Footage like this helps someone from a younger generation (hmmm, a self-reference here) understand what made a Led Zeppelin concert such an amazing event.
This is not a complete show or anything like that. It's 10 minutes total, and due to the nature of the 8mm video camera, no portion of the concert extends more than a few seconds. But there's still a lot to witness -- and to appreciate.
Take "Whole Lotta Love" for example. With the clips that exist of this song, we get a portion of a Theremin solo from Jimmy Page. Seconds later, at the 6:22 mark, off go the onstage pyrotechnics. At 6:37, while they're still finishing the song, the next special effect is John Bonham's gong, which is now on fire. And you thought you were cool!
Prior to today, this footage was exclusively the subject of bootlegs, having been released on a Cosmic Energy bootleg DVD specializing in footage shot over the three nights at Madison Square Garden, plus some outtakes from The Song Remains the Same and a movie trailer. The official Led Zeppelin YouTube channel contains a few gems that aren't available on any official release, such as this Chicago '75 footage that has well over 1 million views.
This marks the second time in as many weeks that some rare Led Zeppelin footage has appeared online. On April 29, a YouTube user posted a rare video of Led Zeppelin miming to "You Shook Me" for the TV show "Beat Club" in 1969, although the audio no longer remained after May 3 due to copyright policy.
The West German TV show "Beat Club" filmed Led Zeppelin lip synching to two songs on March 27, 1969. Neither clip made it to air that year, but when "Whole Lotta Love" was big in early 1970, the TV show took its existing Led Zeppelin footage and spliced it together to the tune of that song. One full year and a day after the filming, an episode aired with this composite "Whole Lotta Love" video. After this, the original footage, of two songs from Led Zeppelin's first album, was then forgotten about for good.
Well, it has taken longer than 40 years, but both of the original videos have finally been leaked online, unedited from their original form. The first to appear was "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You," which was published to YouTube in October 2007 and removed shortly thereafter, almost definitely due to copyright violation. That video can still be seen elsewhere.
Also long rumored to exist was "You Shook Me," now proven to exist with the upload of this YouTube video on April 29. It, too, may be removed shortly, so enjoy it while you can. Update: YouTube disabled the audio track on May 3 but kept the video intact. There is a message about the disabling:
NOTICE This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled.
As was the case with "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You," all four members of Led Zeppelin are playing along to the studio version of the track as heard on their first album. And because they never perform a song the same way twice, it's obvious that they're all miming their parts.
As "You Shook Me" begins, the camera is on Robert Plant, who should have started playing harmonica earlier than he did, only seconds in. No retake was necessary, however. You can also see John Bonham, oddly positioned not in his usual center place but on the left side of the screen, missing some cymbal crashes and inserting at least one where it doesn't belong.
Perhaps the most awkward moment of all can be claimed by John Paul Jones, who wasn't playing any keyboard instruments with any regularity in live performances until 1970. In this clip, he has to walk mid-song to take a new spot at an organ, give up playing his bass temporarily, and replicate an organ solo he might not have actually played more than once since he'd recorded it five months earlier.
On the other hand, Jimmy Page does a rather decent job of duplicating his guitar solo from the studio version. Moreover, the onstage chemistry between him and Plant is apparent at center stage.
It should be noted that not all the synchronization errors are Led Zeppelin's fault. The "You Shook Me" video appears to run faster than the audio itself, and so by the end of the clip, the visuals precede the sound by approximately a full second.
Credit goes to Gyozateisyoku, the YouTube user who uploaded this and 17 other rare classic rock TV performances this past month. Also receiving credit for unearthing this "You Shook Me" clip is one "Chris B.," a longtime member of the exclusive and esteemed trading circle Billy's Zep Phreaks Club (login and password authentication required). Club owner "BillyMacQ" shared a link to the video in a post to Led Zeppelin's official forum on April 30, crediting both players for the find.
Click on the newly launched www.JasonBonham.net, and one of the first images to flash on your screen is that of the young drummer as a child being coached on a small drum set by his proud father, the legendary Led Zeppelin skinsman John Bonham.
