Family dedication

On this day in 1972, Led Zeppelin played a show in Birmingham, England, that was a homecoming for half the band.

Both Robert Plant and John Bonham lived near Birmingham, where they found themselves playing a pair of shows on the fifth destination on their U.K. tour.

Before the band launched into "Heartbreaker" during the encore, Robert dedicated the song to his sister and to John Bonham's father.

The band of nods

On this day in 1972, Led Zeppelin's fans in Manchester, England, were treated to a rare performance of "I Can't Quit You Baby," one of two blues songs on the debut Led Zeppelin album.

By this point in time, the band's fourth album was out, and so the group no longer played most of the material from their first album live. But around this time, "I Can't Quit You Baby" was starting to make a four-month comeback as a part of a medley played all within the context of "Whole Lotta Love."

Now the fun thing about this was how much things would still change from one night to the next. Sometimes, "I Can't Quit You Baby" was as short as two and a half minutes, but once around that time, it stretched to longer than 13 minutes. Most of the time, the band played it for six or seven minutes only.

In 1990, John Paul Jones recalled in a promotional interview:

"As far as structuring the stage stuff was concerned, certain songs wouldn't really change that much, but other songs would really have points where you could -- anybody could do anything. We used to call it the band of nods in those days because you could just, one nod, and [laughs] -- and we could just go play something else: start a blues or start a country piece or start a bit of James Brown or something like that, and then everybody would follow until that idea would run its course, and then off it would go somewhere else, you know. There are several songs that we could do that -- we allowed ourselves the space to do it, and that was really good, really enjoyable stuff."

Beat Beep, beat Beep, yeah!

On this day in 1972, Led Zeppelin was only four days into a tour of the U.K. when their publicist was beaten up by fans at their show in Glasgow, Scotland.

Outside the concert, Zeppelin's publicist, a guy by the name of B.P. Fallon, approached some people who appeared to be selling counterfeit tickets. He said he told them, "Excuse me, there seems to be some confusion about the tickets you're selling." This prompted them all to jump on him and beat him up.

When word reached the stage, the members of Led Zeppelin decided to end their concert early. Fans went home without hearing an encore, which prompted an angry letter from one fan to the New Musical Express. The reader complained about there being no encore and also the way Robert Plant mentioned their forthcoming album over and over.

Generous applause

On this day in 1972, there was an enthusiastic reaction among fans at the first concert of Led Zeppelin's U.K. tour. Reportedly, the audience at the City Hall in Newcastle, England, applauded for 30 full minutes after the band had left the stage and the concert was over. Guitarist Jimmy Page told the press, "For a first night, the reaction was just tremendous."

Over the next two months, Led Zeppelin would be playing 24 dates in front of more than 110,000 people. It was about half the rate of previous tours.

Page was heard to comment on the breakneck speed of Led Zeppelin's previous venture in the United States, saying, "The last American tour just got silly." He was right. Over the summer of '72, Zeppelin played 18 concerts in only 23 days.

Both Page and singer Robert Plant said they fought off some nerves before the first show of their U.K. tour. For one thing, they were debuting some unreleased material that would appear on their next album, Houses of the Holy, whose release was being held up by problems with the cover art.

But the audiences in the U.K. were up for anything. All the tickets for the entire tour reportedly sold out in four hours.