Wow! That is superb.

But nobody was gimme gimme. You were suggesting to another board member to contact “someone”, to buy a bootleg. But that “someone” is you, so why the act? Your website is great. Just don’t understand the need to pretend here. Bootledz/Brannon makes himself completely visible to the public, for instance.

No, they were just the ending of Dazed, the solo splice in Stairway, and some tape before What Is and What Should Never Be. If memory serves, the samples didn't sound that great either.

Don't forget, we also got the complete Whole Lotta Love from 928 via the No Label release of the 3rd audience source (it's lower quality, but it reveals the longest ever Whole Lotta Love), we also got the soundboard from Montreux 70 with an unheard extra encore, an alternate source for Eddie and the master and alternate source for Cleveland 4/28/77, and completely new shows in Glasgow 12/3/72 and Fort Worth 3/3/75. If the Bath 70 Tarantura 2000 release is in fact an upgrade, then there's that too.

You never know. This year is the 50th anniversary of the show....

EV had put samples of the 928 soundboard on the "Live In Japan" GTO boxset 6 years ago. It's also been 3 years since Deus Ex Machina came out, and the Japanese twitter accounts mentioned that people in the BF store had overheard that EV had the soundboard for Long Beach 2 in hand, along with a soundboard for Blueberry Hill.

Yep. They've also been branching out to a lot of new artists that they never covered before. It used to just be Zeppelin on EV and Clapton/Stones on MVR. Now EV has the Beatles, Guns N Roses, Allman Brothers, Eagles, U2, Jimi Hendrix, Queen, Jeff Beck, and other groups. Not sure if that means that they are now slowing down on Zeppelin (doesn't look like it), as much as they are just releasing a lot more stuff than they used to and expanding to other groups. Throw in the Moonchild Records discs hopefully selling like hotcakes, and things like Evolution is Timing and the Niteowl matrices being a successful run of Dime-to-Pressed-Disc profit turners for them, and I would imagine that business is good. Hopefully this expansion means that they can get back to releasing those 75 boards so that they can finish the series. Would be a shame to not see Long Beach 3/12, Philadelphia 2/8, Houston 2/27, or the LA shows not see the light of day.

It's not a new source. It's the same Source 1, but upgraded (according to those who have heard it).

Looking forward to any more news on Twist and Shout (is it really from the 929 sb?), and also whether EV used any upgraded audience source sources for WLL > End for 928. The 929 boxset release had upgraded audience sources for that show. Will be interesting to see if they also have an upgrade for any of the 928 audience sources.

No, same source as before. Supposedly an upgrade.

https://www.innerviews.org/inner/boyd.html You’re in possession of the legendary Led Zeppelin/Fairport Convention jam multitracks from the L.A. Troubadour in 1970. Have you ever considered attempting to get them released? I would never be allowed to release them. The ghost of Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant would come and put a stake through my heart if I ever did anything with them, including putting them up on YouTube. But it was a cool night. There were a lot of memorable things about it. It was Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Bonham. John Paul Jones wasn’t there. I don’t think Bonham played much. It was mainly Plant and Page who got up onstage and joined Fairport. They did things like “Hey Joe,” “That’s Alright Mama,” “Mystery Train,” and other stuff. This was after Sandy Denny had left Fairport, so it was the all-male Fairport lineup. I have some great memories from that show. Now, one of the problems with live recording on a small stage like the Troubadour is the amps are right behind the vocal mic. So, when you go to mix the thing, you’ve got so much signal from the amps spilling down the vocal mics that it’s difficult to get a good sound on the voice. And when you raise the voice by riding the vocal level, you get more of the guitar or bass, or whatever it is nearest to the vocal mic. But with Plant in this case, it was the opposite. [laughs] Plant is so loud that his voice was spilling down the mics in front of the amps. In those days, you didn’t have direct inputs from the amps. You had to put a mic in front of the amp to record it. You didn’t have split leads going straight into the boards. So, Plant would start singing and I’d have almost as much vocal as guitar on the mic in front of the amp because he’s so fucking loud. There was no danger of the vocal being drowned out by the guitars. I also remember Fairport doing one of those jigs and reels pieces while Page tried to play it. It was a pretty good attempt and then Richard Thompson took over and played the rest. Page just looked at Richard with this “What planet are you from?” look on his face. [laughs] He just couldn’t imagine how Richard could do what he did, that fast. My favorite memory though, is Peter Grant. Now, Peter was a thug. Led Zeppelin wanted a thug. They wanted a shark to deal with the sharks. That was the great theory of band management in those days. So, Peter was with them that night. It was late. The band came to the Troubadour after playing the L.A. Forum, a sports arena. Fairport were winding down their last set. The Troubadour was a very relaxed place. Doug Weston, the owner, loved music and was all in favor of spontaneous things happening. But he had to deal with very strict licensing laws. It was a really good evening happening at the Troubadour, but at 2 am, they had to get the booze off the tables, but you could keep playing. So, 10 minutes before 2 am, the waitresses said “Drink up. We have to take your glasses in a few minutes.” At three minutes before 2 am, the waitresses were out there with trays picking up wine, beer and cocktail glasses. Everybody knew this was part of the ritual of the Troubadour. At 2 am, Fairport started playing a ballad called “Banks of Sweet Primroses” with Dave Swarbrick singing. It’s a beautiful song with lots of open space. It just has drums with a little chording from Richard and Simon Nicol, and Dave doing a little riff on the fiddle. It’s very still and silent. And when John Wood and I were listening back to the multitracks, you hear this beautiful first verse, and just at the end of it, you hear this rattle of glasses and the sound of something smashing against wood. Then you hear the voice of Peter Grant yelling “You fucking bitch! Get your hands off my fucking glass!” [laughs] He was sitting right near the front of the stage, so it went right down the vocal mic. He didn’t know the Troubadour routine.

