Bay Area Jazz News : 11-11-69

Robert Plant: 'The first Led Zeppelin practice … you couldn't walk away' – classic interview As the former Led Zeppelin frontman releases his new solo album to rapturous reviews, we look back at Richard Williams’s interview with the then 22-year-old singer, originally published in Melody Maker and resurrected by Rock’s Backpages Richard Williams | theguardian.com, Wednesday 10 September 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/sep/10/robert-plant-led-zeppelin-classic-interview Robert Plant lives in an old, rambling farmhouse near Kidderminster, on the edge of the Black Country, with his wife, Maureen, baby daughter Carmen, dog Strider and a few goats. When he isn’t touring with Led Zeppelin, he’s putting the tumbledown house back into shape, or cleaning out the stables, or just charging around the narrow lanes in his old Jeep. Dressed in old jeans and a pair of snakeskin boots that have definitely seen more glamorous days, Robert isn’t yesterday’s idea of a superstar. But at 22 years of age, he’s a very wealthy young man who has worked his way right to the top of the rock’n’roll world. He came up along the conventional route, forming local groups and playing in youth clubs and parish halls, before eventually striking out for London, where the big time found him, rather than vice versa. He’s always been hung up on pop music, and he really enjoys sitting back and playing old records by the Showmen, Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs, Sonny Til and the Orioles, and other forgotten giants. He’s genuinely enthusiastic about pop, an avid collector of rare treasures as well as a performer himself, and this enthusiasm is constantly bubbling out. His love and understanding of pop is possibly one of the main reasons why he can communicate so well to an audience. Having lived around Kidderminster most of his life (he went to school just down the road from his farm), he’s comfortable there, and old friends, many of whom he played with in long-forgotten bands and who are now “settled down” in regular jobs, are constantly popping in for a chat. For the purposes of this interview, we took a Jeep ride up the hill behind the farm, finally settling in a leafy glade overlooking a beautiful valley. Robert, your band has been put down by quite a lot of critics as being some kind of plastic, teenybopper heavy group, and you have to admit that a lot of your appeal, in America at least, is based on something other than music. How do you react to that? To begin with, apart from anything physical, the person who criticises us has first to decide for himself whether in fact he likes the record or the performance that he hears. If it really gives him the feeling of a teenybopper thing, he should just say: “I think it sounds like such-and-such …” But there are a lot of people who generalise and say: “This surely must be …” and “I think everybody’s agreed that …”, which is ridiculous. It’s rather unfortunate, because when you’re up there enjoying yourself, the physical side has to come in too. When you’re onstage and you’re playing to people, and you know that they’re ready to chew on whatever you sing or say or do or even think, and to be physical as well, to jump about ... well, Africans jump about. Howlin’ Wolf jumps about. Mick Jagger jumps about, but he can still write things like Sympathy for the Devil. It’s another thing that goes with music that can really get you up. I don’t think English people realise what places like the Fillmore in San Francisco are like; the people there have been into all sorts of things for a long time, and they get up and jump about and go wild. Everything that’s in them comes out, and that’s what entertainment is all about. It isn’t something that demands that people should adhere to some strict line, that “this is a serious group and this is a teenybopper group”. There should be no barrier – everybody should be able to enjoy it, and at the same time we as musicians should come off at the end feeling pleased. I think that if we just went on stage and stood there, we’d be cheating ourselves and the people we’re playing to. But “teenybopper” – what does it really matter? You can acquire musical taste at any age. Young girls can go and enjoy listening to Sandy Denny, and then wet their knickers over Scott Walker; there’s no reason why not. But I can’t really see that there’s any sense