Then click into the meat and potatoes of the site's multimedia category, and you can choose from an assortment of rarely before seen videos Jason Bonham has posted. One particular gem in the bunch is home video footage of the next generation of Bonham drummers. Jason's son, Jager, is developing an airy right foot to generate some of the forcefulness on a bass drum made famous by the grandfather he never met.
Jason Bonham was already a veteran of several of his own bands by the time he was pulled to work with such acts as Paul Rodgers, UFO and Foreigner.
With Paul Rodgers:
With UFO:
With Foreigner:
With Slash:
Jason's street cred rose substantially when he performed an acclaimed show with the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin at the end of 2007.
Now, the 43-year-old drummer finally launches his first official Web site on the week of three concerts in Florida presented as "An Evening with Jason Bonham," starting this evening. Featured on the site are an array of photos and videos highlighting the career that has been practically as long as Bonham's life.
It's too early to tell if Jager will follow in his father's footsteps and carry on the family name. Such was the situation in the late '70s, when Jason was a child. Much to his dad's dismay and eventual encouragement, Jason took to dirtbikes and became a sponsored competing rider with a shot at turning pro. It was a year after John Bonham's death that Jason says he "hung up the helmet and picked up the sticks again."
Thirty-six hours remain in an online auction including items pertaining to Led Zeppelin. Bidding on the 12 Zeppelin-themed items ends at 10 p.m. Eastern on Thursday.
Accounting for more than half of that figure is the most prized item, an official hardcover program from the band's 2007 reunion concert that is signed on the cover by Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones. Bidding on this item passed the $2,000 mark yesterday.
Surprisingly, only one bid has been placed for a three-inch projector reel containing three minutes of 8 mm footage shot at Led Zeppelin's concert at the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino, Calif., on June 22, 1972. The high bid is currently a paltry $75.
Some stills from this silent color reel are shown here, and below the silent footage has been synchronized to an audio recording of the same performance.
Among the other auction items also available are live still photographs of the band, autographed fanzines and a book.
Proceeds are to benefit the Mount Sinai Hospital, Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Health Complex, located in Toronto: "Mount Sinai Hospital is an internationally recognized, 472-bed acute care academic health sciences centre affiliated with the University of Toronto. It is known for excellence in the provision of compassionate patient care, innovative education, and leading-edge research."
In other Zeppelin-related healthcare news, Robert Plant was mentioned by Sky News in an article yesterday as one of several celebrities advocating for the availability of a cancer treatment called photodynamic therapy. The procedure uses a laser light to starve cancer cells of oxygen, thereby killing them as the body replaces the cells by generating non-cancerous cells.
Roger Daltrey is another musician whose name is touted in the article as supporting a charity simply called Killing Cancer, which champions photodynamic therapy, or PDT. The article quotes Plant as saying:
"It really is an injustice that this form of treatment is not available to everyone in the UK. I have friends currently receiving PDT, but only because we pushed to get it."
Currently, the use of PDT internationally is limited in scope to only certain kinds of cancers, namely esophageal cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, and pre-cancerous esophageal lesions. Research in PDT is currently aimed at expanding its use to treat cancers beyond these and eventually use the therapy to treat throat cancer, brain tumors, breast cancer, and other conditions including Staph infections.
Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Robert Plant have joined other people close to the band in donating an array of books, photographs, and even two autographed Electric Magic fanzines, to be auctioned off for the hospital's benefit.
Of the items related to Led Zeppelin, the highest valued one is a concert program from the Ahmet Ertegun tribute concert, held in December 2007 at the O2 arena. (The event, of course, became more famous for its headlining act, the reunited Led Zeppelin with Jason Bonham on drums in place of his father.) Now bearing autographs by Page, Plant and Jones, this hardcover concert program, shown at right, carries an estimated value determined to be approximately $500.