Well, if that is the case, could you ask them why they always put too much EQ on their releases? No Use Gneco, Live In the Fairly Tale...releases ruined by deliberately bad EQ. Why?

Are you sure about Tarantura? They have put out 30 random Beatles titles, and 100+ Zeppelin. The shop name is a Zeppelin reference too “Cd Museum pB”. Either way, Empress Valley gets the soundboards for Zeppelin. They always have. If these 928/929 soundboards are somehow different, I have no idea. People who have the new 928 release are already saying that the 929 Twist and Shout is from the soundboard, which if that is true, means that EV held back WLL from the HTEWW release. If it is true, then they have probably had these tapes complete for years. They had put 928 soundboard samples on the GTO boxset 6 years ago. They obviously had it back then too. And it can’t be a coincidence that they put out the recent Nightstalker LA 3/24 soundboard sampler last year deliberately excluding tracks. Remember, the first warning for this type of thing was the release of Deus Ex Machina, with the Heartbreaker sample, before they released that complete show.

What makes these soundboards any different? It is still Empress Valley alone in this game. No Label/Lighthouse have put out many clones, and have also released some nice alternate aud sources, but no soundboards. Wendy has only been putting out re-hashes for years now, and Tarantura is a mixed bag - with most being poor edits of existing shows, and the occasional upgrade or alt source, which they usually ruin with their deliberately bad eq, but never soundboards. So all of the talk of Empress Valley paying “best” makes no sense. After all of these years, none of these boards have come out via any other label. So, this sounds less like EV paying “best” vs them being the only label that has/gets the tapes at all.

There are 5 Japanese bootleg labels that sell Zeppelin these days: Empress Valley/Moonchild, Tarantura2000, No Label/Lighthouse, Wendy, and Graf Zeppelin. Eat a Peach, and Golden Eggs have not released enough titles to really be considered as being in the same league as the others, and Eelgrass only releases clones of EV titles. Out of those main 5 labels, only Empress Valley has released new soundboard content, and has done so over and over and over for the past 18 years. So, I find these stories about tapes being “shopped around” to the “labels” in Japan hard to believe. When only one label is ever releasing these things, then obviously nothing is being shopped around.

Winston Remaster use the EV board How the East Was Won to make his fan remaster called Kutabare Moonchild. Moonchild then copied his remaster, just as they had copied nearly all of his previous ones. EVSD then put Winston's Kutabare onto their latest 929 boxset as the "Hagure Gumo" remaster. Given that Moonchild is a label of Empress Valley, it makes for a circular flow of cloning: EV released a board that was then made into a fan remaster, and then EV put that remaster out on their Moonchild label. Then, they put that remaster out again on the EV label.

Moonchild is Empress Valley. If you mean Eelgrass, I’m sure there will be one of those. But by that point there will already be 20 different fan remasters too.

Where have you guys been? That’s how much these things have always cost. Deus Ex Machina, How the East Was Won, the soundboard revolution titles... There is always a $100ish “standard” version, a $300ish “deluxe” version, and a $500ish “super deluxe” version. Being shocked at the prices means you probably also don’t realize/appreciate the fact that people are spending this money and sharing these gems with you for freeeee.

Which title?

Could be that this 928 release is from the raw soundboard (like Orlando, Toronto, Hampton, Osaka 929 HTEWW) and not from the multi-tracks which are supposed to exist separately for both 928 and 929. If this 928 release does have Twist and Shout from 929 from the same source as the HTEWW soundboard, then we know for sure that they held WLL back. More likely is that the bonus disc of Beatles songs has things like I Saw Her Standing There from 9/4/70, Money from 6/19/72, Slow Down from 6/25/72, and the teases from 928 and 929 from the existing sources.

For sure. With the discs on the blue cloth and all.

Air Raid sells on Yahoo auctions.

I dunno, even with the nice sound, I’ve never been able to get into that one. Can’t put my finger on it. My go to shows for the first leg are Philadelphia 2/8, Landover 2/10, New York 2/12. That trio is great. 2/13 is loose to the point of being all over the map. 2/14 is well played but also a bit tired in places.

This set reveals two things....1) It costs EV next to nothing to actually make these CDs, if they are really able to produce 15 pressed/screen-printed CDs in a custom box with inserts all for $20 retail per set. And 2) Even if the content is already freely available for download online, there will STILL be customers willing to pay for the bootleg. In fact, the set might actually be more attractive to buyers if the customer already knows that it's good. There are plenty of bootlegs that were limited to 100-300 copies that only sold out AFTER they had been posted online. I've seen EV/Graf/Tarantura CDs on sites that stay up for sale for weeks, and then immediately get sold after the show appears on Dime.

The last note is performed with the pedal steel guitar. It does a quick half-step slide up to hit the final note, in sync with the last strum of the acoustic guitar, with plate reverb on top, to make it ring out.