Stairway To Bourbon Street

[Jahfin]

Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and Ernie K-Doe. Photo by Sidney Smith.

It’s May of 1973 and the British Gods of Rock—Led Zeppelin—sweep into New Orleans at the height of their mysterious and epochal powers as arguably the best rock band in the world. They play a strange concert that night in the Municipal Auditorium; after all, it is New Orleans and Zeppelin is on stage playing their best stuff to a bunch of stoners and hippies and, well, you get the picture. “Jimmy suggestively bowed Robert’s bum during ‘Dazed and Confused,’” says rock journalist Stephen Davis in Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga.

“[The Municipal Auditorium] wasn’t state of the art even for those days,” remembers former Atlantic Records executive Phillip Rauls (pronounced like Rolls-Royce, just like the kind Keith Moon drove into a hotel swimming pool.) “It was in a rundown area of town.”

Rauls remembers very well those hours just before Led Zeppelin took the stage at New Orleans Municipal Auditorium on the night of May 14, 1973. “In those days, we partied hard,” he says. “We partied before the concerts as well, and such was the case with that particular event. Hell, we were in New Orleans having a Dixie beer and a bowl of gumbo! We were all pretty sky-high if you know what I mean.”

Rock critic Jon Newlin wrote a review about the concert in the May 19, 1973 issue of Figaro, a review that is either a brilliant piece of writing or nonsensical rubbish as the Brits say. He described Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant as “a verdical odalisque with a shiny, cylindrical neck like Fernand Leger’s Big Julie, a cross between a peachy Jacobean kewpie doll, and a hard 40’s blonde (on the order of, say, Lizabeth Scott) after 800 volts worth of spoolies. Along with a zany, dumb, rubber band singing voice, he has a cagey galumphing balls-of-the-feet dance style.”

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[dpat]

Even though I expect that Atlantic Records executive Phillip Rauls to eventually say, in Monty Python voice, "You know what I'm saying? Eh? Nudge nudge. Wink wink," the article was interesting. And I loved that it seemed to solve a part of "Royal Orleans" lyric I've been baffled by for some time:

Out at a hotel in the quarter, our friends check in to pass the night

Now love gets hot, but fire preceded water

Poor whiskers set the room alight.

Whiskers!

Most LZ lyric sites claim it is "...our friendship took a bash tonight." I prefer the version above.

Thanks!