in all that crap about us. If you want to move about, if you’re dancing in a club, you don’t have to dance like the next person. You’ve just got to enjoy yourself. I don’t think that rock’n’roll is any more teenybopper than Indian music anyway, and I can go home and play Elvis’s When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again and get off on that just as much as I could get off on something on the opposite end of the spectrum, that the critics say everyone’s supposed to be digging. It’s all a bit mystifying. Can you tell me how you got into rock’n’roll in the first place? There was a fellow called Perry Foster, who came from not far away from here [Kidderminster], and he was an incredible eight-string guitarist. Instead of playing it the normal way, he used to play like Big Joe Williams, with it half on his lap. He was a horrible bloke at times, but he was a real white bluesman, and I, when I was 15, immediately fell under his spell. My dad used to drop me off at the Seven Stars Blues Club in Stourbridge, and we used to wail on Got My Mojo Working – old Chris Wood used to play with us, and Stan Webb and Andy Sylvester were in a competing band (this is going well back) – and we had a residency at the Seven Stars. All the other guys, who didn’t have residencies, used to come along and sit right at the front with their arms folded. It was a good atmosphere, a real blues club, like I’d love Smitty’s Corner in Chicago to be. The sound was good, and everybody who saw me there six or seven years ago still remembers it. They always say, “Well, you’ve come a long way, but the music’s still the same,” and really, that was the initiation. The group was called the Delta Blues Band, and when we weren’t doing that, a guitarist and myself would go round all the local folk clubs doing Corinna, Corinna and all those really vulgar blues, like Peetie Wheatstraw’s stuff. I was at school at the time, and it was really hard to combine the two and keep a compatible relationship with schoolmasters and parents at the same time as doing what I really wanted to do. It was great because I was having drink underage, and it was a break into a different society, because you can go to a grammar school and never see the light of day again for the rest of your life. The minute you pass your 11-plus it could be all finished for you. So I got in with this crew, which I’m afraid upset my parents a bit, and the cleft between Mum and Dad and Robert got a bit wider and a bit wider until I joined a group in Kidderminster called the Crawling King Snakes at the same time as old Jess Roden had his Shakedown Sound, and I think the personnel of the two bands are all still around now, and they’ve all been in bands with me or Jess since then – it’s like a football team that keeps swapping over. It was a little bit more of the commercial sound then: it was Daddy Rolling Stone and hopping about the stage with the mic stand up in the air. A lot of incredible things happened, and I met a lot of people who made sure that I’d carry on in the way I was going. Like, the first blues festivals I ever went to, I always got a shiver every time I saw Sonny Boy Williamson, the way he strutted out on the stage. Finally I nicked one of those big bass mouth-harps off him, which I’ve still got at home. Sonny Boy really did it for me, that control that he had, and the tales I’ve heard about him since – like he always liked a bit of rabbit to eat, and one time in a hotel in Birmingham the only way he could cook his rabbit was in a coffee percolator, and he fell asleep and the rabbit cooked and cooked and cooked ... they had to evacuate the whole floor of the hotel, and he was still snoring away. But he had this sort of a charm, he’d have a really good time, yet he was really coarse and he was everything that I wanted to be at the age of 70. It was people like that that made sure that it wasn’t down to joining the Ivy League or even doing an Alvin Lee and backing the Ivy League. I never really knew where I wanted to end up; for a long time I thought I just wanted to do country blues, maybe only two people, or a very straight blues band, and the first time I heard Fleetwood Mac they were the very straight blues band that I wanted to be – that sort of Chicago tightness. Then I found out that I was in a rut, really, I’d been with a lot of other groups and written a few things myself that really didn’t have