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What's the worst live performance of a song?


gibsonfan159

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Any version of ten years gone in 1977... what is so hard about playing that solo...a piece that he wrote to boot!!.

whats with the 3 neck gimmick that never really made that much of a difference , to me that is. 

The beginning was never poweful

Bonzo was always a bit heavy handed in the live versions. 

Percy was always great especially in the verse after the so called solo.

and Jimmy flubbing the solo night after night and if he did at least nail half of it , he gets too much credit especially from some threads on this site. It's his job to,play well. To rehearse. To nail it. To be a professional. 

In this song he played like a ten year old with his first guitar. 

There might be a version or two from LA and Copenhsgen but most suck.

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3 hours ago, Blaize86 said:

Any version of ten years gone in 1977... what is so hard about playing that solo...a piece that he wrote to boot!!.

whats with the 3 neck gimmick that never really made that much of a difference , to me that is. 

The beginning was never poweful

Bonzo was always a bit heavy handed in the live versions. 

Percy was always great especially in the verse after the so called solo.

and Jimmy flubbing the solo night after night and if he did at least nail half of it , he gets too much credit especially from some threads on this site. It's his job to,play well. To rehearse. To nail it. To be a professional. 

In this song he played like a ten year old with his first guitar. 

There might be a version or two from LA and Copenhsgen but most suck.

Sorry, but I do not exactly agree. He nailed this song live about 1/3 of the time. Sure, that is pretty shitty that only one in three shows Jimmy played this song good but that is a far cry from two shows. He nails the shit outta this song on almost every MSG & LA show, Pontiac, and the final Landover date just to name a few. Though to be fair I do agree I just cannot understand why he consistently fucked up the first, easy solo 2/3 of the time???? He rarely had a problem with the second or outro solos which were far more complicated.

Now my contenders for most fucked up song live is a tie between Tempe 77' Achilles & July 23rd 79' Copenhagen MMH. I believe Jimmy got his dick caught in the strings on the latter.

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On 5/18/2018 at 1:16 AM, IpMan said:

Sorry, but I do not exactly agree. He nailed this song live about 1/3 of the time. Sure, that is pretty shitty that only one in three shows Jimmy played this song good but that is a far cry from two shows. He nails the shit outta this song on almost every MSG & LA show, Pontiac, and the final Landover date just to name a few. Though to be fair I do agree I just cannot understand why he consistently fucked up the first, easy solo 2/3 of the time???? He rarely had a problem with the second or outro solos which were far more complicated.

Now my contenders for most fucked up song live is a tie between Tempe 77' Achilles & July 23rd 79' Copenhagen MMH. I believe Jimmy got his dick caught in the strings on the latter.

I agree. They certainly flubbed every song at some point in 77, but they also had some great performances of them all. Only one L.A. performance was truly sub par in my opinion, the rest were pretty good.

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1 hour ago, gibsonfan159 said:

I agree. They certainly flubbed every song at some point in 77, but they also had some great performances of them all. Only one L.A. performance was truly sub par in my opinion, the rest were pretty good.

Which one do you consider sub par? The 27th?

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ALS from Tempe 77 always gets mentioned but at least it sounds like there's energy and has a cool opening. ALS from the second Knebworth show will always get my vote for worst version. Jimmy's unbelievably sloppy, and his guitar tone sounds absolutely dead on arrival, utterly weak and pathetic. I hate it with every fiber of my being.

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35 minutes ago, Sue Dounim said:

ALS from Tempe 77 always gets mentioned but at least it sounds like there's energy and has a cool opening. ALS from the second Knebworth show will always get my vote for worst version. Jimmy's unbelievably sloppy, and his guitar tone sounds absolutely dead on arrival, utterly weak and pathetic. I hate it with every fiber of my being.

Didn''t he break a string during ALS at the second Knebworth show? Regardless, it does sound pretty bad right out of the gate. The guitar sounds out of tune, and he is flubbing notes all over the place. I've only listened to that version a handful of times. Strangely though I do love NQ from the 11th.

