Summer 1970
Randell Magtoto
The more bootlegs I listen to, the more I am convinced that the North American Tour Summer 1970 was Led Zeppelin at their height of live performance. Plant still had his full range, and the other members were all on-point and excited to play. Shows were just starting to creep past the two-hour mark (which I consider to be the "point of no return" for most bands), so repeat listens are never a slog.
15 August in New Haven - The first night of the tour, and a shorter, tighter set for it. The band seems loose and eager to improvise. Unfortunately, the quality of the recording wears on the ear, with a sound I can best describe as "crunchy."
19 September (evening) in New York - This is a marathon performance, and a recording that didn't show up until decades after the show. There are some phenomenal performances seemingly inspired by the recent passing of Jimi Hendrix, but ultimately the second half of the show drags. Some of the Whole Lotta Love and How Many More Times medley/ bonus performances in particular feel forced. Indeed, this could be the exact night when Led Zeppelin passed the "point of no return" in regards to exhaustively long performances, which culminated in the back-breaking 4 hour long nights of 1975 and 1977.
31 August in Milwaukee - We only have recordings of around half of the tour. Of this night in Milwaukee, for example, we have less than an hour. What it reveals is a doozy, however, featuring one of the best Since I've Been Loving You and Heartbreakers of all time. The quality and length of the audience recording leaves a lot to be desired.
2 September in Oakland - My vote for for the best night of the tour. Everything seems to be in perfect balance. There are nights on this tour where Plant definitely has a roughness to his voice, or the recording quality really hurts repeat listens. Not so for this night! In my opinion, the roominess of the tape actually enhances the sound to some degree, and almost every performance could be considered definitive. Even Moby Dick seems to have the crowd on its feet. When I saw there is a small possibility the show is preserved somewhere as a higher-quality bootleg, I almost couldn't believe it.
Definitely a fantastic period for the band, I agree. Honestly, though, I'm not terribly familiar with the lesser-sound-quality shows, and so for me Sep 4 and Sep 19 have been the gold standard. They're just monster performances, with a stunning depth and variety of moods and playing. Even though for obvious reasons the setlist didn't include anything post-Zep III (with the minor exception of Bron-Yr-Aur, which would later show up on Physical Graffiti), the sets are long and there are tons of surprises, including rarely played tracks from the catalogue as well as cover versions and all sorts of stuff thrown into the medleys. It's also noteworthy because it's one of the few periods when they did long medleys in both Whole Lotta Love and How Many More Times.
To your list I would only add the earlier summer, June 28 show at the Bath Festival. Not North America obviously, but a legendary performance that finds the band in the same basic mode as the August and September shows.
Lucky sod. You have 1971 ranked last? I would have loved to have seen 1970 of course, but 1971 is the one I really covet. Fresh songs from IV, choice material from III, including totally gonzo "Celebration Day" on the 12-string. Every boot I listen to from 1971 sounds like a killer show, topped by Orlando, Berkeley, Toronto, and the Japanese tour.
You are thinking of the planned documentary centered around the 1970 Royal Albert Hall show. That's the main reason that concert was professionally filmed and recorded. But things were moving so fast for the band at that time, with recording sessions and tours following in rapid succession, that they never could sit still long enough to work on a proper documentary. The RAH footage was put away and eventually forgotten about until it was resurrected for the 2003 DVD.
Well, I'm not ranking tours overall, as I haven't listened to the number of boots that many others have on this board, to try and give an opinion on that. I was ranking concert performances of specific dates that I experienced. As you were. Even within a tour, some nights are good, others are great, and some nights are just so-so (for LZ)...
I believe that the reason the Royal Albert Hall footage was filmed, though not released around that time, was due to the fact the Jimmy Page and Peter Grant thought that the concert was filmed "to dark" or something to that effect. Meaning that they thought the entire footage was not recorded in the best possible "light" and decided to shelve the whole concert and documentary project.
Supposedly, there was a black cloth backdrop behind the stage that made the concert and the subsequent filming footage sub-par for the likes of Mr. Page and Mr. Grant to be released as a concert film or documentary.
Will someone please remind me how to post or upload the actual youtube clip and not just the link that I have provided above. To me it is very frustrating when I try and post the actual video clip and cannot do so and end up providing just the link. I knew how to do it before the new forum upgrade but for some reason what I did before does not work anymore.
Click the 'Insert other media' tab, then 'Insert Image from URL' and paste there. ^This link didn't work because you loaded it from a playlist. In that case, just copy and paste everything before the ampersand or question mark.
To properly shoot the concert, the stage needed to be lit with back lights and front lights which it was not. Spotlights on the band are sufficient enough to light up the boys but the stage area itself needed some proper lighting.
You make a great point here! After this tour, the shows started to get much more professional and planned out, less spontaneous or risky. Set lists got more rigid and they played less medleys and cover tunes, even the Whole Lotta Love jam became fixed to Let That Boy Boogie-Woogie.
Reunion - UMO 1970 --- Commencement --- UMO Students Give Blood --- New Fraternity (Delta Upsilon) --- Bangor and Augusta Campuses Receive Grants --- A Public Education Radio Station --- Graduate "M" Club Publishes History of Varsity Athletics
And speaking of the old days, I had a few hours to kill between trips the other day. So as not to block the limited dock space for all that time, I went out to a mooring in the cove and tried to catch up on my email. There was no wind, and the late afternoon sun was baking the deck. I put down the computer and decided to go for a swim.
Our family stayed that year in a little rented cottage on Salem Bay. My brother and I spent our mornings hauling lobster traps from an old wooden skiff, and our afternoons fishing for bait for the next day. We caught flounder and cod, and mackerel by the barrelful. We took the finest fish back home where my grandmother would cook them for dinner along with the cull lobsters. When we got too hot fishing in the sun, we jumped off the boat for a swim. I took off my shoes on the last day of school and went barefoot until Labor Day that year.
As that golden summer unfolded, unbeknownst to my brother and me, our father was quietly dying of cancer. His death just before Christmas brought an end to our seaside summers, and it would be some years before I had a boat again. But ever since then I have wanted to be around beautiful boats and to learn to handle them properly.
Meanwhile, out at Star Island, the unofficial capital of the Isles of Shoals, the abundant rain has kept the lawns green into midsummer, and the rainwater cisterns are full to the brim. The ocean is warm and the bait fish are plentiful. On one recent trip to Duck Island, guests were treated to three surfacing whales and hundreds of gray seals. A humpback whale was spotted well inside Gosport Harbor. Signs of white shark attacks on gray seals are being reported, and the beacons are detecting the presence of tagged specimens of these awesome predators from Rye to York. The scientists report that each ping on a shark beacon represents the potential presence of as many as a dozen sharks.
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