -- cheaper than a hired car, for some reason. We got in there, and then they said, 'The problem will be landing.' 'Cause I think for every thousand feet you have to be a thousand feet away. I said something, and they said, 'Don't worry, we'll fix you a transport when we get there.'

"So we ended up, we landed in a field ... There's nobody about. ... But suddenly, all these bikes just rolled up. ... 'Oh, wait a minute,' you know. And all these Hells Angels appeared in the field on their bikes, and said, 'We're your transport.' And so, ... we got on the back of a bike and just rolled straight through to the stage. It was a great entrance, I have to say. I was carrying a mandolin. I had a cowboy hat on -- Peter Fonda!"

Jones showed up, sporting a leather jacket assumed to be given to him by the Hells Angels. He told me, though, that it wasn't given to him. "I remember the jacket," he said. "It was this silly, shiny thing with picks and tapes, real hippie stuff. It was great."

No sooner did Jones turn up than the group started playing. To present the best possible outdoor show, Zeppelin manager Peter Grant imagined that his group should begin its set at dusk, stressing the band's theme of light and shade. That was the intention, but thanks to delays in the festival's proceedings earlier in the day, a band called Flock was still onstage when the sun began to set in the British sky. Grant bounded onto the stage during the act's performance and began to remove the group's equipment to make room for Led Zeppelin to begin against the backdrop of the sunset.

Present for Zeppelin's set at the festival was visionary filmmaker Joe Massot, who had directed the psychedelic-era film Wonderwall, released in 1967, and also provided the screenplay for 1970's Zachariah. At the Bath festival, Massot watched Led Zeppelin's performance first from backstage and eventually earned a first-person perspective from onstage. "With the sun setting behind Robert [Plant]'s hair, the whole gig took on another dimension," Massot once commented. (He later became the original director of Led Zeppelin's first feature film, The Song Remains the Same, released in 1976.)

The band kicked things off immediately with new material -- a hard, driving riff from the guitar, bass and drums shortly met by wailing vocals that sound like a Norseman about to overtake some townspeople. In reality, it was Led Zeppelin, about to take over England with the first performance of a song called "Immigrant Song" in the country. A writer for Disc Magazine stated, "As soon as Zeppelin ripped into their first number the living field of people exploded."

"Heartbreaker" was next, and then "Dazed and Confused" made it early on in the set. "Bring it on Home" was juxtaposed with another blues attraction, the band's new "Since I've Been Loving You." With Jones on a Hammond organ, he was featured in a solo before leading the band in for "Thank You."

Jones admitted after the show that the band members did have butterflies in their stomachs before playing. "I always feel uneasy," he confessed, "particularly on British gigs like this."

However, as Jimmy Page switched over from the electric guitar he used on "Thank You" to an acoustic guitar for the next song, the four band members' tension eased a bit. The four band members lined up on stools at the front of the stage to get a bit more personal.

"I think we weren't really into it until the acoustic number when we all had a chance to sit down and take a look around," Plant later said. "Then it was like clockwork; we looked at each other, and we heard it was sounding good. And we looked down, and everybody else was grooving too."

The acoustic number was the third and final new song of the night, a pretty ditty with the working title "The Boy Next Door." Led Zeppelin followed it up with a pair of tracks from its second album, "What is and What Should Never Be" and "Moby Dick."

After this, Page played a bit of "Rice Pudding," a track from the Jeff Beck Group's year-old album Beck-Ola. Soon, it changed into the familiar riff from "How Many More Times," and Plant introduced the individual members of Led Zeppelin as usual. "For anyone who doesn't know Led Zeppelin," he began, addressing any of the 150,000 who might not have an inkling of who was onstage.

"How Many More Times" extended into a 27-minute medley featuring quotes from Neil Young's "Down by the River" and blues verses from such songs as Muddy Waters' "Honey Bee" and "Long Distance Call" and Robert Johnson's "Sweet Home Chicago."

Short renditions of "Whole Lotta Love" and "Communication Breakdown" followed, and after each, a thunderous round of applause demanded more. "The crowd just wouldn't let them leave the stage," wrote the reviewer from Disc. "They could have played all week, and most people would have stayed."

Receiving a standing ovation from 150,000 fans, the band played a straightforward medley of rock 'n' roll covers and finally drew the festival to an official close. Led Zeppelin finished with Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally," Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode," Gene Vincent's "Say Mama" and Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's "That's All Right, Mama."

The name of the game that night was light and shade. It referred to the sunset that accompanied the band and even more to Led Zeppelin's music, which ranged from hard rock to acoustic folk. The band that thrilled with "Dazed and Confused" and its violin bow solo was also quite capable of a soft, moving moment. The new acoustic song played tonight hinted toward one of many musical directions the band pursued in its future, come what may.

Salt and Raine

On this day in 1970, a staff writer for a newspaper in Salt Lake City, Utah, couldn't make up his mind about Led Zeppelin's performance at the city's Salt Palace.

The band received some local publicity in the Salt Lake Tribune on March 27. In his comments, writer George Raine gave "virtuoso" Jimmy Page most of the credit for the show.

"There is seemingly nothing he cannot do in the technical realm," Raine proclaimed in his remarks about Page. "He plays one of the fastest guitar necks to be seen. His intonations, his vibratos and his sense of time and syncopation probably are matched by only a handful of contemporary guitarists."

However, Raine's thoughts on the whole band was that [it is] "not particularly hot, nor is it cold. Led Zeppelin is not good, nor is it bad." The headline read, "Group is nothing to get excited about."

Despite reviews, the attendance at Led Zeppelin's concerts was becoming quite impressive. The day after Salt Lake City, the band performed for the first time at the Forum in Los Angeles. Led Zeppelin welcomed 20,000 people and earned a $71,000 fee at that March 27 concert.

On the day before Salt Lake, a March 25 show in Denver had set a local record. The band played to a full-capacity audience at the Denver Coliseum. The 11,530 fans there made it the largest assembly gathered for a concert in Denver. It was, in fact, the first concert in Denver ever officially recognized as being sold out.

(At the Beatles' Aug. 26, 1964 show at the Red Rocks Amphitheater, the 9,000-capacity venue was filled with possibly more than 10,000 fans. However, only 7,000 tickets were sold for the show, and so there were 2,000 unsold tickets, thus making it technically not a sold-out show. The fact that there were more than 7,000 people there for the show meant that a few thousand counterfeit tickets must have been used to gain admission.)

Pb Zeppelin

On this day in 1970, the first concert of Led Zeppelin's fifth North American tour shattered an attendance record.

A crowd of 19,000 gathered at Vancouver's Pacific National Exhibition Coliseum. It was actually the largest paying attendance ever in the PNE Coliseum at that time. The old house record had been set by the Beatles.

The two-and-a-half-hour set list began with "We're Gonna Groove" (a song that did not appear on any Led Zeppelin album until 1982). A version of "Communication Breakdown" included a few verses of the seldom played "Ramble On." The night marked the first time "Since I've Been Loving You" was performed in North America; the song was not available on album until the end of the year.

At the end of the show, the crowd mobbed the stage. Robert Plant was used to that happening regularly at Led Zeppelin concerts. He joked about the situation, saying, "Never before in the history of Led Zeppelin has this happened."

For whatever reason, John Bonham found a dressing room door backstage worth kicking in. Band manager Peter Grant was quick to pay for the $1,500 damage that Bonham's actions caused.

Incidentally, that concert also became the first Led Zeppelin show to be released on a bootleg. The story behind the first Led Zeppelin bootlegs is explored in an article by Hugh Jones in the April 1999 issue of his Led Zeppelin fanzine Proximity. The article can be found online here.