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Led Zeppelin Gets Its Groove Back At Ertegun Tribute


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The New York Times gave Led Zeppelin's reunion concert high marks:

"Some rock bands accelerate their tempos when they play their old songs decades after the fact. Playing fast is a kind of armor: a refutation of the plain fact of aging, all that unregainable enthusiasm and lost muscle mass, and a hard block against an old band’s lessened cultural importance.

But Led Zeppelin slowed its down a little. At the O2 arena here on Monday night, in its first full concert since 1980 — without John Bonham, who died that year, but with Bonham’s son Jason as a natural substitute — the band found much of its old power in tempos that were more graceful than those on the old live recordings. The speed of the songs ran closer to those on the group’s old studio records, or slower yet. “Good Times Bad Times,” “Misty Mountain Hop,” and “Whole Lotta Love” were confident, easy cruises; “Dazed and Confused” was a glorious doom-crawl."

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Photos via NY Times Slideshow

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The outstanding question is whether a tour is on the way.

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Stereogum has provided a set list, a good review and a couple other videos:

01 "Good Times Bad Times"

02 "Ramble On"

03 "Black Dog"

04 "In My Time Of Dying"

05 "For Your Life" (live debut)

06 "Trampled Under Foot"

07 "Nobody's Fault But Mine"

08 "No Quarter"

09 "Since I've Been Loving You"

10 "Dazed And Confused"

11 "Stairway To Heaven"

12 "The Song Remains The Same"

13 "Misty Mountain Hop"

14 "Kashmir"

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15 "Whole Lotta Love"

16 "Rock And Roll"

Good Times, Bad Times

Kashmir

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The Daily Mail has published a list of Led Zeppelin's excesses...from A to Z :)

A is for Ahmet Ertegun, the Turkishborn ambassador's son and founder of Atlantic Records, in whose honour Led Zeppelin are reforming for their one-off show. Ertegun signed Zep in 1968 for £100,000, a staggering sum at the time, when they were still unknown. The deal became hugely profitable, making Atlantic hundreds of millions of dollars over the past 40 years.

B for Boleskine House, on the shores of Loch Ness, bought by Zeppelin guitarist, producer and band leader Jimmy Page because he revered its former owner, the Satanist Aleister Crowley. Page became obsessed with black magic, would wander through Boleskine wearing Crowley's cloak and claimed the house was haunted by a decapitated head.

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Bob Lefsetz of the The Lefsetz Letter finds the reunion to be creepy, and letters in response to his column seem to agree. "Greed, sellouts, passed their prime," seem the call of the day.

I had a similar feeling when the hype began. On the other hand, the band performed well and they seem to be enjoying themselves...and most importantly, they've provided an opportunity for the people who have never seen them...provided it's affordable?$$!

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  • 3 weeks later...

Sasha Frere-Jones at the theThe New Yorker writes a two page adulatory article on Led Zeppelin's reunion - its probably the best write-up I've seen. Here's a sample:

"My affection for Led Zeppelin is limitless and somewhat irrational. I often say that my respect for the band’s music is mathematical: there are fewer bad songs on its eight studio albums than on anyone else’s. But such shaky calculations mask what is an involuntary response to the music. John Bonham played the drums as if the fate of the universe depended on how hard he could hit them; he could both dissolve a song and send it rocketing forward. Bonham played rope-a-dope with the clock: sometimes his accents arrive a tiny bit behind the beat; at others, they land a split second ahead. (If you can isolate Bonham’s placement of the hi-hat, kick drum, and cowbell on “Good Times, Bad Times”—never mind the tomtom rolls, themselves a prizeworthy achievement—you’ll have heard proof that 4/4 time is limiting only if you believe it is.) Page’s guitar playing was born during an era of British reverence for the American blues, but it went somewhere else entirely, drawing on acoustic English folk guitarists like Bert Jansch and on a battery of studio effects that made his work irreproducible and strange. Listen to Page’s sound on “Custard Pie,” a song from the 1975 album “Physical Graffiti” which was stitched together from a handful of famous blues numbers. Page, like many other rock guitarists, uses a Marshall amplifier, but the result is simultaneously nasty, small, and big, as though a tornado were happening inside a tin can. Jones, officially the band’s bassist, was equally skilled on the keyboards. The sepulchral electric piano chords that open “No Quarter,” from “Houses of the Holy” (1973), could be ambient music, and Jones’s electric-piano part on the heavy and freewheeling “Misty Mountain Hop,” from “Led Zeppelin IV,” makes the song sound like one extended bass line, though it contains no bass."

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