Random Newspaper Articles

apologies for posting this without date headline, and this is duplicate as well, as you have submitted contribution to timeline same previously...the details...

The article is: Salt Lake City Tribune, 28th May 1973, "Page" 11

LordStanley · June 21, 2014

I"m not sure if this link belongs in this particular thread but I thought that it was in interesting read. Sorry if it's been posted somewhere on the Forum already.

Article from Slate.com...not too fawning and not too critical. Good Times Bad Times

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2014/06/led_zeppelin_how_jimmy_page_robert_plant_et_al_invented_modern_rock.single.html

scylla · June 21, 2014

I"m not sure if this link belongs in this particular thread but I thought that it was in interesting read. Sorry if it's been posted somewhere on the Forum already.

Article from Slate.com...not too fawning and not too critical.

"Dazed and Confused is a lousy song, the musical equivalent of plastering a horrific tragedy on your album cover and then asking your art department to make it look more like an erection."

I don't agree at all, but I must say I laughed.

LordStanley · June 21, 2014

"Dazed and Confused is a lousy song, the musical equivalent of plastering a horrific tragedy on your album cover and then asking your art department to make it look more like an erection."

I don't agree at all, but I must say I laughed.

The writer was a bit erratic in his opinions. Zeppelin was either the most influential, innovative rock band of all time or a chronic purveyor of complete rubbish . Possibly both.

All I said was that the article would be an interesting read.

Perhaps I should have called it too fawning AND too critical...alternately from one paragraph to the next.

Edited June 21, 2014 by LordStanley

scylla · June 21, 2014

The writer was a bit erratic in his opinions. Zeppelin was either the most influential, innovative rock band of all time or a chronic purveyor of complete rubbish . Possibly both.

All I said was that the article would be an interesting read.

Perhaps I should have called it too fawning AND too critical...alternately from one paragraph to the next.

It was a VERY interesting read. Rarely have I disagreed with something so much ("Tangerine" one of their best, and "Dazed" lousy? Please) whilst also really enjoying it. He's very intelligent and perceptive, even if I think he's mostly wrong. (He's not being iconoclastic for the sake of it). And that's probably what actually does you some good to read, a hell of a lot more than just reading stuff that reinforces what you already think. Although the bits that DO reinforce what I already thought are awesome. That description of what's great about "Good Times Bad Times" is so completely bang on.

“True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;

Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,

That gives us back the image of our mind." - Pope

Sorry, I'm feeling poetical today. But that's the nature of the best rock writing - you don't need a writer to tell you to love something, but when they can really capture why you do, it's glorious.

LordStanley · June 22, 2014

It was a VERY interesting read. Rarely have I disagreed with something so much ("Tangerine" one of their best, and "Dazed" lousy? Please) whilst also really enjoying it. He's very intelligent and perceptive, even if I think he's mostly wrong. (He's not being iconoclastic for the sake of it). And that's probably what actually does you some good to read, a hell of a lot more than just reading stuff that reinforces what you already think. Although the bits that DO reinforce what I already thought are awesome. That description of what's great about "Good Times Bad Times" is so completely bang on.

I laughed at the line where he mentioned that Whole Lotta Love is barely a song. Until I thought about it.

There really aren't any chord changes per se, no switch from verse to chorus. Really no chorus to speak of at all. The song is just the awesome chugging riff, wild middle section, guitar solo, same riff and Plant wailing his way back to the riff outro. Clocking in at over 5 minutes, it was an extended piece of rock music back then.

I guess that's part of the beauty of Led Zeppelin's music. Even a seemingly simple song structure could still have so much innovative nuance that set it apart from anything that had been heard before

sam_webmaster · August 21, 2014

St. Paul 1977

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

sam_webmaster · August 21, 2014

San Diego 1977 - 2-1-77 (sold out)

http://www.ledzeppelin.com/show/june-19-1977

SteveAJones · August 22, 2014

Great contributions, Sam.

sam_webmaster · August 23, 2014

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

badgeholder · August 23, 2014

The St Paul reviewer claims there was a "45 minute version of No Quarter"

sam_webmaster · September 10, 2014

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.

------------------------------------

Original article:

LZ77 · September 11, 2014

St. Paul 1977

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

WOW!! it would be great to see if the photog Doug Connell is still around. He must have some great photos of the show.

sam_webmaster · September 16, 2014

Bay Area Jazz News : 11-11-69

badgeholder · September 19, 2014

This is very interesting, I hope the rest of the article can be located

PlanetPage · October 5, 2014

">http://

Austalia Archives Links...Canberra Times Additional LZ Articles

http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/result?q=Led+Zeppelin&exactPhrase=&anyWords=&notWords=&requestHandler=&dateFrom=1972-01-01&dateTo=1973-12-01&l-advcategory=Article&l-word=*ignore*|*ignore*&l-illustrated=*ignore*|*ignore*&sortby=dateAsc

Edited October 6, 2014 by PlanetPage

PlanetPage · October 15, 2014

...Image Courtesty with Very Sincerest Thanks to Research Staff/Oaklahoma Historical Society...

The Daily Oaklahoman January 31,1977..

">http://

PlanetPage · October 15, 2014

Courtesy : OK Historical Society/Research Staff

..Cont'd article January 31, 1977 Daily Oaklahoman..

">http://

OK. State Archives...Thus far..

SteveAJones · October 15, 2014

Welcomed additions to the archive, Planet Page!

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