The auction also includes:
live still photographs of the band in concert in 1973, 1975 and 1977;
an 8 mm film reel of footage shot from the front row of a Led Zeppelin concert in 1972;
Sam Rapallo, the author of those Electric Magic fanzines, has also signed a copy of his book, "Led Zeppelin: The Montreux Concerts," along with coauthor Gilles Chateau; that's being auctioned.
There's also a rare photo collection by Mick Bonham, brother of the late Led Zeppelin drummer, titled "Bonham by Bonham," which was released posthumously in a limited and numbered set.
Bidding for the Led Zeppelin-related items closes on Oct. 8 at 10 p.m. Eastern.
The announcement of these auction items comes 48 hours before Plant, who recently turned 61, is to take the stage at the O2 arena for the first time since the Led Zeppelin reunion. He's billed to appear at the star-studded Rockwell fundraiser.
The Rockwell lineup -- which also includes Tom Jones, Lulu, David Gray, Razorlight and Joss Stone, among others -- promises "unique collaborations." However, from an announcement of the full line-up, it does not appear Plant will be pairing up with any other acts on the bill. That doesn't mean he won't surprise us!
Proceeds from this concert on Friday are to benefit Nordoff-Robbins, a U.K. charity that uses music therapy techniques as a means to improve the quality of life for people living with various illnesses and conditions.
What happens when three generations of guitar heroes meet?
"Probably a fistfight," predicts Jack White, on his way to an arranged guitar summit with The Edge and Jimmy Page.
This comical prediction comes courtesy of a newly released trailer for the feature film "It Might Get Loud," which heads to theaters this August.
The trailer cuts to a scene with Page shot on location at Headley Grange, known to Led Zeppelin fans as the place where many of that group's songs were recorded. At the bottom of a staircase, Page names off one of them, "[When the] Levee Breaks."
The shots, in this film directed by Davis Guggenheim of "An Inconvenient Truth" success, bring this mythical and storied mansion to life for a mass of Zep fans who have never seen inside it before.
Just as this comes to life, Page says memories are coming back to him, and the shot changes to home footage I haven't ever seen before. Probably from 1971, Jimmy Page is shown wielding a guitar in a garden, presumably on the grounds of Headley Grange, with a dog relaxing on one side and an energetic Robert Plant bouncing around on the other side.
The trailer later cuts to a glimpse of Page playing air guitar, as has been explained before, to his recording of Link Wray's "Rumble." Get a load of the library of records behind him! This was filmed at his home, which video crews are said to have never been allowed before.
The trailer begins and ends with White building his own makeshift guitar -- "Who says you need to buy a guitar?" -- but also includes a moment of three-way laughter as Page treats the two agape and onlooking guitarists to a personal performance of "In My Time of Dying."
Dennis DiMatteo brought his father's 8mm camera with him to the Fillmore East in New York, N.Y., on Jan. 31, 1969. The camera was already pushing 20 years old at the time and was one of the models that needed to be wound up to shoot just a few seconds at a time.
Throughout the night, DiMatteo was able to capture only about a minute's worth of footage, mostly of the sensational opening act for Iron Butterfly. And that opening act was Led Zeppelin.
A crowd numbering in the hundreds had gathered at the Fillmore for the show. And since Led Zeppelin's first album hadn't yet been out for even a full month, it's rather likely some people had come just to see Iron Butterfly and had no idea what was going to hit them when the opening act took the stage.
Audio recordings that surfaced years ago that attest to the heavy sound Led Zeppelin was evoking at two of the four Fillmore East performances over that weekend 40 years ago. But never before has such an early glimpse of the band's visuals been presented to the public.
Now we see how the band rocking out in rather stunning quality! Led Zeppelin was more than just something to listen to. It was also a sight to behold. Watch as the ruffle-sleeved Robert Plant, at age 20, belts into the microphone with John Paul Jones to his right side. Witness as Jimmy Page slides his left hand across his fretboard as he shakes his other hand, grinding that violin bow into the strings! There's so much history to be gleaned and appreciated from such a small portrait of the band's visuals at this time.
