A date which will live in infamy!!!! LOL

Welcome Laeotaekhun -- have you tried http://discoogle.com? Excellent resource; usually pretty accurate for cross-referencing by catalog numbers.

Glad you enjoyed them, SuperDave. It's a joy to discover this forum and share with my fellow Zeppers.

Hey Stairway...thanks for posting these screenshots so promptly every day!!! Well done!!

(Snicker) Well, so much for absolute accuracy...then again, I do wonder how accurate Jimmy's memory of dates would be given all the brain cells he cruelly murdered back in the day. The guy must've kept one hell of a calendar archive, or else some poor overworked, underpaid secretary is having to sort through it all and has to try and verify these dates. Given all that, mistakes are bound to happen. I wonder how DO they select the events featured for "On This Day"...does Jimmy choose these personally, or does staff recommend them and he gets the final vote? Rather liked mixing two events today...the Riffathon and the release of "Little Games." Might be confusing to some, but I don't mind. btw Steve, thanks for clarifying that Les Paul did not play with the Firm at Meadowlands. I was kinda wondering how Les' style was going to fit in with that particular outfit. Could've been tricky. But I would have enjoyed hearing him take a solo on "Radioactive!!!" Satisfaction Guaranteed...........INDEED!!!!

Curious how they got that Les Paul/Firm date so wrong. Ah well, enjoyed reading about it anyway, and the pics were a treat! Does anyone know what songs Jimmy and Les played together that night? Also REALLY dug the Yardbirds feature for the July 22 1967 Santa Monica Civic gig. Hard to imagine all those bands for only $3. P.S. Super Dave, I had no idea the Shadows had recorded that song. Thanks for the info!

Thank you!!!!! Man, that is outtasight....sort of Link Wray meets Dick Dale, lol. Whatever it is, I dig it

Oh yes, definitely the coolest and most obscure "On This Day" entry yet. Love it!! The guitar on this knocked me out. Is the entire recording available somewhere, a bootleg? Or is this 2 minute snippet all we get?

Couple of rare early birds here...

I voted "other." While it's damned near impossible to choose only ONE favorite Page solo, mine would have to be the solo from "Rock and Roll" on TSRTS soundtrack. that one just kicks my ass every single time!

Well, I gotta go with "Fate of Nations" too, just because it's an amazing album from start to finish. Perfect in every way. Followed by "Manic Nirvana," "Now & Zen," and the Honeydrippers, in that order. I love EVERY RP album, tho' -- all of them are fantastic!!!

Wow, so cool all these years later to virtually meet some folks who were there, too!! Both times!!! thanks Steve for providing the original concert date of Oct. 7. Yes, I remember that now because I was excited to see Page and Plant concerts so close together...had just seen Jimmy in Dallas Sept. 23, and then would be seeing Robert just about 2 weeks later in OK. as it turned out of course I didn't even get to see Robert or Chris at all the first night. Had backstage access for an event AFTER the show, but when Chris had to be rushed to the hospital, the whole band split and the after-show party was cancelled. Thats ok, tho'...we made up for lost time in November!!! The band was in especially fine form that night. Rocked the damn house!!! Chris Blackwell, btw, is one hell of a great drummer. Funny guy, too. I see he's keeping busy these days with mostly orchestral and some commercial work. Sure would like to see him w/ Plant again. Next to Richie Hayward and Michael Lee, he's my favorite drummer that Plant has worked with in his post-Zep period. And sadly, he's the only one of the 3 who is still alive.

I took these of Robert at the Lloyd Noble Center in Norman, OK on Nov. 18, 1988. Great show!! He was at the top of his game that night. This date was originally scheduled for a month or so before, but drummer Chris Blackwell fell in the shower and broke his wrist during Joan Jett's opening set. 10 minutes to showtime, Robert's tour manager comes out and has the unpleasant task of telling 12,000 fans there won't be a Robert Plant concert tonight!!! Thankfully, the Okies took this news well -- although they were certainly not amused. Most seemed to agree upon further reflection that Zeppelin tunes sound much better with drums, however, and waited patiently for the make-up date. The Norman show was re-scheduled for Nov. 18th. Don't recall what the original date was, sorry. Slept since then. I also interviewed both Plant and Blackwell for my radio show and a feature article in the Oklahoma Gazette in advance of the Nov. 18th date where we talked about the shower incident. Pretty funny stuff...good laughs; Spinal Tap drummer jokes all around. The interview quickly devolved into a Monty Python sketch. Bloody hilarious. Eventually I will digitize these goodies (when I find those confounded, elusive boxes) and share `em here too. Enjoy the pics. Really love that one of him smiling, close-up. Handsome devil!

Perhaps if anyone saved Jimmy from anything during that period, it was David Coverdale, who got Jimmy off his ass and fired him up. Anyone ever look at it that way? Without David's encouragement, Jimmy might have just as easily stayed home and those songs may have never been written. Rather than simply waiting for Robert Plant to come around again, Jimmy forged ahead and kept the creative fires burning. David was exactly the right partner at the right time for Jimmy, IMHO, just as Paul Rodgers had been in the 1980s. These projects kept him actively engaged in music. Left to his own devices, Page may well have drifted away into a hermit's life, releasing no music at all. Jimmy would probably be the first to admit that he needs a collaborator to kick him up the ass and get him going now & Zen.

Someone earlier in this long thread ( think it was Steve Jones) asked about the Firm concert in Oklahoma City on May 16, 1986. I've often seen this show incorrectly listed (even on Jimmy Page's official website) as taking place at the Civic Center Music Hall. It was actually the State Fair Arena. that night was the first time I had seen any member of Led Zeppelin -- unfortunately I was born too late to ever see the Mighty Zep live. So I was quite unprepared for the force of nature named Tropical Storm Jimmy that was about to hit! There was a massive thunderstorm that raged on and on -- even by Oklahoma standards, this was a wild one! Blew the power to the arena 3 times during the show. (The third time, during "You've Lost That Loving Feeling", a very irritated Paul uttered "SHIT, Again?" audibly into the mic.) The encores were cut short due to the storm; Jimmy personally apologized to the crowd for this. The parking lot was chaos after the show; the storm hadn't let up a bit, and you've got several thousand people trying to find their cars in the driving, blinding rain with hailstones pelting down! Unless you had a pair of goggles, you couldn't see shit and would just walk around in circles for an hour searching in vain for your vehicle in a sea of cars! To make matters messier, the parking lot was dirt, so it had turned into a mud pit. Cars sunk into the mud and many got hopelessly stuck. I came home spattered with mud and my white car looked like it had just come from a monster truck pull, lol. Yep, was a night to remember, allright! For many, many reasons. Good thing I saw them when I did -- the Firm played their last show together about ten days later. I feel blessed to have seen one of their final shows. And in my humble estimation, one of their best! There was a video bootleg of the OKC show that a friend of mine made on his big-ass bulky 1980s camcorder (heavy as a suitcase full of bricks, that beast was). He gave me a dub that I kept in my collection for several years -- unfortunately it was stolen in a burglary of my home last year, along with most of the Zep/Page collection. Luckily there is at least a partial audio bootleg available of that show - guessing but this may be incomplete due to the storm interfering with the soundboard. It was about at that point in the show (right after Jimmy's bow solo) the electrical outages started happening. It's only the first 6 songs, but hey I'm grateful to have any of this wonderful night to replay and re-live again!! Attached a couple of pics from the OKC `86 concert. Also the front & back cover art of the bootleg CD (incomplete). I still have my tickets around here somewhere...when I eventually find the correct album I have them stored in, will upload & share.