So this is Christmas…

TBL Retro Christmas Reflection 1:

 Christmas always bringing with it that air of nostalgia, so here’s a seasonal TBL retro reflection from 1972:

ALLY PALLY 45 YEARS GONE:

45 years ago on Saturday December 23rd  1972, I was lucky enough to be in attendance at the closest gig Led Zeppelin ever played to Christmas in the UK. It was a cold  dank day and the walk up Muswell Hill to the Alexandra Palace was a bit of a trek. All worth it of course, as this very impressionable 16 year old was again in the company of musical giants.

The venue itself had not been used for a gig for years and was a little cold and impersonal – the sound also suffered a fair bit swirling around the high ceiling. Zep of course were brilliant – I had already read they were playing new tracks off of what was still being described as Led Zeppelin V (it would emerge as Houses Of the Holy the following March.) Hearing Over The Hills And Far Away, The Song Remains The Same,The Rain Song and Dancing Days was an immense thrill. The Jesus character who frequented many London gigs at the time stripped naked in front of me (ooerr!) and played a tin whistle during Jimmy’s Dazed violin bow solo. The Whole Lotta Love medley was memorable for a great Everybody Needs Somebody To Love, Let’s Have A Party and a scintillating  I Can’t Quit You Baby. Zep gig number two was ticked and I wanted more…much more… though that opportunity would not come around for another two years. By then I had a new mantra..if Led Zeppelin were playing in the UK I wanted to be there…

PHIL TATTERSHALL’S ALLY PALLY EXPERIENCE:

Long time TBL contributor Phil Tattershall was also at the December 23rd show – here are his memories of his first Led Zeppelin concert…

The announcement of Led Zeppelin’s 72/73 UK tour was incredibly exciting.  I’d had a copy of the double LP, Live On Blueberry Hill for a while and I’d captured their 1971 BBC radio performance as it was broadcast using our family reel-to-reel tape recorder.  Both had been played to death.

I was 18 in 1972 and I’d recently started work, but my old schoolmate Dave* was still job hunting.  He had a bit of spare time, also a motorbike, which meant he was just the man to journey into London in the vain hope of securing tickets for one of the Alexandra Palace shows from Harlequin Records.  Unbelievably, he was successful and managed to buy three tickets, the third being for another schoolmate, Neil**.

I proudly announced to my colleagues in the office that I was going to see Led Zeppelin, but being much older than me, they didn’t share my excitement.  I was shocked to learn that none of them had even heard of Led Zeppelin!

My first wage packet had been spent on a battery-powered cassette recorder and I thought that it would be a perfect opportunity to try concert recording for the first time.  Dave was a keen photographer and thought he’d try to take some pictures to complement my efforts.

The week before the show, we went for a ride on Dave’s motorbike to Alexandra Palace, to make sure that the ancient machine was capable of completing the 45 mile round trip.  It was a curious hybrid vehicle, self assembled from parts of two other bikes dating from 1936 and 1948.  It would need to transport three of us on December 23rd, so Dave had bolted an old sidecar to it.  I remember that reconnaissance expedition well; it was freezing cold and I sat in the sidecar listening to a cassette of ELP’s Trilogy album on both legs of the journey.  (I learned later that the sidecar was attached to the motorbike by a single bolt.  Dave was a bit of a slapdash mechanic!)

Come the 23rd, Dave, Neil and I undertook that intrepid journey from Hertfordshire to north London.  It was as cold as it had been the previous week, but the bike and sidecar served us well.  Outside the venue, I bought a show programme for 25p, which I later learned was unofficial (and is now very collectable!) and chatted to a guy from New York who had bought a ticket from a tout and was fearful that it might be a forgery.  It looked the same as mine though and I think he managed to get in OK.  My voluminous police-service surplus great coat served a dual purpose: it kept out the worst of the cold and effectively concealed my rather large cassette machine.  I gained access without hindrance.

