What was it like to attend a Led Zeppelin concert?
Led Zeppelin was the first full-scale rock concert I ever went to.
It was spring of 1977 at the Chicago Stadium. I was fifteen years old and actually not the biggest Zep fan around but had managed to get 14th-row tickets from a family friend with radio connections.
(This is not my ticket stub but is from the next night)
The overall experience was somewhat overwhelming to my tender suburban teenage sensibilities. First and foremost, I remember how loud it was — this was well before the lawsuits started rolling in and decibel limits started being enforced. If you’ve only seen concerts in the last 20 years or so, trust me, you have no idea just how loud a heavy ’70s band could get in the confines of an arena.
In the same way, the rather antiseptic, security-conscious atmosphere at a modern arena cannot compare to the free-for-all grunge of a ’70s rock show at an old-school venue, where substances of all sorts were freely distributed and consumed and a haze of smoke quickly formed above the crowd. Rolls of toilet paper purloined from the bathrooms, along with some firecrackers, flew from the balconies. Amazingly stoned people were everywhere. There was a palpable sense of danger and chaos in the air even before the show started.
(pictures from Chicago, IL Chicago Stadium April 6, 1977 – Photos )
A second memory was how sloppy the mighty Zep was on stage. Both from a personal appearance perspective — Jimmy Page was glassy-eyed, chain-smoking, and swilling from bottles — and a musical one. (Two nights later the show would be cut short as Page succumbed to “food poisoning” on stage). John Bonham was ripping through a seemingly endless supply of Heinekens from a cooler next to his riser, and sometimes missed cues to start or stop a song. Robert Plant and John Paul Jones, by comparison, appeared calm, cool and collected; Plant was the clear frontman, cracking wise about the rest of the band.
To say the show was rough around the edges was an understatement: I had recently seen The Song Remains the Same and expected the same level of tight playing (the performances in that film were from 1973, the consensus peak of the band’s live career, and may have been aided by post-production).
After a shambling beginning they hit a groove; smoke poured out onto the stage and spooky lighting for “No Quarter”, followed by a sit-down acoustic set featuring “Going to California” and “The Battle of Evermore” where Jones held down the main guitar work leaving Page to the mandolin. At this point, what awesomeness there was was peaking, Plant in particular was just emanating that Golden God aura, which he extended through “Kashmir” and “Black Country Woman”.
The show hit another low point near the end: Bonham’s solo (“Moby Dick”) was long and pointless, Page’s solo (with the violin bow) was basically just noise accompanying a laser show. The next song was “Achilles’ Last Stand” — Presence had just dropped — and it was just awful: Page seemed to be hitting chords at random and Bonham was completely off. The crowd became increasingly stoned and disconnected with lots of bathroom running and sleepiness going on at this point.
Just as the crowd is slipping away, Plant calls out “last song” and the band launches into “Stairway To Heaven”, instantly bringing everybody back onboard. Remember, this is 1977; “Stairway” is still everybody’s favorite epic rather than the cliche’ that it would eventually become; it’s nearly three hours into the show and the crowd is orgiastic. Plant reprises his quip from the earlier live recording (“does anybody remember laughter?”) as “does anybody remember forests?”.
“Rock and Roll” is the encore and “Trampled Under Foot” the finale. The crowd is deaf, pummeled into submission, past its drug-induced peak.
In retrospect, I think I stumbled upon a peak moment in the kind of wretched, ego-driven, drug-fueled excess that eventually sunk what would later be known as “classic rock” and would spawn punk and grunge.
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