Led Zeppelin 12/10/2007, London, UK

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Since I've been loving you

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I simply cannot understand how something this big couldnt get any kind of TV special in America. Im sure they'll release a DVD sometime later next year.

There really isnt a price tag on what I would pay to see them if they do tour...

IMO of top bands ever, There's The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and then theres everyone else.

 

I don't know if I'd go quite that far, but they blew me away every time I saw them. That's why I'm so skinny. I'm still trying to find some of my parts!

COME TO TEXAS!!!

 

Stay home, pops. Let some of us who were too young to go the first time around go!

 

****, i was actually in london on Monday and never heard of this. trip was planned for a long time - so could have potentially made a push. that said, 20m demand for 20k would have made it a bit more difficult.

 

They should re-form the band with Jason as the drummer (I'm sure John wouldn't mind), make a new album, and then tour. This way...Plant can quit beating a drum about the boring repetition of playing a nostalgia hits tour by mixing in new with old. From what Page was saying, he has some guitar parts and ideas for new songs.

I'm sure the fans would love a pure "hits" tour but that sounds unlikely given Plant's many times on record about having no interest in playing for the past. I kind of admire him for holding to his principles and not just taking the outlandish money to do it. I would be very surprised if Plant agreed to just a "hits" tour with nothing new. I think the rest of them wouldn't mind, though.

 

Fixed - to make it a top three.
The ranking is debatable but you can't forget bout Floyd!

 

His new album with Allison Krauss, "Rising Sand," is one of the best albums of the year, so he doesn't need a new Led Zeppelin album to feel better about himself. I would see them in a heartbeat (and a few hundred dollars), of course.

 

If they come I will be there.

 

Of course he does, imagine being not just any guitarist, but Jimmy Page Himself! He's probably playing guitar all the time, constantly being inspired and writing, I wonder what sorts of things he's come up with in his own private time for all these decades

 

Just get Paul Rodgers to take Plant's place then.

 

Sir, thank you for that. For those few minutes, all was right with the world.

 

Hey man,

are you in San Marcos? I don't have any torrent programs but if I can get this in as unadulterated a state as possible I'll master it.

Cheers,
Brock

 

Thanks, SWT! I'm a jealous guy. Jason isn't his father, which he'd be the first to admit, but he's damned good. The rest, as best I could tell, haven't lost a thing. Plant, in particular, you would expect to have suffered from the effect age might have on his voice, but he sounded great!

I sure hope they recorded this and put it out on a DVD. I've heard sound board recordings of Led Zep at the Texas International Pop Festival in August of '69 (2 weeks after Woodstock), which I recommend if you can find them, but the technology wasn't what we have today. I'm pumped. I'm really jonesin' for a Led Zeppelin concert!

 

Another review. I thought it was a good read...


In London, Led Zeppelin Gets a Whole Lotta Love

By Erik Huey
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, December 12, 2007; C01



LONDON -- Everyone has a Led Zeppelin story. This is mine.

The lights in the O2 Arena have just gone down. And Led Zeppelin -- a little blues-rock combo from the 1960s and '70s that went on to sell more than 300 million albums and rival the Beatles in terms of influence -- is about to to take the stage for its first full concert in 27 years. I am on the floor a mere 15 yards from the stage at Monday night's benefit show for the Ahmet Ertegun Education Fund (in honor of the co-founder of Atlantic Records, Zeppelin's record label, who died last year).

Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones stride onstage, joined by Jason Bonham, son of their original drummer, John Bonham, whose death in 1980 caused the band's breakup. As they pick up their instruments, I'm consumed by one overwhelming sentiment: Can they pull it off? Can a trio of 59-to-63-year-old men recapture the raw thunder and sexually charged intensity of their youth?

For that matter, can we?

I'm an attorney now, staring down the barrel of 40. But think of the person you were decades ago -- adolescent, unshackled by cynicism and Weltschmerz, full of youthful abandon and an unblinking belief in the sheer possibility of things. And if you grew up in the '60s, '70s and '80s, Zeppelin may well have been the soundtrack to your adolescence.

As they launch into the opening chords of "Good Times Bad Times," the band seems to acknowledge the limitations brought on by the passage of time. "In the days of my youth/I was told what it means to be a man,/Now I've reached that age/I've tried to do all those things the best I can." Indeed, they're doing pretty well, for old guys.

By the time they finish their second and third songs -- "Ramble On" and "Black Dog" -- it is becoming clear that, even if they are not gods who walk the Earth as men, these are no mere mortals before us. And this is going to be no mere rock show. We are witnessing history.

An unlikely sequence of events led me to this arena tonight. Along with more than 20 million other Led Zeppelin fans, Mike Smith -- my college roommate, who now lives in London -- entered an online lottery to win the chance to buy one of only 8,000 pairs of tickets to the show. The concert Web site received more than 1 billion individual page views in a single day, causing it to crash. Then, a couple of weeks later, like Charlie of Chocolate Factory fame, Mike won the golden ticket, which granted him the right to pay 250 pounds (more than $500) for a pair. Since his wife is not a huge fan, he invited me to fly to London from D.C. to see Zeppelin.

Before I know it, I'm standing in front of a young customs agent at Heathrow who asks, "What is the purpose of your visit?" "To see Led Zeppelin," I emphatically reply. She nods politely and says "Oh, Led Zeppelin, is it? When is he playing?"

Now the self-described sons of thunder are launching into their fourth song of the night, the swamp-blues grind of "In My Time of Dying." Clearly used to playing only in a rehearsal space, they crowd around the drum set for the first four songs, never more than five or six feet away from one another.