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18 minutes ago, tom kid said:

Didn''t he break a string during ALS at the second Knebworth show? Regardless, it does sound pretty bad right out of the gate. The guitar sounds out of tune, and he is flubbing notes all over the place. I've only listened to that version a handful of times. Strangely though I do love NQ from the 11th.

it sounds to me like the whole band forgot where they were right before the machine gun drumming/strained solo about 7 1/2 or 8 minutes in, and they never fully recover. I actually like the 11th up through Kashmir, and then the encores are good. There are about as many wrecks as triumphs at that gig, with a better TSRTS, Celebration Day and Black Dog than the first night, a good NFBM, shite OtHaFA, a shite MMH, then good SIBLY, great No Quarter, Hot Dog is good, The Rain Song is very pretty, a good White Summer, and an awesome Kashmir. From that point Jimmy is a wreck til the encores. What's worse is again the flub near the end of ALS, with a similar flub during In the Evening.

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There's a night full of hit and misses at the 2nd Knebworth. Rather than go through it again, I'll just say that after Kashmir, there are some bright spots in spite of Jimmy breaking about 66 strings at that show. I really don't mind Achilles or ITE, and they did break out "Boogie Mama," so that alone made the encores worth it.

Communication Breakdown was great, too...

 

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  • 3 months later...

Thank God, they never imploded like Creed, The Doors, Amy Winehouse, or like Ozzy and the stupid bat incident. Granted if they had toured the states in 1980 something would have happened. But we'll never know.  

12 years and a couple of bad songs/shows - I'm grateful for what we have and hope there's a new show out there to be release soon! 

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I don't know if it's the worst one ever, but the version of IMTOD from May 22, 1977 is very strange. About 30 seconds in, they just stop playing. I don't recall them ever doing that before. Robert blames "clouds on the stage". About 20 seconds later they start up again and everything goes well until just after Robert's "My Jesus" solo. As the band returns, Jimmy completely loses his way. It sounds like he's a teenager at a jam session whose never heard the song before and he's trying to play it while someone calls out the chords to him. Very, very weird. He continues on that way for about 30 seconds, then gets back in the groove and they finish up without further incident.

I'd love to have a video of this show to see what caused the problems, particularly the stop at the beginning. Abandoning a performance mid-song is pretty much the cardinal sin of live music. And they all cease playing at the same time, so one of them must have given the "we're not gonna make it" sign. It didn't sound like a broken string or anything technical, so I can't imagine what made them decide to stop.

 

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2 hours ago, SteveZ98 said:

I don't know if it's the worst one ever, but the version of IMTOD from May 22, 1977 is very strange. About 30 seconds in, they just stop playing. I don't recall them ever doing that before. Robert blames "clouds on the stage". About 20 seconds later they start up again and everything goes well until just after Robert's "My Jesus" solo. As the band returns, Jimmy completely loses his way. It sounds like he's a teenager at a jam session whose never heard the song before and he's trying to play it while someone calls out the chords to him. Very, very weird. He continues on that way for about 30 seconds, then gets back in the groove and they finish up without further incident.

I'd love to have a video of this show to see what caused the problems, particularly the stop at the beginning. Abandoning a performance mid-song is pretty much the cardinal sin of live music. And they all cease playing at the same time, so one of them must have given the "we're not gonna make it" sign. It didn't sound like a broken string or anything technical, so I can't imagine what made them decide to stop.

 

Page comes in a little early. Sounds like he slows down to fall back into the beat while Bonzo speeds up to catch him and they pass each other up. Page does the smart thing though and just plays a palm mute until Bonzo gets in sync, then goes back into the riff.

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  • 1 month later...
On 9/25/2017 at 4:22 PM, gibsonfan159 said:

Something Page always struggled with on the 75 tour- the Black Dog solo. This one is from Baton Rouge. How this show started off so great and turned a bit so bad near the end baffles me. I think Page may have indulged backstage during Moby Dick.

 

This is a pretty bad one lol! But this is one of those awful soundboard recordings which makes it even worse. I hate the soundboards as they are always too dry. No reverb. They suck. But we can't blame the soundboard for this this entirely - it's bad! Another crappy show was Buffalo 73. Terrible.

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  • 2 years later...

For me, other than Tempe, the most embarrassing performance is the improvisation in No Quarter from the otherwise excellent Houston May 21 1977 show.  Page is somewhere else and keeps falling into a hole, while Jones and Bonzo try and dig him out.  Then Jones falls in too 😂, it's just a mess.

Edited by TheMonolith
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