As you all might know by now, I am a big fan of Led Zeppelin. Have been for at least 30 years now. Their official YouTube channel just posted this nice rare 8mm film from 1975 during a Chicago concert and performing (in parts) "No Quarter", "Moby Dick", "Whole Lotta Love", and "Black Dog."
They were at their peak during this era. Classic stuff.
Wonderful audio and visual mashup of classic Led Zeppelin riffs, with various Christmas melodies along with some Bloom County (one of my old favorite comic strips) visuals, from the animated special, A Wish for Wings that Work.
Led Zeppelin To Tour, Record Without Plant?
The non-singing members of Led Zeppelin apparently aren't waiting around for Robert Plant to sign off on a reunion tour and/or album. In an interview with BBC Radio, bassist John Paul Jones said he and guitarist Jimmy Page and drummer Jason Bonham "are trying out a couple of singers."
"We want to do it," he said. "It's sounding great and we want to get on and get out there." But he cautioned Plant sound-a-likes were not the goal, and that "it's got to be right. There's no point in just finding another Robert. You could get that out of a tribute band, but we don't want to be our own tribute band."
With Plant, Zeppelin reunited for a well-received one-off concert last December in London. But Plant, who has been touring with Alison Krauss for most of 2008, recently said he has no plans to work with the band again.
In recent months, Page, Jones and Bonham have logged rehearsal time together in the hopes Plant would agree to tour. Rumors have also circulated that Alter Bridge vocalist Myles Kennedy is in the running to step in for Plant.
On Nov. 4, Rhino will release a 10-disc boxed set featuring Led Zeppelin's nine studio albums plus the rarities album "Coda" in mini-LP replica sleeves with artwork from the original U.K. vinyl releases.
[Billboard]
Would you still see them in concert?
Musicians thousands of miles apart have managed to put together the best Led Zeppelin covers ever recorded.
Recently a group of YouTube musicians, who specialized mostly in making videos of themselves jamming along to CDs in their basements and bedrooms, formed a band, of sorts, called Virtual Zeppelin. In an Internet filled with musicians of every imaginable stripe and talent level, these guys share something special. They can play Led Zeppelin with freakish accuracy. The fact that they live tens of thousands of miles apart—from Canada to Japan to Northern Virginia—is no longer a barrier to putting together the best Led Zeppelin cover band in history.
The technology behind "Virtual Zeppelin" isn't rocket science. Each guy records his part. They pass around multitrack files along with individual videos, and the last guy in the chain mixes everything down into the finished product. Easy. And because of that, there's already a few similar projects popping up online—virtual mashups dedicated to Deep Purple, the Beatles and Kiss, to name a few. Almost as soon as you see and hear these things you understand the brilliance of it, and you just know it's going to be huge.
This is what Web 2.0 is all about.
Led Zeppelin perform in Los Angeles, June 23 1977, at the L.A. Forum, with Keith Moon who joins onstage. (8mm film).
It's spliced very poorly, but hey, back in 1977, what should you expect with amateur videotaping.
For the Keith Moon segment, forward to around 5:30 mark. You will get to see Robert Plant on DRUMS for a few seconds while Keith blabbers on the mic until Plant rips it out of his hands. Then Keith Moon joins in with the whole band standing next to Bonham playing kettle drums on "Rock And Roll". Cool historical shit.
To give you an idea of the level of care that goes into the manufacture of the box set, you can see a video of the process here.
British pop star Leona Lewis and Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page performed the Led Zeppelin classic “Whole Lotta Love” at the Closing Ceremony for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games at the National Stadium on August 24, 2008 in Beijing, China.
With another dramatic fireworks display Sunday evening at the National Stadium here, the Beijing Olympics came to a dazzling close, ending two weeks of spectacular athletic performances during an Olympic competition that was surprisingly free of protests or the disruptions that some, including Beijing, had anticipated.
In addition to fireworks, there were acrobats clinging to a large “memory tower” at the center of the stadium, also known as the Bird’s Nest, precision drummers, bicyclists and performers representing 56 ethnic groups singing, “Please Stay, Guests From Afar.”
And unlike in the opening ceremony, with its orderly parade of countries and their athletes, the closing ceremony brought flag bearers congregating in the middle, and athletes filing in somewhat haphazardly and many dressed less formally.
In the handover ceremony for the 2012 London Games, a red double-decker bus entered the stadium just after 9 p.m., followed by three cyclists. The bus then opened into a stage with Jimmy Page, the Led Zeppelin guitarist, performing “Whole Lotta Love” with the British singer Leona Lewis, and David Beckham, the soccer star, taking a soccer ball from a young Chinese girl, handing the games off to London.
Check out the video of their performance here (video redirects to official NBC broadcast):
Robert Anthony Plant (born August 20, 1948, West Bromwich, England), is an English rock singer and songwriter, famous for his membership in the English rock band Led Zeppelin as the lead vocalist, as well as for his successful solo career. He recently released a folk based album with folk singer Alison Krauss.
http://www.robertplant.com/
Some Non-Led Zeppelin Robert Plant tracks/classics ...
Rolf Harris - Stairway To Heaven
A revealing new programme will examine the artists and music which shaped one of the world’s greatest rock’n’roll bands, Led Zeppelin.