the balls behind them that they should’ve had, and it just went round in circles until I formed the first Band of Joy. This Band of Joy, I’ve got to own up, every now and then there’d be a Darrell Banks number slipping out, or an Otis Clay. Living near Birmingham I got in with a lot of Jamaicans, and I started to like the old Blue Beat, and the drummer in the band – Plug, who’s now with Bronco – he’d got the most incredible feel for that stuff. The lead guitarist was an Anglo-Indian guy with long black hair, and he used to bob up and down, and what with that and the drumming, you’d really got to groove on it. It was like a poor version of those Little Milton things, and of course it was received everywhere with open arms – and I got sacked, thoroughly and utterly sacked, because Plug used to slow the beat down every now and then and I’d turn round and wind him up, and he didn’t really like it. And the guitarist played a few odd chords: he never really played Sunny with the same chords on any two nights – God bless him. But we were all still learning – we all will learn forever, there’s no ending to it – and it was a good time, because people were suddenly twigging that there was more to it than just Dave Dee. At last I could slip in a few blues things, and they were going down as well as Darrell Banks – that’s progress. Anyway, everybody loved it, and I was sacked because the manager – who was the organist’s father – told me I couldn’t sing. “I’m sorry, Robert, but there’s just something about you,” he said, and I said: “Please give me a chance,” but I couldn’t understand it. So I got the sack and formed another Band of Joy, still with this illustrious manager. I’d gone back to him out of desperation, and this band decided to have painted faces – it was a little bit before Arthur Brown, believe it or not. It frightened everybody to death, and there was this big fat bass player who’d come running on and dive straight off the stage. He was so fat, wearing a kaftan and bells, billowing into the audience, and I howled so much that I couldn’t do anything at all. It was absurd, I was driving the van and everything, and I thought it was time for another Band of Joy. In came this fantastic guitarist, Kevyn [Gammond], who’s also with Bronco now, and we hit it off well. We had a good bass-player and John Bonham came in on drums. It was debatable whether he’d join because it was a long way to go and pick him up and we didn’t know whether we would have the petrol money to get over to Redditch and back! We always laugh about that. It turned out to be a really good group. It was a combination of what we wrote ourselves, which wasn’t incredible, and rearrangements of things like She Has Funny Cars and Plastic Fantastic Lover. What led you into the Jefferson Airplane/Love scene, the west coast thing? Well, I must admit that for a long time things like the Beatles had really fucked me off – until somewhere around Strawberry Fields they started to get interesting again. I remember the first time I heard Buffalo Springfield’s Flying on the Ground is Wrong. I thought: “That sounds like nothing at all,” and then I heard it again and thought: “There’s something more to this.” The lyrics at the time weren’t astounding, but there was something there. Then I got the album, and it was great because it was the kind of music you could hare around to or you could sit down and dig it, and I thought, “This is what an audience wants – this is what I want to listen to.” Then I got the first Moby Grape album, which was a knockout – the guitar-playing and everything was really good, it fitted together so well. It was that spirit that I reacted to, and when I finally got to San Francisco and saw the Youngbloods and the remnants of that 1966 spirit, it was a cross between being in tears and giggling all the time, because I saw that air that I knew I’d see one day, and all it was was a sort of sincerity. All that music from the West Coast just went “Bang!”, and there was nothing else there after that. I love good blues, but all of a sudden I couldn’t listen to any old blues any more and say it’s OK. It just tore me up – like three years before I was shuddering to listen to Sonny Boy Williamson, and three years after that I was sobbing to Arthur Lee and Forever Changes, and I thought there must be something wrong with me! For something to get at me that much, I mean three years before Sonny