Even in Blackmore's work before Deep Purple can you hear the beginnings of his later style, just listen to his leads from the records he made with Screaming Lord Sutch. You can tell it's him straight away

The image I have in my head of an archetypal "shredder" is a guy playing guitar with a high-gain (but not fuzz) distortion tone, using a fair amount of non-pentatonic leads in his playing, possibly playing a strat or a super strat style guitar as well. If we're judging by that stereotype the first player to truly fit that description is Blackmore. He was one of the first in rock guitar to incorporate classical style leads in his playing, and he's also just a very technical player in general. He also has all the showmanship and flashy playing characteristic of the typical image of a shred player. Blackmore was the guy who paved the way for others such as Uli Roth, Malmsteen, Rhoads, etc. Essentially players like Blackmore started to codify the tropes that would later be known as "shred" in the 70s, and the style fully developed by the time Rhoads and Van Halen came on the scene.

Apples to oranges

There's a really good version of Communication Breakdown on the Winterland tape from 6th November 1969. From 4:08-4:36 on the tape Page plays these two really cool parts on there, I've been trying to figure them out on guitar but it still doesn't sound right. Could anyone on here break these two riffs down for me? The second riff is called "Bert Jansch Section" on bootleg databases, and I've tried listening to Pentangle (Jansch's band) to try and find the potential inspiration of the riff, but to no avail. In this same tape the riff also appears during Dazed and Confused, from 28:47-29:30. The first riff is more often heard on live versions of Communication Breakdown from 1969, but I don't think it has an official name. Here's the link to the tape:

You betcha

I'd also love to hear a tape of the show in Athens, OH in 1969, supposedly they blew Jose Feliciano off the stage. I went to Ohio University and I used to frequently walk by the venue on the way to class or to the gym. A full recording of Iceland '70 wouldn't be bad either, but the absolute holy grail for me is any show from the '68 New Yardbirds tour.

I'd say out of any Zeppelin tapes I'd be happiest to see something from the New Yardbirds tour surface. As far as what the setlist would have been for the first show, here's my two cents: 1. Train Kept a Rollin 2. Can't Quit You 3. Dazed & Confused 4. White Summer 5. You Shook Me 6. Flames 7. For Your Love 8. HMMT I based the order of the songs on what we know the band tended to do in early shows, as evidenced by recordings of the first US tour. We pretty much know for certain as well that they would have played "Train Kept a Rollin", Dazed & Confused", and "White Summer", especially since we have photographic evidence of the latter being played (Page with his Danelectro and Bonham using mallets). The overwhelming majority of the time in this era they opened up with "Train" and went straight into "Can't Quit You" afterwards, so I would assume this is what they did here too. In recordings of early shows "White Summer" usually comes right after "Dazed & Confused", hence its placement as the fourth song of the set. Likewise "You Shook Me" is generally played later in early sets, so I had it come after. We also see Plant and his harmonica in the Gladsaxe photos, so perhaps he had a harmonica solo on there just like on the record. I would argue that they played "Flames" by Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera instead of "ALAIHY". Page even stated on his website that they played "Flames" on the first tour, and the probable setlist on the official Zeppelin website makes no mention of "ALAIHY" either. I believe "ALAIHY" came later in the tour, perhaps they would have played it in Stockholm. I have heard rumors that they supposedly recorded a version of it in the studio that didn't make it onto the first record, but I haven't seen any evidence to support this. "For Your Love" likely came towards the end of the show, using its appearances on tape in January '69 as reference. From there "HMMT" would have been the closer, since we see this in almost all early performances, as well as on the record itself. It is also to my belief that by the start of the tour, "HMMT" would have already been fleshed out for the most part. Zeppelin is rumored to have played "Smokestack Lightning" at their first rehearsal, so in the three week span until the tour started they probably had "HMMT" in much of the same form as on the record. Like "ALAIHY", "Communication Breakdown" would have likely appeared later in the tour, I would suspect that they had it partially fleshed out by the time they left for Scandinavia and then played it during the last few shows. One question I do have about the first tour is if they actually played additional dates past the show in Gothenburg on 15th September. Wikipedia says that they played a few dates in Norway, and Plant supposedly remembers playing in Bergen as well.