Down The Tracks: The Music That Influenced Led Zeppelin contains rare and previously unseen footage of Howlin’ Wolf, Charley Patton, Son House, Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and Bukka White.
The DVD will also look at some the lesser known artist and movements, such as skiffle, folk and even an exploration of their interest in the occult, which are clearly identifiable on Led Zeppelin’s albums.
Renowned producers Joe Boyd and Larry Cohn, and musicians like John Renbourn, Chas McDevitt and Davey Graham give revealing interviews alongside blues historians and music authors.
The DVD is due for release on 15 September 2008.
[Uncut]
TOKYO - Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page said Monday he was ready to take the iconic band on a world tour after burning up the stage at last month's reunion concert in London. But it probably won't be before September.
"The amount of work we put into O2 was what you would normally put into a world tour anyway," Page, 64, said of the intense rehearsing the band did for the Dec. 10 concert at London's O2 Arena.
The band's three surviving members — Page, singer Robert Plant and bassist-keyboardist John Paul Jones — were joined at the sold-out benefit show by the late John Bonham's son Jason on drums.
Page, who was in Japan to promote the new Zeppelin release, "Mothership," said the two-hour-plus concert was proof that Led Zeppelin can still perform at its best.
He said the band, which formed in 1968, was ready musically to get back together and take it out on a wider run, but it was not clear when it would go on tour as the singer had other plans.
"Robert Plant has a parallel project and he is busy with that until September," Page said.
Plant and bluegrass star Alison Krauss will begin their world tour with a run of shows in the southern U.S. this spring. The two released an album in October called "Raising Sand" that debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard chart in the U.S. The duo will tour Europe in May before returning for North American shows still to be announced for June and July.
Page said the band set their standards very high before agreeing to do the reunion, their first in 20 years. Led Zeppelin broke up in 1980 after the elder Bonham's death.
Page said they rehearsed for weeks, apprehensive that the cohesion they had in the 1970s when they were at their peak might be hard to rediscover.
"We wanted people who might not have even been alive in 1980 when we finished to understand what we were," he said.
Page said all went well until he broke a finger in three places, forcing the band to postpone the show for several weeks.
"But we did the show, and it was great," he said. "It was instant in terms of chemistry."
Source [Yahoo]
VIDEO OF THE WEEK:
Stairway to Heaven by The Beatnix, Australian Beatles Tribute Band
Led Zeppelin's "Mothership" compilation (Rhino/Atlantic) surges 6-1 in its fifth week on European Top 100 Albums to top the survey for the first time.
The Zeppelin album enjoys a sales spurt from publicity surrounding the group's reunion performance at the Ahmet Ertegun memorial concert at London's 02 Arena Dec. 10. In Austria it leaps 16-4, in Germany 12-4, and in the group's native United Kingdom, it's up 8-4. "The massive buzz around the reunion gig, coupled with a powerful marketing campaign, has seen sales of 'Mothership' soar," says Dan Chalmers, VP at Rhino UK & International. "The strength of both the two and three disc versions has meant it's appealing to long term collectors and, importantly, new fans, and proving to be an ideal festive gift."
In the aftermath of the O2 gig, Led Zeppelin sip cocoa and try to figure out what the hell they're gonna do next (once Plant gets his Alison Krauss tour out of the way)... meanwhile, probably in the home counties, Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason has dropped huge hints that the psychprog overlords could be hitting the road again.
Mason told XFM that 2005’s Live 8 event “showed that the door can be opened” for future Floyd reunions. Pigs flew (geddit?) when the group rejoined at Live 8 so it’ll probably take something that big to get Waters and Gilmore pallying up again. “If there was a suitable reason or things change a bit in the next year or two and everybody suddenly thinks, ‘Well, actually, I really would like to do that’ then I think it’ll happen,” Mason explained, but “the only thing that would generate it would be something the equivalent of Live 8.” Of course, they nearly got it on in tribute to Syd Barrett...
The band had to abort a reunion at last year’s Syd Barrett tribute and Mason, who Rolling Stone rag dubbed a moonlighting 'rock fantasy-camp counselor', blamed bad timing as opposed to ego war. “Roger was on at Earls Court the next day and so he’d arranged to go on early... and Dave couldn’t get there ’til late … so everything conspired against us but it wasn’t a case of ‘We’re not going to play together.'”
Of course, if the band did get back together, I think it would be churlish to hope to hear Careful With That Axe, Eugene and See Emily Play, but you never know do you? There's better ways of paying tribute to the late Syd than wheeling Crazy Diamond out again. People who work in lazer light shows and dry ice, start sitting by the phone now.
Source [Electric Roulette]
Led Zeppelin fans who weren’t able to get tickets for the band’s reunion show at London’s O2 Arena, and those who just want to pretend that they went, are now buying the ticket stubs and cut-off wristbands from the show off eBay for prices as high as £125 each. If that number sounds familiar, it’s because that’s the same amount 20,000 lucky lottery winners spent to actually see Led Zeppelin perform.
Source [RollingStone]
Led Zeppelin Stairway To Heaven Live Video at O2
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