They're dressed entirely in black, except for Page, who is wearing a white tux shirt that quickly becomes soaked in sweat and plastered to his gyrating torso. Page is the maestro, alternating thick, crunching riffs with piercing, scalpel-sharp solos. Plant, looking lionlike with his thick mane of curly hair and gray whiskers, bellows with soulful yearning (albeit sometimes an octave lower than he did in the '70s) and regains more of his trademark swagger with each passing song. The progenitor of every sexually charged rock frontman cliche is not the poster boy he once was, but he still exudes a confident sensuality that has the women in the crowd swooning.

Jones, looking a decade younger than the other two original members, is sure and steady on the bass and keyboards, providing a solid rhythmic foundation for the others' extravagances. In any other band, he would be the most talented musician onstage. Jason Bonham perhaps has the most to prove, and he is up to the task -- he pounds the skins with fury and urgency, each crushing snare-hit a tribute to his father. He is clearly a devout student not only of his father's complex and (until now) inimitable drumming technique, but of the entire Led Zeppelin catalogue and ethos.

With every note, as the night goes on, the weight of the years melts away and we are transported closer to our adolescent rock-and-roll selves. Every member of the band, especially Page, is smiling.

The crowd is jubilant, too, but also reverent. It is a graying, overwhelmingly white demographic, though the fans on the floor are about 10 years younger on average than the ones in the stands (in the online application, contestants could specify seating or standing). The randomness of the lottery system guaranteed that nearly all the tickets went to true fans, not a bunch of corporate stiffs, and the crowd has a democratic feel uncharacteristic of most large stadium shows.

There is a palpable sense of community: Two Italian students to my left have improbably smuggled in bottles of wine, which they are sharing with everyone around them. It appears that all the tickets to this concert went to couples who cared about each other deeply: Fathers and sons. Mothers and daughters. Lifelong friends who bonded all those years ago to the music of the men onstage.

With Plant's introduction of "this is one of the songs we have to play," the band cranks out the sacred chords of "Dazed and Confused." It is not long before the violin bow comes out, which Page proceeds to use for his trademark assault on his Les Paul. All notions of rock idolatry aside, it has now become obvious that Page is simply not human. He is some kind of formless shape-shifter, channeling darker forces as he languidly glides across the stage, his visage made all the more eerie by the shock of white hair that flows to his shoulders.

They follow "Dazed" with "Stairway to Heaven." Sure, by now the song verges on a Spinal Tap-like cliche, but by the end of this earnest version, even the most jaded among us begin chanting the lyrics like we're back in junior high. As the song ends, Plant looks to the heavens and exclaims, "Ahmet, we did it!"

The hits keep coming -- "The Song Remains the Same," "Misty Mountain Hop," and a shimmering "Kashmir" to close the set. The band bows and exits, then comes back after a few minutes to greet the screaming crowd with the bone-crunching riff of "Whole Lotta Love." The second encore is a loose, galloping version of "Rock and Roll." "It's been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time . . . ."

Yes, it has. As the house lights rise and silence descends, we file into the chill of the London night, younger and wiser -- buoyed by our reclaimed adolescent faith in the redemptive power of rock-and-roll. A few bars of the cage have melted. Led Zeppelin had pulled it off. And so had we.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/11/AR2007121102393.html?hpid=topnews

 

Christ....I teared up reading that.

Thanks, man.

 

Rumors of a New York Show?

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/bizarre/article571141.ece

LED ZEPPELIN celebrated their triumphant comeback gig by planning world domination over cups of tea and coffee.

Unlike in their hellraising heyday, singer ROBERT PLANT and guitarist JIMMY PAGE slapped each other on the back and were handed giant mugs of hot drinks.

But then the rock fighting talk began and they discussed returning to Madison Square Garden in New York - where they did three sell-out shows in 1973.

My source backstage at London’s O2 arena said: “Robert had a couple of bottles of beer before going on stage but afterwards it was just hot mugs of tea and coffee.

“The band were really fired up and were talking about their late drummer JOHN BONHAM and what he would have thought about it - it was a time for reflection.

“Then the talk went to, ‘What next? Was this it or would there be something else?’ One of the guys started talking about their three concerts at the Garden.

“There was a consensus of, ‘Why not?’ It is one of the best live music venues in the world. I have no doubt after their reaction backstage that they will be there next year playing to a sell-out crowd.”


Tour

I said in my Bizarre manifesto I held wrinkly rockers in high esteem - and Led Zep’s first show for 19 years didn’t disappoint.

At the reunion gig the three surviving members - Page, Plant and JOHN PAUL JONES - were joined by Bonham’s son JASON on drums.

To see more pics from the gig and the celebs who attended, click on the link below.




The band have hinted they would launch a tour if they enjoyed performing.



And if they loved it as much as their 18,000 screaming fans on Monday, expect to see them at a sold-out venue near you soon.

Page has been up for doing more gigs for a while, but Plant has been enjoying his solo career and has been reluctant.

But it seems the reaction of the fans and a bit of backstage back-slapping has turned his head.

A return was also predicted by support act PAOLO NUTINI.

He said: “They seemed very happy. Based on the show they gave I think they will tour.”

Celebs in the audience were full of praise for the band too. FOO FIGHTERS’ DAVE GROHL said: “That was amazing. Jason Bonham was fantastic on drums. I think he was even better than me.”


Then he challenged anyone listening: “I’ve got Led Zeppelin tattoos, have you?”

Just one word from LIAM GALLAGHER: “Mega”.

VERVE frontman RICHARD ASHCROFT wasn’t saying much but he did get noticed — he turned up with a dodgy bleached barnet.

Led Zeppelin? They’ve still got a Whole Lotta Love to give.