DiMatteo's silent footage, shot only three rows from the stage and recently transferred to a digital format and posted online, is believed to be the earliest video footage that exists of Led Zeppelin performing live. It's earlier by well over a month than the 32 minutes of professional TV footage from a concert appearance in Denmark on March 17, which was included on Led Zeppelin's 2003 DVD.
An altered version of the rough footage has also been posted online with audio clips of the band's rendition of "Dazed and Confused" from the same date.
And Led Zeppelin's official Web site has already been updated to include the video footage. DiMatteo's footage has been posted there, loosely synchronized with actual audio from renditions of "Train Kept A Rollin'," "I Can't Quit You Baby" and "Dazed and Confused" performed that date.
The other day, I chortled when I read a comment on this blog from my friend Rich, requesting some live Zeppelin clips rather than live clips of Zep covers from a music festival in 2008 where no Led Zeppelin members even appeared. He has a point!
It just so happens that some vintage live Zeppelin performances are being uploaded to Youtube these days with the approval of the band. The LedZeppelin Youtube channel is officially sanctioned by the group, so some video and audio clips are now seeing their official release exclusively online.
The channel has some clips from their previous official releases. Who could forget this excerpt of the powerful "I Can't Quit You Baby" from the Royal Albert Hall in 1970?
...or this funky version of "The Ocean" performed at Madison Square Garden in 1973?
...or the classic and penultimate take on "Kashmir" from the Knebworth 1979 shows?
But what's especially interesting to see are some of the videos added over the past couple of weeks whose release the band had heretofore withheld authorizing.
Chris Welch took some 8mm footage of the group on tour in West Germany in July 1970. Now these clips have been edited together and come to life with the soundtrack of "Celebration Day" supplied for effect.
An outstanding performance of "Sick Again" from the L.A. Forum in 1977 is presented in full with several sources supplying great angles of Jimmy Page in his white dragon suit wielding his double-neck guitar, and the rest of the guys doing what they do best. This montage was spliced together by Sam Rapallo, webmaster of the official Led Zeppelin Web site, www.ledzeppelin.com.
The band takes flight in this 8mm footage shot on location in Pittsburgh in 1973 outside the Starship. This was the location of a famous photo shoot in which the band poses next to their touring plane with Robert Plant opening his arms wide. The first half of the footage is accompanied by Page's guitar instrumental "Bron-Y-Aur," until we arrive at the concert. Then, snippets of that night's version of "Rock and Roll" and "Black Dog" kick in with the visuals synched up to the tunes.
Cut to a year earlier in San Bernardino, Calif., where the band can be seen and heard ripping up a version of "The Song Remains the Same" a whole year before it was released. Page's guitar antics continue in the middle of his "Heartbreaker" solo. This also includes snippets of "Black Dog," "Stairway to Heaven" and Page's violin bow solo from "Dazed and Confused." Remarkably, before the footage ends with a brief snippet of "Whole Lotta Love," we get a glimpse of a rare onstage performance of "The Crunge."
Here's a version of "Kashmir" recorded in Los Angeles the year it came out on album. That Mellotron John Paul Jones plays may not be quite in tune, but what else would you expect from a 1975 performance?
Fast-forward two years, again in Los Angeles, and this time there's nearly 10 minutes' worth of Led Zeppelin performing. This 8mm footage includes a shot of Jones at his keyboard during "Trampled Underfoot" and another of John Bonham during his "Over the Top" drum solo. Page can be seen performing portions of a guitar solo that preceded "Achilles Last Stand." But the biggest surprise of the night comes five-and-a-half minutes into the video, when Led Zeppelin welcomes a rare guest onstage -- namely Keith Moon, drummer for the Who. With Keith at Plant's microphone and Plant at the drums, hilarity ensues! Moon then sticks around to play timpani and tambourine for the encores, and Page marks the one-off occasion with an out-of-tune string heard a few times at the beginning of "Rock and Roll."
There are also segments from several shows on Led Zeppelin's final tour. Catch up with them in 1980 at their destinations in Munich:
