Rewatched my fav movie last night for something like the 200th time - Eyes Wide Shut. For anyone who hasn't seen it, I highly recommend it. Every time I watch it, I see something new. It's like being immersed in a Jungian dream, got more layers than Aunt Judy's Christmas Lasagna

1. Fourth Album 2. Physical Graffiti 3. Houses of the Holy 4. Led Zep III 5. Presence 6. In Through the Out Door 7. Led Zep I 8. Led Zep II 9. Coda

Happy (belated) birthday! Looks like the most popular show for past 12 months, and I suspect in general, are the 71 Japan shows. Totally agree on Providence and Seattle 73 shows. Those are 2 my fav shows for the 73 US tour behind the LA 6/3 show. LZBoots made a great comp on YT for the 73 US tour using mainly those 3 shows (plus a few from the Detroit shows) about a year ago.

Best song ever right here:

Great harmonies tho, the female singers in particular are fantastic

🤣🤣 oh man, this made my morning. Thank you for this. I love how they made the guitarist and drummer wear matching mustard yellow shirts lol. And also how the video starts off with the camera on the super creepy yet also goofy-looking guitarist, and then we never see him again. The producer of the show is like "cut away, cut away!!". He kinda looks like Rainn Wilson if he put on a few pounds.

Finally, a little sanity: kim Iversen: OSHA SUSPENDS Biden's Mandate, SCATHING Court Opinion Calls It "STAGGERINGLY Overboard" https://youtu.be/NrTYUAXjiAM

I love substack. You'll never see journalists pursue this kind of news on MSM.

Very cool, thanks Thalassophile. I'll be sure to compare and looking forward to hearing it.

That kind of stuff is interesting to me. Makes me wonder how good shows will sound (even crappy recordings) 20 years from now. Do you know if anyone put the Nite Owl matrix of Vienna up on YT? I've been listening to the Winston remaster today (good ol LZBoots) but did spot a couple other links on there that were 4 source matrix shows.They weren't advertised as Nite Owl tho

In a perfect world, the UN would get together and declare experimenting with bioweapons (whoopsie, I meant "gain of function" research) a crime against humanity. This won't happen for decades of course, if at all. The cat is out of the bag so it doesn't matter at this point, but the optimist in me likes to think we all might learn from this boondoggle, if at least for a little while. I personally did take both jabs 6 months ago but respect everyone's right to refuse. I think at this point, Americans have earned the right to be highly skeptical of both the government (who have been caught in repeated lies about all of this since it started) and Big Pharma. I don't see any easy solutions. Masks suck, but if everyone wore them, it would help. It's problematic, but then so is chronic fatigue and not being able to taste your food indefinitely (I know several people with long covid). In my opinion, we (meaning the US) are still in the denial and anger stages. I reckon the depression stage (reality) will set in 12 months from now - if long covid turns out to be as prevalent as some studies suggest. Scientists could find a way to mitigate or even stop long covid which is the real problem in my view. Or, they might not. At this stage, it feels like we're in trouble. I do think human ingenuity will ultimately prevail, it's just a question of "when". In the meantime, I think businesses should be allowed to have vaccine mandates or NOT have mandates - I think the government is overstepping on this one, only because the vaccines are an unknown in terms of what they'll do to the human immune system long term. We could be 100% vaccinated, and this thing would STILL be a problem because the vax efficacy drops off a cliff after 6 months. Booster shots (from a new technology that may or may not screw up someone's immune system long term) every 6 months are not a solution. I'm just a little ray of sunshine tonight. Wish I had something meaningful to add here, but I'm fresh out of ideas. I really, really hate masks but think if everyone wore them, it would be a big help in stopping the spread. Beyond that, I think people need to try and see things from a perspective that is not their own and hope for the best. I haven't even gotten into the long term economic ramifications of this lol.(And I won't because who in their right mind would really want to). Believe it or not, it's very possible we're in the honeymoon phase of this thing.

Lotta great shows on everyone's list. I'm listening to OTH from Vienna right now as I work ... it's just mind-blowing how good Bonham and Page are here. One of my fav OTH solos. I've been listening to so many poor-sounding boots lately, it's nice to hear a top tier show so clean over headphones. I think I'm just gonna let this one keep playing and listen to the whole damn show ...

