Led Zeppelin (Official Thread)

gorgon

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I read somewhere that Jimi recorded multiple solos for Stairway before he finally nailed it. I'd like to hear the other ones.
 

gcczep

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From BBC Culture News 8/2/13

Why won’t Robert Plant reform Led Zeppelin?
by Gret Cot

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Reunions are big business. But one ‘70s superstar – Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant – is bucking the trend. Greg Kot explains why.

Organiser Michael Eavis hails "the high spot of 43 years of Glastonbury" after The Rolling Stones make their debut at the festival with a hit-packed set. It’s just a wild guess, but the Rolling Stones’ recent run of paydays, er, concerts, are not likely to have gone unnoticed by the former members of Led Zeppelin. The Stones have been away for a while, are all around 70 years old, and are playing songs from three and four decades ago on their current tour. But with tickets going for as high as $600, they’re pulling in millions of dollars in revenue each night.

Somewhere, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones are thinking: “This too could be ours.” A 2007 Led Zeppelin reunion concert at the O2 Arena in London with original members Page, Jones and Robert Plant, joined on drums by Jason Bonham (the son of the late John Bonham), was a success artistically and commercially. The show set a record for ticket demand, with 20 million fans wanting in, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

But the reunion proved to be a one-off, largely because Plant wanted no part of doing something more, despite tour offers ranging as high as $200m (£132m) from concert promoters. Page and Jones even started working with other vocalists in Plant’s stead in hope of keeping Zeppelin afloat, but never took it beyond the rehearsal stage. Plant instead focused on touring in 2008 with country singer Alison Krauss and producer T Bone Burnett, with whom he made a Grammy-winning album, Raising Sand. It didn’t sound anything like Led Zeppelin – a guiding feature behind most of Plant’s music in the three decades since Zeppelin imploded after John Bonham’s death in 1980.

Once more with feeling

It’s the era of reunions, with everyone from classic-rockers to the first generation of Lollapalooza bands pulling together one more time for the big bucks, but Plant is no bandwagon jumper, despite the eye-popping revenue potential. Consider that the Police raked in more than $340m(£225m) on a 2007-08 comeback tour, the Eagles collected $250m (£165m) in 2008-11, and the Pixies have played to audiences five to ten times bigger in the last decade than when they were releasing ground-breaking albums in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. This year, it’s The Replacements’ turn – or what’s left of them. Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson have signed up to play three dates at Riot Fest in Toronto, Denver and Chicago, after rejecting lucrative offers from festivals such as Coachella and Lollapalooza for years.

The exceptions to the trend are dwindling. So far, the Smiths have resisted a big-bucks rapprochement, with Morrissey steadfast in his contention that it will never happen. Ditto for a victory lap from indie-rock favorites Hüsker Dü, with Bob Mould in no mood to commingle assets with Grant Hart. But Plant is the most notable hold-out of all.

The singer has his reasons, which he has rephrased countless times over the decades, turning many of his responses into punch lines: “It would be like sleeping with your ex-wife again without having sex.” Engage Plant more deeply on the subject of what it means to play music, and he’ll tell you it’s all about discovery, new challenges. He sees a Zeppelin reunion as a nostalgia piece “fired by youth and a different kind of exuberance,” as he once said.

Part of his response suggests that it would be difficult to do anything Zep-related on his terms; that is, to create and perform new music rather than rely on rehashing the past. Even if Plant, Page and Jones reunited to make a new album, would fans want to hear them play it in concert at the expense of Whole Lotta Love and Stairway to Heaven? And if the band was somehow persuaded to crank up the ‘70s jukebox, could Plant hit those high notes and conjure the bravado of the bare-chested “golden god”?

Reinventing the past

Plant certainly has his doubts. Call it integrity, common sense or just plain old distaste for reliving the past, the singer is that rare ‘70s superstar whose second act is as artistically rewarding – if not as financially lucrative – as his first. Even when he performs Zeppelin songs these days in concert, it’s with a twist, taking the music back not only to its roots in Mississippi Delta blues, but to the shores of West Africa. At a recent show in Grant Park on Chicago’s lakefront, Plant and his genre-bending band, the Sensational Space Shifters, refashioned Whole Lotta Love around a droning, one-string African fiddle rather than an electric guitar. A trance-inducing mix of keyboards and stringed instruments supplanted the flying metal shards of another Zep warhorse, Black Dog. Plant wasn’t trying to shout so much as snake through the songs, darting and diving between the syncopated beats and finding melody lines inside the band’s shadowy interplay.

With his greying hair tied up in a Miami Vice-style bun, he looked like he was having a blast, shimmying as the Space Shifters reshaped time. His fans – who have been trained to expect the unexpected from him – danced. The 64-year-old singer smiled devilishly and thanked the audience for indulging him “an evening of soft rock.” He poked fun at the days when he wrote lyrics filled with “mad hobbits and Vikings“.