Boy I was sobbing in the choir, because it moved me so much. All these things along the line have ended up, I think, with the third Zeppelin album, because how this is going to turn out is like the Fourth Sob. I’ve talked to you before, and probably given you the impression that I believed Zeppelin were never going to do what I wanted to do, but the new album is really getting there. How did you react when Jimmy Page asked you to join Zeppelin, because it must have been obvious that the music would be derived from heavier things than you were digging? Yeah. At the time I was playing with Alexis Korner, and they said: “Go down to Jimmy’s for a week, and see how you get on,” and I looked through his records one day when he was out and I pulled out a pile to play, and somehow or other they happened to be the same ones that he was going to play when he got back, to play to me to see whether I liked them – hah! We just giggled at each other for a bit, and it just worked from there, because if you can hit it off at one stage like that, if we came together like that 20 months ago, then, despite all the rows and bothers on the way up we’ve still got to keep coming together. So really, I thought: “It’s so fresh that it’s untrue, I don’t know the person, why not try it because it’s something completely new?” Jimmy wasn’t dominating anything, as I might have suspected; I could suggest things and the two of us rearranged Babe I’m Gonna Leave You, although it doesn’t say that because I was under contract to somebody else, and when we heard it back in the studio we were shaking hands with our brains, because it turned out to be nice. It was good to be able to hit it off like that. Had I been asked to join Jeff Beck, I’d have probably gone down and seen him, found out that he was a good guitarist, needed the bread, gone with him and got really off. What did the future look like when you joined Zeppelin? Was the plan to make it in America first? No, not really. When we got together it was almost like forming a group in your own hometown, like: “Who can we get on drums and what kind of a drummer do we need?” We needed one who was a good timekeeper and who laid it down, and the only one I knew was the one I’d been playing with for years, which was John. Now you couldn’t put another drummer with us, because although we’re different people, he’s the only drummer who can sympathise with what we do. So you got John into the band. Did Jimmy know him before? No, nobody knew him. He’s been in the Band of Joy up until I went off with Alexis, and he went off with Tim Rose. I thought: “It’s got to be John,” and I got so enthusiastic after staying down there a week that I hitched back from Oxford and chased after John, got him on the side and said: “Mate, you’ve got to join the Yardbirds.” He said: “Well, I’m all right here, aren’t I?” So I had to try and persuade him, because he hadn’t earned the bread before that he was earning with Tim Rose, and I had nothing to convince him with except a name that had got lost in American pop history – the Yardbirds. Finally I pulled him away, so that was him, and Jonesy decided that he didn’t fancy sessions any more. I didn’t meet John Paul till the first practice, and of course it sounded great. We did a Garnet Mimms thing, As Long As I Have You, which we used to do in the Band of Joy – that was the first number Zeppelin ever rehearsed. The first practice ... well, it says it in all the publicity, but it’s right, you couldn’t just walk away and forget it. The sound was so great. It’s taken a long time to know each other properly, I think, because a lot of the time that we’ve spent together has been spent getting on with what’s in hand, rather than with getting to know each other. We’ve got to know each other more through playing than we’ve got to the playing through knowing each other, if you see what I mean. But had we not had Peter [Grant – manager] behind us we could easily have gone to pieces. As much as the credit goes to us, it goes to old Peter as well, because he goes all round the States with us, everywhere we go, when he could just sit in the office in London. He’s been a big part of the thing – it’s a funny relationship all round, I don’t think Jonesy’s ever worked with anybody like me before, me not knowing any of the rudiments of music or anything like that, and not really desiring to learn them, but still hitting it off – that’s been amazing. What about America, how did the success come about? It was just the way it happened. The old story goes that we tried to play in England several times, trying to get billed as Led Zeppelin, and they always put “the New Yardbirds” on the posters, every time, and they’d drag along the audience who’d come four years before to hear the Yardbirds, and of course there we were, doing stuff like Communication Breakdown. So America saved us, because they were willing to book us under our new name, everybody knowing who Jimmy was and not having to rely on the Yardbirds’ name. Did you enjoy the Bath festival? You seemed to be one of the few bands that really succeeded, possibly because you’d got it all together in front. We enjoyed it, but I think it was the biggest strain we’ve ever had. There must have been a big thing around us, with everybody saying, “Well, they don’t play very often, I wonder what they’re really like?” We’d never done much, no TV or radio, nobody could see one of us and think, “Ah, he’s that kind of a bloke.” So we knew that it was going to be a crucial thing. We went on and we knew that the next two or three hours were going to be the ones, as far as holding our heads high. You can still go to the States and earn incredible bread, but that’s not what it’s all about. I think really we weren’t into it until the acoustic number, when we all had a chance to sit down and take a look around. Then it was like clockwork, we looked at each other and we heard it was sounding good, and we looked down and everybody else was grooving too. It must have been strange for you, topping the bill over the bands you’ve always admired, like the Airplane and the Byrds. Right. I didn’t feel guilty, but the geezer had probably billed us like that because of our mystery value, not having played around much. The Byrds are like the Youngbloods – they can do anything and it’ll be good. Those are the groups, the ones who have an atmosphere, and I’d really like to think that we’re one of them, in our own way. It isn’t just a teenybopper-swinging-the-mic-around thing, there’s something else going on. Like there’ll be one number that we’ve been doing every night for God knows how long, and every night it’s different. Maybe Bonzo’ll start it out of the blue while everybody’s having a quick orange juice, and we’ll probably go through a lot of different things before we finally get into the riff of the song we’re going to play. I think the audience knows that it isn’t all a contrived thing. That’s one thing about blues – you can do more or less anything, around a very vague shell, and the more of it you do, the better you get until at the end there’s very few boundaries to it at all, and yet it’s all very tight. All this jamming that’s going on, it’s there in a way but it never quite reaches what we get. There’s been four of us together for 20 months now, and because we start going off like that on the first night that we ever played, the end product now is really good to listen to all the time. You mentioned that the third Zeppelin album is particularly satisfying to you. Does this mean that things have got better recently, and can you see the band lasting longer as a result? You can never say what’s going to last for how long, but it’s so refreshing to all of us to be able to sit down and come up with these things, with everybody having ideas that they’ve never had before, everybody being a part of a finished article, and it’s good. All that crap about Zeppelin splitting up – when you turn out an album like the new one, everybody’s really pleased. Zeppelin’ll last as long as it’ll last, but it’s really good to know that from the first LP to the third LP has been a very nice change, producing something different all the time. What would you really like to do, musically, in the future? There’s a lot of things that I’ve never tried that I’d like to do. I’d like to play more instruments, because it’s confining only to be able to strum a guitar and not be a part of it. But really, any type of music that I could suggest has already been verged on by Zeppelin, and it’s approached by everyone in a very personal way. When you’re doing that, you’re going on to the boundaries of anything that you might want to do. The makings of it are all there, so I don’t think I’ve got any bother. © Richard Williams, 1970 ------------------------------------ Original article:

What Nassau Coliseum Means To Me by Chris Dordon In July of 2015, the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum will exist no more. It will be torn down, renovated, refinished… however you look at it, the barn will never be the same again. My first time at Nassau Coliseum was when I was the ripe old age of 6. It was an Islanders game against the original Winnipeg Jets. I remember a small amount of the game. The final score was 7-5 Winnipeg and Ziggy Palffy netted a hat trick. It was also a game in which I saw Derek King take a face plant onto the ice, subsequently breaking his jaw. From that moment my favorite player was Palffy. The following season I went to a game between the Isles and Panthers. It was a snooze fest, 0-0 going into overtime. I don’t remember the end to the third period, because as a 7 year old sitting in the 300′s, I fell asleep! I’ll tell you what though. I woke right up when the Isles scored the game winner in OT and the barn erupted. I’ve seen other events at the Nassau Coliseum too. I saw Monster Jam there a couple time as well as Supercross. I saw the Backstreet Boys when I was 11. More recently I saw one of the greatest non-sporting events I’ll ever witness at the Nassau Coliseum. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame came to town and performed the immortal classic album, “The Wall”. It was a dream come true for a kid who will never see a true Pink Floyd show. I grew up with my father listening to bands like Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin. I guess some of those tastes were transferred onto me because when the show was announced I begged him to go. It worked. The stage effects, the atmosphere, and the music were once in a lifetime for me. The epitome of all events though, for me, was game four of the Eastern Conference Quarterfinals against the Pittsburgh Penguins on May 7, 2013. Of all the times I’ve been to Nassau Coliseum, never have I felt electricity like I did that night. The Islanders die hards all showed up and it was so LOUD. Before they even had warm ups, chants of “Let’s Go Is-lan-ders!” filled the air. They had a car painted in Penguins colors outside for fans to beat with a sledgehammer. As the puck dropped, I couldn’t hear the person next to me. When Brian Strait scored the first goal of the game the place exploded. The game was back and forth until the third period. You all know what happened. The Captain, John Tavares, delivered. The go-ahead goal gives me goose bumps as I write this. I’ve never felt more PROUD to be an Islanders fan than I did at that moment. The final score was 6-4 Islanders. It was at this time when I found my home away from home in Nassau, Section 329. I had sat there by coincidence for the playoff game, that’s where my tickets ended up being when I bought them. It was during that game when I had my first experience with the group known as the Blue and Orange Army. Throughout the summer of 2013, I started talking to the members of the BOA. They welcomed me with open arms for the 2013-14 season and I now can proudly call myself a member of the group of not only Islanders fans, but some of the best friends I’ve ever had. The 2013-14 season was the most fun I’ve had, even though it was so disappointing on the ice. I’m going to miss this old barn. It’s going to be a rough ride the first couple seasons in Brooklyn, where the Islanders, as we all know, will make Barclays Center their home. It’s going to be strange getting used to having to take a train and not being able to show up at the parking lot early to hang out with friends and tailgate. No longer will we have the compact sightlines and unobstructed views of the ice at the Nassau Coliseum. We won’t have a center hung scoreboard, unless you consider the center of the ice the blue line. It’ll be different. Sometimes change is good. We will just have to wait and see. http://eyesonisles.com/2014/08/31/nassau-coliseum-means/