A lot of us take breaks from LZ, come back to it, discover new shows, etc. This past 2 years we've been introduced to some great new stuff. I thought an interesting question to ask would be which 3 shows have you listened to the most over the past 12 months? My own answer surprised me, considering how much attention I've given 75 this year: Copenhagen 71 Leicester 71 Manchester 72

Happy 50th to one of my all time fav shows right here:

Pretty much all of the Coda outtakes - Sugar Mama, Baby Please Come Home, Traveling Riverside Blues, Hey Hey What Can I Do, etc .. all songs we've heard before since the 80s but still sound great. I used to listen to the Physical Grafitti rehearsals boot a lot in the 80s so it's nice to hear a lot of that remastered and mixed in with the rest. It all makes for great driving music too.

First time hearing this, it's incredible. First impression is it sounds like a bridge between their sound in 71 and US tour in 72. Robert and Jimmy in particular having a phenomenal night.

A fantastic and really insightful article that was posted about McCartney today by Colin Fleming. I wish all music journalists could write/think like this: Despite all the scrutiny applied to the Beatles at the remove of 50 plus years, I’m always taken aback by how rarely they’re truly examined. My own experience in writing regularly about the band and their art suggests that the Beatles have become something akin to sacred plush toys. People are loath to probe, and prefer to deify, making a kind of Beatles cosmology, as if that veneration process reflects favorably on who they are, by dint of what they choose to esteem. Pulling out truths, and then considering those truths from myriad angles, can be seen as a personal attack, rather than what it really is—a good faith effort to enrich a rich experience even further. There can be joy—I think so, anyway—in citing how a song might not work, or how a guitar solo falls to bits, or an instance where creativity faltered but good old-fashioned pluck saved the day. Not everything need be the masterpiece of a “Strawberry Fields Forever” or a Revolver to be cherishable. Sometimes, even with the Beatles, human moments—which are not always the same as Valhalla moments—say a lot about why we love what we love, if we let them. Beatles tropes persist, despite how easily they can be debunked. They’ve long been out there, and they remain out there. Consider, for example, the oxymoronical “fourth wheel” status of Ringo Starr, when the man was a master technician on his instrument, and there were times in the Beatles’ seven-year run—as with their glorious, leave-taking Abbey Road—when Starr evinced that he might have been their most gifted instrumentalist, and that’s with Paul McCartney as a James Jamerson-level bassist. Many of what we’ll call Beatles-based “unexaminings” are oriented around the McCartney-John Lennon axis, because how could they not be? The partnership became a shifting balance of competition in which each man essentially tried to “out-art” the other, but with sufficient humility and fealty that they’d still assist the other’s cause. Need some help with that melody on “In My Life,” and McCartney would step up for Lennon; unsure about the “movement you need is on your shoulder” line in “Hey Jude,” and there’s the former Johnny Moondog telling the ex-Paul Ramone to just leave that sucker be. And just as Lennon and McCartney came to pull apart as distinct artistic stylists, Beatles people have tended to fall into camps. You’re a Paul person or a John backer. You have your go-to. Saws and tropes head up each man’s camp as that camp is usually thought of. Lennon was the artier fellow, the rebel, the burgeoning avant-gardist, and the lyric master. McCartney was the all-around musician, the melodist, the balladeer, with homespun, sometimes hokey words which mattered less because of the quality of the tunes—in their very tunefulness—that he wrote. Lennon later requested a helping of truth—as in, give me some, brother—and we should probably say that there’s not a lot of truth here, in the tired, repeated old ways of thinking about these things, which takes us to this remarkable new addition to the literary annex of Beatledom, and it comes from Paul McCartney, with a book simply called The Lyrics, though it is not so simple at all. Cherry-picking through his catalogue of songs, from the Beatles era on up, McCartney talks his way through the songs in conversation with the Pulitzer prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon (himself no stranger at fronting a rock ’n’ roll band). But he’s conversational the way Samuel Pepys’ is in his diaries; that is to say, he’s convivial, but conviviality works best when it has the larger purpose of depth, substance, and the ease of the tone helps get that substance across. In a way I’m surprised that McCartney did this book, but I’m also not. Up until now, he’s never been a chronicler, like, say, Bill Wyman was for the Rolling Stones. He’s not an archivist of displayed memories. I think that the era of the podcast and social media—when it’s so easy to set the record of one’s life straight and do so quickly—probably provided both some inspiration and a suggestion of the relative ease of this format. But you’re also going to want to remember that in many ways, McCartney was the brains of the Beatles. Lennon was the edge, the fashioner of the emotionally searing musical poetry, and he could be the balls, but you weren’t getting much shrewder than McCartney, who also possessed a grace that Lennon did not. We learn in these pages, for example, about a high school English teacher named Alan Durband, who instructed a young Paul in the deceptively simple power of rhyming couplets, and it’s not hard to imagine some other schoolmaster similarly turning on, say, a young Keats. Which isn’t to say that McCartney was a formal poet, or that his lyrics work as poetry; but he was a poet of sound, and as such, the king of a kind of rocked up, euphonic, versification. His lyrics are tailored to his music. They are music. They might not be as quotable as assorted Lennon chestnuts, but that is not their point. And again, McCartney had the brains and grace to accept what their point was, which is one reason his best songs will never go anywhere so long as human ears exist. My sense of McCartney has always been that he’s a straight-up guy whose nature is to be kind. I also think he’s always needed to be liked. He’s that person who would maintain a relationship with a favorite teacher from the past, visit the old woman across the road as a kid, whereas Lennon would have been more likely to seek revenge on a pedagogue who had punished him by, I don’t know, pissing in his shoes. One man is an energy guy, an attitude guy, a “be here now” guy, which is how Lennon summarized rock ’n’ roll, but he might as well have been talking about himself. In his darkest song, “Yer Blues,” the singer is suicidal precisely because he even hates rock and roll. That is, himself, at his core. McCartney was the Beatle better suited at looking back, measuring the depth of experience, telling the stories, which become larger than anecdote, and in a book like The Lyrics, take on the stuff of narrative. Let’s go back to the mid-1960s, when the Beatles were at their apex as sonic revolutionaries with absurd populist cachet. It’s 1966-67, and one thinks of Lennon as tripping out of his gourd on LSD, plumbing labyrinths of creativity and living the life of the genius intellectual. This would be false. Lennon slept a lot, did a huge amount of laying around, excelled at the soporific, and sometimes roused himself to write about it (“I’m Only Sleeping”). He’d work a song over with intensity, in a “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but this was the period when McCartney was the real culture vulture of the band. Dating Jane Asher, he was the London sponge, present at the reading, the play, the experimental film. McCartney wanted to learn, and he learned. History doesn’t talk about him as an intellectual, as an envelope-pushing artist, which gives this book further utility. I say “utility” and not agenda, because though McCartney will from time to time sniff that Lennon got some credit that should have been his—which isn’t a great look with Lennon being dead—he has every right and reason to set the record straight, which in my view is akin to giving the likes of Sgt. Pepper a final, proper mastering before sending it off into the world. In the entire Beatles discography, McCartney’s “Eleanor Rigby” is the most surreal song they ever waxed, and that surreality is enriched and undergirded by a quotidian Englishness. An everyday-ness. It’s like when Henry James has a ghost pop out during the daytime hours—that ghost becomes more ghost-like. The way this works in The Lyrics is, we get the words of the songs on one page, and then McCartney’s Pepysian thoughts on the facing page. Thus one learns that “Eleanor Rigby” was in part born of Nivea cold cream—his mother Mary’s favorite. The line that rocked my cerebral cortex as a 14-year-old first getting into the Beatles was “Wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door,” with its follow-up query of, “Who is it for?” which was every bit as discordant and thrilling, but also sensical, almost despite itself. That paradox is life’s gist. The song helped me understand that discordance is far more congruous with human existence than a stable tonality. Cold cream is pretty prosaic, but it put McCartney in mind of this living ghost of a person with a face that comes and goes. His gift was for a way of seeing the world. The world is always trying to tell you its stories. I don’t mean in the news cycle way. Story and image are embedded in all we see and hear, and some people simply look and listen past the levels of everyone else. Do that, and you can fashion a prodigious body of work of art, as McCartney did. As a kid, he had a friend—I think that’s the word we should use—who was an older woman he helped out with some chores. That’s just so McCartney to me. As he puts it about these people he’d know in one way or other, “I wanted to write a song that would sum them up.” Regarding the “original” Eleanor Rigby, “I would go around to her house,” McCartney says, “and not just once or twice. I found out that she lived on her own, so I would go around there and just chat, which is sort of crazy if you think about me being some young Liverpool guy.” Is it? He doesn’t actually mean crazy. He means “against type or expectation,” but also entirely keeping with who he was, which helped him become the songwriter that he did. In life, not a lot is going to happen to you each day, if you’re most people. Gets rather humdrum. The events in art are often unlike the events in life, save that encoded in the characters experiencing those events in art are the feelings, thoughts, fears, joys, doubts, riddles of existence, and sometimes the answers, that everyone back in the humdrum world harbors within themselves. One might call that the “trick” of art. I call it the miracle. McCartney understood this just as well as Charles Dickens understood it. They’ve always been linked in my mind, and this book makes that link more explicit. It’s McCartney’s Pickwick Papers, a big collage of storytelling bouncing from world to world; the world of imagination, the world of a bus in Liverpool. My larger focus is on the Beatles songs, but he spans his entire career. Something that nettles me with post-Beatle McCartney—and people can get cross when you say this, but I don’t think there’s any diminishing its truth—is that he was content to have peaked in his twenties. As an artist, anyway. I’d be down on myself if that was true about me, but what you’ll see in The Lyrics is how the post-Beatles efforts were often more about a lark, about trying an approach to try it, because hey, why not? Whereas the Beatles era was a time of pushing. Striving. Seeking to evolve seemingly by the minute. I admire that. And it’s not like there’s a big, central character to the Beatles’ output, but if there was one, I think it would be an entity of imagination incarnate, and that character’s core belief would be that you always try and better what you just did. You raise the standard continuously. That’s the way for a human to be most human. And it’s certainly the way for an artist to be as formidable an artist as possible. A feeling I have throughout reading the book—which you can do cover to cover, moving alphabetically by song title, or hop-scotching around, dipping into your favorites—is “Why have you been keeping all of this great stuff tucked away?!” and also “What more might there be to say?!” It’s a feeling of gratitude, which is also Dickensian. Reading Dickens, you have the sensation that he’s doing you a kindness. He wanted to be rich and have you pay him for that kindness, and I’m sure the already super-rich McCartney wants loads of people to buy up this not-inexpensive book. But Dickens always makes me want to say, “Good looking out, brother man,” and McCartney is the same way. Talking about “Drive My Car,” the number that opened Rubber Soul in December 1965—an album that changed much in Western music—McCartney states, “Once you get into creating a narrative and storytelling, it’s so much more entertaining. It draws you forward so much more easily.” I read that, and it makes sense to me what he’s doing with The Lyrics. It’s a book that itself is a song—or a song suite, if you prefer. A concept album. And extended session, like the 585-minute affair that resulted in Please Please Me on a winter night in 1963. It’s narrative, and it’s a drawing in. I would say it’s McCartney close to his best, and at his most musical, which is all the more remarkable in that there isn’t even anything to hear, save story itself, which is a sound unto itself.

We have similar listening preferences - I do the same thing, regarding Robert's voice with Montreal being one of a few exceptions due to the band sounding so incredible and the vibe of the show. And Robert does get warmed up and sounding much better towards NQ. I hate 2-12 too for the same reason lol. But OTHAFA on that one is still great because he's really holding back and singing in a a more restrained way ... he really didn't wanna f--k that one up and it shows. His vocal performance at the beginning of the song has a vulnerable quality to it that really adds something special. And of course Jimmy's solo is fantastic. It's ok to go a little off-topic, I think we're still in the ball park of the discussion. It's not like these threads get a ton of responses. 😂

Great picks for both over and under. I'm absolutely with you on your points on 71 - can't go wrong with any shows from that year, but the UK Fall tour is hugely underrated. I need to give 4/26/69 some attention. I listened to it briefly once a while back while multitasking and didn't give it much attention. It's on my "listening list" for this week.

with THIS crowd? I think they would absolutely post by tour 😂 Maybe make it tour optional, depending on listening preference? Here are mine, by tours/shows I regularly listen to (the rest I left off) 1969 - 4/27 the only show I listen to with any regularity from this year 1970 Spring Tour - Montreaux 1970 -Fall Tour - MSG 9/19 1971 Back to the Clubs - Copenhagen 5/3 (I prefer Belfast 3/5 but listen to 5/3 much more due to better sound quality) 1971 - US Tour - LA Forum 8/21 1971 - Fall UK Tour - Leicester 11/25 1972/73 - UK Winter Tour - Manchester 12/8 followed closely by Bradford 1/18 (all time fav WLL!) 1973 - Euro Tour - Offenburg 1973 US Tour - LA Forum 6/3 1975 US Tour - Montreal 2/6 followed closely by San Diego 3/10 1975 Earl's Court - 5/24

Great lists ^^. It's funny to see this post today because I was thinking this same question to myself just yesterday, it's a tough question but I realized it's simple to answer. The ones I listen to the most must be my favs, so here they are: 1969 - 4/27 1970 - 9/19 1971 - 5/3 1972 - 12/8 1973 - 6/3 1975 - 5/24

Thanks man! Have a great weekend.

"Jane's Light Orchestra?" 😜 I like it!! Never in a million years would I imagine Dave Navarro doing something this fun. Good for them. If the whole album sounds this good, it will be the happiest surprise I've had since the Dolphins womped the Ravens last night lol