Above the 1972 bootleg programme which I purchased outside the venue on the night – – the image is actually  Marc Bolan taken from a poster (thanks to Pete Burridge for that info).

Inside the hall it was apparent that there had been problems during the soundcheck and curtains had been hung from the ceiling in an attempt to tame the cavernous venue’s wallowing acoustic. It was an all-standing event and I was surprised that the hall was nowhere-near full, probably little over two-thirds of the floor space being occupied.  I later learned that fire regulations had limited the number allowed to attend.

There was no support act, just a children’s cartoon shown on a small screen above the stage.  I remember the cheer from the audience when one of the cartoon characters swallowed the contents of a bottle labelled ‘Super Speed Pills’.  Hmmm… that certainly wouldn’t be allowed in these days of political correctness and child protection.

The lights dimmed, I pressed the record and play keys of my cassette machine and hoped for the best.  As the band took to the stage, the bloke standing next to me was hit on the head by a beer can thrown from behind, prompting a stream of foul language from him and his companions.  The can’s impact and the subsequent profanities are perfectly captured on my tape.  Sadly the music, at the time the loudest noise I’d heard in my life, is less well preserved.  The poor cassette machine was overwhelmed by the volume and the recording is hopelessly overloaded.   The tape tangled 25 minutes into the show anyway, so it’s hardly an indespensible document.  Dave fared little better in his efforts to capture the visuals and his pictures were disappointing too.

The show itself was astonishing.  Of the songs from the yet-to-be-released Houses of the Holy LP, I remember being particularly impressed by Dancing Days, while friend Neil, a guitar player himself, was blown away by The Song Remains The Same.  The high point for me was the violin bow sequence in Dazed and Confused.  Thanks to my bootlegs, I was very familiar with the live version of the piece and always imagined each “da-da da-da” element being generated by a bow strike.  When I witnessed every other ‘da’ blasting out as the bow hit thin air, I genuinely thought some sort of sorcery was afoot.  (It wasn’t magic, of course, but an Echoplex unit.  I was so disappointed when I found out.  Jimmy was a mere human after all!)

Luckily, another amateur recordist was on duty that night and his results were infinitely better than mine.  My first experience of Led Zeppelin live was preserved for posterity and for that I’ll be eternally grateful.  One thing the taper missed as he flipped tapes was Robert’s “Goodnight – we’ll see you next year”.  I remember it well, because I was thrilled that it wouldn’t be too long before I could see them again.  As it turned out, I had to wait until May 1975, but I’m sure Robert’s intentions were honourable when he gave me what seemed a personal assurance.  I also recall narrowly missing out in the scramble to grab the tambourine he threw into the crowd at the end of the Whole Lotta Love medley.

The motorbike journey home in cold rain was deeply unpleasant, but we didn’t care; we’d seen the greatest band in the world.

When safely home, I extracted the tangled mess of tape from my recorder and reassembled it into a spare cassette shell.  As already described, the sonic results were disastrous, but, forty years hence, I still have that souvenir.

A couple of days later, back at work, the office manager, who was ten years my senior at 28, asked, “How did your pop thing go Phil?”  “Pop thing!??!!”, I thought to myself.  This wasn’t a “pop thing”: this was Led Zeppelin.  But there was no point in entering into lengthy discussion on the topic.  The older generation would never understand.

*Dave had another go at photographing Led Zeppelin in 1975 and was rather more successful.  The photos can be seen in TBL issue 15.

**Those familiar with one of the better audience recordings of the first Knebworth show will have heard a voice loudly proclaiming  “I can’t hear the bass, can you?” during The Song Remains the Same. That’s Neil.

Phil Tattershall.

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ALLY PALLY – THE MIKE TREMAGLIO LOGS :

Here’s the Alexandra Palace lowdown via Mike Tremaglio’s concert logs  which appeared in TBL issue 30.

Friday, December 22nd, 1972 Alexandra Palace, London, England

Setlist (from 130 & 58 minute audience recordings):

Rock and Roll, Over the Hills and Far Away, Out on the Tiles (Intro)/ Black Dog, Misty Mountain Hop, Since I’ve Been Loving You, Dancing Days, Bron-Y-Aur Stomp, The Song Remains the Same, The Rain Song, Dazed and Confused (incl. San Francisco),  Stairway to Heaven, Whole Lotta Love Medley (incl. Everybody Needs Somebody to Love, Boogie Chillun’, Let’s Have a Party, Heartbreak Hotel, I Can’t Quit You Baby, Going Down Slow), Immigrant Song, Heartbreaker, Mellotron Solo/Thank You

 Once again, Chris Charlesworth of Melody Maker reviewed the concert in the “Caught in the Act” section of Melody Maker (January 6, 1973).  Charlesworth praised the group as “about as perfect a band as you could hope to hear.”  He wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic about the venue, saying it was “never built to rock” and that the “atmosphere inside this giant hall seemed cold and forbidding…there was a diminishing sound that flew up into the rafters and returned as a disjointed series of echoes.  My guess is that only about half the fans heard the music as it should have been heard.”

Saturday, December 23rd, 1972 Alexandra Palace, London, England

Setlist (from 131 & 28 minute audience recordings):

Rock and Roll, Over the Hills and Far Away, Out on the Tiles (Intro)/ Black Dog, Misty Mountain Hop, Since I’ve Been Loving You, Dancing Days, Bron-Y-Aur Stomp, The Song Remains the Same, The Rain Song, Dazed and Confused (incl. San Francisco),  Stairway to Heaven, Whole Lotta Love Medley (incl. The Crunge, Everybody Needs Somebody to Love, Boogie Chillun’, Let’s Have a Party, Heartbreak Hotel, I Can’t Quit You Baby, Going Down Slow), Heartbreaker

 The band played the second of two shows at the “Ally Pally.” The setlist is virtually identical to the prior evening, except the Immigrant Song, mellotron solo, and Thank You were all dropped from the set.  The Crunge, which had typically been played during Dazed and Confused, was incorporated into the Whole Lotta Love medley.

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More Nostalgia -the way we were in 1971 – The Christmas Charts:

Here’s the UK and US charts as published this week in 1971. A double top for the new Led Zeppelin album (the recently released fourth album).

My, there’s some amazing albums lined up here… Imagine, Electric Warrior, Rod, Santana, ELP, Isaac Hayes, Wings, The Who and many more – I have a fair few of the albums on this chart in my collection for sure!

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Led Zeppelin News Update:

In conjunction with the Led Zep news site, each week I will be re- producing highlights from their weekly email update news summary. This goes out every Sunday. Sign up details are below. Many thanks to James Cook.

Led Zeppelin

• The gold sales award given to Peter Grant for 25,000 sales of Led Zeppelin II in Sweden sold for £2,625 at Bonhams in London on December 13, far above the £600 to £800 estimate.

• The BBC uploaded a supercut of its recent coverage of Bron Yr Aur to Facebook.

Robert Plant

Robert Plant ended his UK and Ireland tour this week with two performances: Portsmouth on December 11 and Birmingham on December 12. Plant reportedly ended the final show of his tour by talking about a roundabout that used to be near where he was raised. See the setlists below and click through to view videos of the linked songs.

December 11 – Portsmouth
New World…
Turn It Up
The May Queen
Rainbow
That’s the Way
All the King’s Horses
House of Cards
Gallows Pole
Carry Fire
Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You
Little Maggie
Funny in My Mind (I Believe I’m Fixin’ to Die)
The Lemon Song
​————
Bluebirds Over the Mountain
Whole Lotta Love

December 12 – Birmingham
New World…
Turn It Up
The May Queen
Rainbow
That’s the Way
All the King’s Horses
House of Cards
Gallows Pole
Carry Fire
Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You
Little Maggie
Funny in My Mind (I Believe I’m Fixin’ to Die)
Misty Mountain Hop
What Is and What Should Never Be
————
Bluebirds Over the Mountain
Whole Lotta Love

• An Aston Martin DB5 previously owned by Robert Plant is up for sale. We published photos of the car and information about it here.