APRS Exhibition, May 28-29, 1971 Association of Professional Recording Studios London (Note: The article refers to John Paul Jones as "John Bonham")

Led Zeppelin turned down Woodstock for Asbury Park Jean Mikle, | August 23, 2014 It was Saturday Aug. 16, 1969, and at Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York, hundreds of thousands of people clustered on a mud-covered field for Day Two of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair. The lineup that day included some of the biggest bands in the land: Canned Heat, Mountain, Sly and the Family Stone, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Grateful Dead and The Who all played, although heavy rain and lengthy delays meant that several of the performers finished their sets in the wee hours on Sunday morning. This is a story, though, about a band that wasn’t there. Recruited to play at Woodstock, Led Zeppelin turned down the gig. Instead, they headlined a show about 150 miles south of Bethel, at Asbury Park’s Convention Hall, as part of promoter Moe Septee’s “Summer of Stars” concert series. Zeppelin’s manager, Peter Grant, apparently turned down Woodstock because he didn’t want his band to be part of a multi-act bill. In a 2010 interview on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” Zeppelin’s lead singer Robert Plant said, “Our management thought we would be typecast,” explaining that the festival was so visible that the fear was the guys’ performance would forever be linked to that particular event. Of course, in fairness, what a cultural touchstone Woodstock would become.” In the summer of 1969, Zeppelin was a band on the rise. Its self-titled first album, released in January of that year, reached Number 10 on the Billboard charts in the U.S., and peaked at Number 6 in the U.K. The band’s pairing of blues, folk and psychedelia eventually would make it the biggest band of the 1970s, “as influential in that decade as The Beatles were in the previous one,” according to their biography on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame site. Zeppelin would play more than 40 gigs on their Summer of 69 tour of U.S. At Convention Hall, they did two shows — at 7:30 and 9:45 p.m. — as was typical of bands who played Septee’s summer concert series. Tickets were $5.50 and $4.50, and $2.50 for standing room. The opener in Asbury: a young British blues-rocker named Joe Cocker. Glen Partusch was only 12 years old in 1969, but he already was working at Convention Hall, hawking programs during the shows. Before the concerts, Partusch’s job was to number the seats that were placed on the floor of the hall before each show. “We had the little stickers and we had to number each of them,” said Partusch, 57, who lives in Monmouth Beach. He remembers that the 7:30 p.m. Zeppelin show was not sold out. “You could just walk up to the door and buy a ticket for $5.50,” he said, but the second one was “pretty much a sell-out.” After seeing Zeppelin play, Partusch got its debut album the next day, although he didn’t buy it in a store. Instead, he won it at a boardwalk stall on Asbury’s boardwalk. But it was Joe Cocker, backed by the Grease Band, and not Led Zeppelin, who stole the show in Partusch’s eyes. “They were wild,” he remembered. “Seeing him perform, with the songs and the hand gestures, you couldn’t take your eyes off him. After the first show, I couldn’t wait for the second show to see it again.” Asbury Park Press music writer Joan Pikula also seemed to like Joe Cocker just a bit more. In her review of the show, which ran in the Aug. 18, 1969 edition of the Press, Pikula wrote, “Joe Cocker is something to see. Lining him up with Zeppelin was an interesting idea and while it probably wasn’t planned, what the proximity does is present a picture of pseudo-blues and blues-where-it’s-really-at. Plant’s vocals could not seem anything but “staged” when seen against Cocker’s ... it is Cocker who is a blues man from the inside out and Plant who merely sings the blues.” Joe Cocker did make it to Woodstock. He and the Grease Band headed to Bethel after the Asbury show. Cocker would play at 2 p.m. Aug. 17 at Woodstock, and his powerful, soulful performance would propel him to stardom. For Deal resident Pam DeLisa, Led Zeppelin was definitely the draw. Sixteen years old that summer, DeLisa already was a huge Zeppelin fan. At the second show on Aug. 16, she had standing-room-only tickets, but managed to work her way right up to the stage by the end of the concert. Even better, she received a kiss from a T-shirt clad, super sexy Robert Plant, with his long mane of golden hair. But it was not until 45 years later that DeLisa realized that the night had been even more special than she remembered. For decades, she had kept her ticket stub along with two items she had taken from the stage that night at show’s end: a paper cup that had once been filled with whiskey for the band, and a cigarette. About a week ago she pulled out the ticket stub and was surprised to see some writing on the back. At first, she was annoyed. “I couldn’t believe someone had scribbled on the back of the ticket,” DeLisa said. Then she looked closer. The scribbling turned out to the signatures of Plant and Led Zeppelin’s lead guitarist, Jimmy Page. “Love to Pam,” they had written. “I couldn’t believe it,” DeLisa said. “I must have been so excited about getting kissed by Robert Plant that I forgot that I had gotten the autographs.” It may not have been Woodstock, but Aug. 16, 1969, was certainly a night to remember on the Jersey Shore. http://www.app.com/story/news/local/2014/08/23/led-zeppelin-turned-woodstock-asbury-park/14496865/

http://www.ledzeppelin.com/show/august-16-1969

August 16, 1969 | Asbury Park, NJ US Convention Hall http://www.ledzeppelin.com/show/august-16-1969

San Diego 1977 - 2-1-77 (sold out) http://www.ledzeppelin.com/show/june-19-1977

St. Paul 1977 http://www.ledzeppelin.com/show/april-13-1977

Start Up (France) June 2014

Here's the article, from December 1967, originally scheduled for two nights at the Olympia. Not sure why it was cancelled....

Dome memories: Time for the Fort Worth convention arena to go Thursday, Jul. 17, 2014 Finally, Fort Worth is putting the convention center arena out of our misery. The scene of 1970s sellout rock concerts, but forever an awful sports arena, the saucer-like downtown dome will be junked as soon as the city and donors can afford a new Cultural District events center. Frankly, the arena should have given way to a convention ballroom long ago. It’s almost embarrassing that a city larger than Denver, Washington, Nashville, Boston or Kansas City relies on civic arenas built in 1968, 1936 and 1908. “It needs to go,” said Melvin Morgan, 68, of Azle. For 18 years until 1997, he kept the seats packed and the roof patched when it was the Tarrant County Convention Center. “Fort Worth is finally doing things downtown that people have talked about for years. It was just a matter of how fast they could get a new rodeo arena up. We need that, too.” If you haven’t followed the checkerboard jump of arenas, touring events will move to a new, 12,000-seat rodeo and exposition center south of the current Will Rogers Memorial Center in the Cultural District. News reports in competition-wary Denver put the Fort Worth arena cost at $450 million, half privately funded. At the downtown convention center, the horseshoe-shaped arena may be replaced with a 50,000-foot ballroom flexible for convention sessions or trade shows. Morgan remembered a career of coordinating rock concerts and tractor pulls in the arena and ballet performances in the old theater (before today’s Bass Hall). When a U.S. president visited in 1976, the marquee read: “Welcome President Ford.” But that was in small letters. Above, in larger letters, the marquee announced: “Arena — May 3 — Paul McCartney.” The arena hosted Elvis Presley for record crowds at nine shows in three visits, the Rolling Stones, gymnastics star Nadia Comăneci in the 1979 World Artistic Gymnastics Championships and U.S. stars Andre Agassi and John McEnroe in the 1992 Davis Cup world tennis finals. It was also the oddly shaped home court for Fort Worth’s only major league sports team ever: the 1970-71 basketball Texas Chaparrals. Before that, they had been the Dallas Chaparrals. Now, they’re the San Antonio Spurs. “But we had lots of wrestling and [minor league] hockey,” Morgan said. When Dallas’ wrestling Von Erich brothers were at the top of their career, Morgan said, “The crowds were so huge and wild we almost couldn’t handle it.” When the legendary 1995 hailstorm pounded Fort Worth with grapefruit-sized hailstones, the center had 10,000 guests at a marketing convention and another full house at an exhibit-hall trade show. Hail broke through the theater roof and pounded sets for an opera. Morgan remembered years of finicky concert artists and rock stars between 1968 and 1980, when Dallas’ now-gone Reunion Arena opened and took most tours. The band Parliament Funkadelic ended one show by staging a giant pie fight on stage. Morgan had the catering staff bake 300 cream pies that the housekeeping staff later cleaned up. Presley made only one special request, Morgan said: a six-pack of Cokes, “and he didn’t drink a single one.” But when the late actor and singer Yul Brynner came to the theater, his agent insisted on one very personal amenity: a brand-new toilet seat. The arena also hosted U2, Led Zeppelin, Johnny Cash, Dean Martin, an ill-conceived rodeo on a shallow layer of imported dirt and once, a bullfight. Now, it hosts mostly conventions coming to a much more energetic downtown Fort Worth. “It’s time for a change,” Morgan said. “I could never have imagined how beautiful the rest of the center has turned out. They need to do something just as beautiful in place of the arena.” The dome is done. By Bud Kennedy http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/07/17/5978572/dome-memories-time-for-the-fort.html?rh=1

That's incorrect. One member of LZ met with Elvis on another occasion, at his home in Los Angeles.

Muziek.NL

Cover artist Hiromichiito, website: http://en.tis-home.com/hiromichiito/works/51 inside drawings:

1969 TV ad for a skating rink in Iran... http://youtu.be/rxGC5Elx9eo

Young Mates Music Player (July 2014) Japan

Blitz (June 2014) Portugal

NME (May 2014)

MOJO 248 / June 2014

Rock & Folk - June 2014

Muziek Expres

Getting off topic re: Nash the Slash, but... He also shot some great pics of Zep at the Rockpile, 8-18-69. Though, he made it clear that he was no Zep fan, when I was in touch with him.....