How much did Plant get paid to have all that fun? According to city records, $125,000 (£82,400)– a tenth of what he might have hauled in had he been performing with Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones. Sure, Plant doesn’t need the money. But it appears he needs Led Zeppelin even less.
 

gcczep

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45 Years Ago: Led Zeppelin Play Together for the First Time
by Dave Swanson

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On Aug. 12, 1968, in a small space on Gerrard Street in the west end of London, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham played together for the very first time. The first song the band — which would later be named Led Zeppelin – tore into was ‘The Train Kept A-Rollin’,' which was a fixture in Page’s previous band, the Yardbirds.

According to Led Zeppelin’s website, the chemistry was instant. “We first played together in a small room, a basement room,” recalled Jones. “There was just wall-to-wall amplifiers and a space for the door — and that was it. Literally, it was everyone looking at each other — ‘What shall we play?’” As they kicked into gear, “the whole room just exploded,” said Jones.

Even though the band was still known as the New Yardbirds at the time, they were off to a strong and fresh start. And everyone there felt the electricity. “I remember the little room — all I can remember it was hot and it sounded good,” said Plant. “Very exciting and very challenging really. It felt like we’d found something that we had to be very careful with because we might lose it. But it was remarkable, the power.”

The band would play its first concert on Sept. 7; the name change would come a little more than a month later, on Oct. 14. “Exciting is the word,” Page said about that first jam session, “At the end, we knew that it was really happening, really electrifying.”
 

Robbue

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The older I get the more I really appreciate the genius of these guys.
 

gcczep

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The First Time...

Led Zeppelin To Be Honored In Denmark
August 13, 2013

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September 7, 2013, marks the 45 year anniversary since Led Zeppelin played their very first concert. Now the British rock stars are getting a special plaque right where it all began; in a primary school in Gladsaxe.

In Denmark, Led Zeppelin made themselves into rock history September 7,1968. There was, as we know, many interesting things around the world that year. That there was an English rockband that played on a Saturday night in Gladsaxe Teen Club in the neighborhood of Copenhagen, was nothing special. After all, youth clubs pulled in, every Saturday night, somewhere between 1,200 and 1,600 young people when there was a ball at Egegaard School. And, many British groups came.

Gladsaxe the rock world map

There were usually three bands in one night. The main name that evening was The Yardbirds. They had been there before and they were good ol, seemed both club's board and many fans. But it did not go quite as expected. The British band that was booked long before the summer, ran afoul with each other over in the home city of London and was dissolved the summer. Group guitarist Jimmy Page, however, had a new plan up his sleeve, namely to find new playmates to play with. He found them, and it was this new group that appeared in Gladsaxe Teen Club Saturday 7th September 1968 under the name "The New Yardbirds."

The three new members of the group were singer Robert Plant, bassist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham. They had only practiced a few times together in London, then in the afternoon of September 7th, they knocked on the door at the school in Gladsaxe and asked if they just had to practice a little before the evening's concert. And so, a nice school in Gladsaxe - incidentally, then departed Erhard Jakobsen, who was the mayor of the municipality - both "rehearsing room" and "concert venue" for the world premiere of one of the world's greatest rock bands, Led Zeppelin, will be there.

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World premiere plaque

45 years after being given Led Zeppelin a place of honor at the school where it all began, there will be a plaque for the rock historic event . The plaque will be put up at Gladsaxe School, which Egegaard School was called.

It will of course be celebrated, and it happens Saturday, September 7, 2013, at Gladsaxe School, where the plaque will be unveiled.

The project is called "Initiative Group for the selection of Led Zeppelin's world premiere in Gladsaxe" which among others, several of the people who had significant shares of Led Zeppelin's world premiere and documentation of the event, namely Kim Utke, co-founder of Gladsaxe Teen Club and a member of the board, will help to decide which groups play at the club. Jerry Ritz, music and theater producer, was on the road with foreign groups such as The Who, The Animals and Small Faces, was the tour manager for Led Zeppelin in Scandinavia in 1968 and 1969, and Jorgen Angel, rock photographer, who took a series of recent very famous images of Led Zeppelin's first concert which is world renowned for its unique photographs of rock's big names from the 60s and 70s. His pictures can be seen at a major exhibition in The Old Town in Aarhus.
 

gcczep

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...the re-shot scene from "Argo" with the proper placement of the needle on "When The Levee Breaks" from the fourth album.



Ben Affleck had to re-edit the scene in Argo to use WTLB - the band insisted the needle drop be in the exact right place on the album - and rather than complain, Affeck appreciated their attention to detail !
 

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