• Robert Plant will be interviewed on Dan Rather’s “The Big Interview” on February 27 on AXS TV. Find out more here.

• Robert Plant announced an upcoming performance at the Festival de Carcassonne music festival in France on July 25. Tickets go on sale on at 10am CET on December 19. It’s likely that this festival appearance will be part of a larger European tour in the summer.

• The poster for Robert Plant’s recent UK and Ireland tour is currently for sale in his online merchandise store.

Upcoming events:

January 28 – The exhibition at Proud Central in London that includes photos of Led Zeppelin will close.
February/March – New Led Zeppelin photo book “Led Zeppelin Live Times” will be released.
February 1 – Robert Plant will perform at the UK Americana Awards in London.
February 9 – Robert Plant will perform in Raleigh, North Carolina.
February 11 – Robert Plant will perform in Charlotte, North Carolina.
February 12 – Robert Plant will perform in Norfolk, Virginia.
February 14 – Robert Plant will perform in New York.
February 16 – Robert Plant will perform in Boston, Massachusetts.
February 17 – Robert Plant will perform in Toronto, Ontario.
February 20 – Robert Plant will perform in Chicago, Illinois.
February 22 – Robert Plant will perform in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
February 24 – Robert Plant will perform in Denver, Colorado.
February 26 – Robert Plant will perform in Phoenix, Arizona.
February 27 – Robert Plant will be interviewed on Dan Rather’s “The Big Interview” on AXS TV.
February 28 – Robert Plant will perform in Oakland, California.
March 2 – Robert Plant will perform in Los Angeles, California.
March 23 – Robert Plant will perform in Sydney, Australia.
March 26 – Robert Plant will perform in Sydney, Australia.
March 27 – Robert Plant will perform in Sydney, Australia.
March 30 – Robert Plant will perform at the Byron Bay Bluesfest in Australia.
April 1 – Robert Plant will perform in Melbourne, Australia.
April 2 – Robert Plant will perform in Melbourne, Australia.
April 5 – Robert Plant will perform in Adelaide, Australia.
April 8 – Robert Plant will perform in Perth, Australia.
July 25 – Robert Plant will perform at the Festival de Carcassonne in France.

Many thanks to James Cook

The complete Led Zeppelin News email goes out every weekend. To receive it each week sign up here:http://tinyletter.com/LedZepNews

Led Zeppelin News Website: Check out the Led Zeppelin news website at

http://ledzepnews.com/

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More LZ News here – Jimmy Page Academy of Achievement interview (see YouTube clip below) – plenty of speculation and media coverage on his comments: 

http://ledzepnews.com/2017/12/19/jimmy-page-said-previously-unheard-led-zeppelin-music-manner-surprises-will-released-bands-fiftieth-anniversary/

http://ledzepnews.com/2017/12/20/led-zeppelin-fiftieth-anniversary-release/

http://www.nme.com/news/music/jimmy-page-teases-manner-surprises-led-zeppelin-50th-anniversary-2178342

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Book Review:

Led Zeppelin

All the Albums All The Songs

Martin Popoff (Voyager Press)

The track by track analysis style book format is now a tried and trusted one. I’d like to think I was something of a pioneer of this format. Way back in 1990, I suggested to Omnibus editor Chris Charlesworth that we make the centre piece of the Zep book I was then writing ( Led Zeppelin A Celebration) a track by track commentary of the Zep entire catalogue. Dubbed ‘The Ten Album Legacy’ (it included The Song Remains The Same soundtrack), it kick started something of a trend within subsequent Zep books – notably  Charles Cross and Erik Flannigan’s Heaven And Hell -An Illustrated History and Chris Welch’s’ Dazed And Confused  The Stories  Behind Every Song. I’ve had a couple of cracks at it again myself, notably with the 2011 Omnibus publication From A Whisper To A Scream.

The prolific rock/metal writer Martin Popoff is the latest in line to take on the task of making sense of the story behind every Led Zeppelin studio track.

An expansive 250 page hardback book All the Albums, All The Songs benefits from a highly attractive lay out – packed with photos and images many of them in colour and some rarely seen. As for the text, Martin affords each song its own page sometimes stretching to more. He sticks rigidly to the original nine studio albums ending with Coda.

This might be missing a trick, as there are a fair few songs and alternate versions ripe for discussion that have emerged on the Jimmy Page administered Zep reissues of the past three years.

Whilst he occasionally makes reference to some of these alternate versions and previously unreleased songs, it would have been fascinating to here Martin’s full take on the likes of Sugar Mama, Trouble In Mind/Key To The Highway, Everybody Makes It Through, If It Keeps On Raining and St Tristans Sword.

Wading through book, there is no doubt that Martin is a skilled and intelligently opinionated rock music chronicler. He brings a concise authority to the many anomalies that ploughing through the original Zep catalogue throws up – for example the early blues plagiarisms, the folk influence, the more controversial content of their latter work etc. He also covers the technical and musical aspects of their playing with clarity.

Overall, in presenting All The Albums, All The Songs (well nearly all), Martin Popoff has done a commendable job. He brings fresh perspective to what could  have been an easily repeated dry re-telling of the song by song formula.

Dave Lewis – December 18, 2017.

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TBL Retro Christmas Reflection 2:

A TBL Christmas Carol:

DL Diary Blog Update:

Friday treats at the Vinyl Barn –at the always excellent Vinyl Barn last Friday ahead of work on the Zep book – some fine record treats including Television’s Foxhole 12 inch single on red vinyl, single albums by 70s singer songwriters Tom Rush and David Ackles plus the best of Delaney and Bonnie – weekend playlist sorted – thanks Darren Harte!

Last Saturday in St Albans I came across another part of my publishing history. For there in the Oxfam shop was an original copy of the large format edition of The Concert File – the book I co authored with Simon Pallet published 20 years ago in 1997. Long out of print, I had not seen a copy for years – I immediately decided the book would be better off in my collection than on the Oxfam shelves so I duly invested! That can line up with the copy of the small version of my A Celebration I saw in the Bedford Oxfam shop a month or so back.

It makes me wonder have Oxfam a warehouse of my books tucked away somewhere? If so put me down for a bulk purchase!

Running on empty…

I’ve been feeling like I’ve been fighting something off since before the December 10 TBL event. Yesterday it all caught up with me as I’ve spent most of the day in bed exhausted and aching. The spinning of a fair few plates here on TBL projects etc looks to have taken its toll. I ‘m still feeling somewhat drained, achy and exhausted today but I’m  hoping I can fend this off and get back to form soon as I can, as there is a very big weekend ahead.

So this is Christmas…

Christmas is nigh on upon us – and it’s that final rush to get everything sorted for the next couple of  days.

As is customary on Christmas Eve here – at some point I’ll aim to be wearing my Led Zeppelin Winterland 1969 tie bought for me by Larry Ratner in 1993 (hi Larry!)

However, the early part of Christmas Eve will be taken up with an important rendezvous with our Sam at Heathrow Airport. Sam’s flight from Sydney Australia lands in the early hours and I will there to meet her. Sam is back home after a year working in Australia. We have missed her terribly and we are very much looking forward to her being back with us here again…that will be the best Christmas present of all…

Until next time, Merry Christmas from me to all of you

Dave Lewis  – December 21 ,2017  

TBL Website updates compiled by Dave Lewis

with thanks to Gary Foy and James Cook

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YouTube clip:

Jimmy Page Academy of Achievement interview – October 2017: