Led Zeppelin - Copenhagen, Denmark, 3-15-1969 to 3-17-1969

The other day, I was in the mood to hear some early Led Zeppelin that I'd never heard before. But I wanted something with excellent sound quality, because I think sound quality matters a lot for a band such as them. I discovered that the band played a bunch of times in Copenhagen in the middle of March 1969. What makes these concerts stand out is the fact that some of them were recorded for local TV or radio shows. As a result, the sound quality is as good as it gets for live Led Zeppelin in 1969. 

I suspect these bootleg recordings haven't gotten as much attention as they deserve because they only played short sets of half an hour or less. But I've combined three different concerts, all recorded in Copenhagen on March 15th, 16th, and 17th, and combined them, removing a few cases of repeated songs. The result is a soundboard level quality live album that's just over an hour long.

The first three tracks come from a radio show played on March 16th. The sound quality is excellent. The next four tracks come from a TV show, "TV Bren," played on March 17th. Again, the sound quality is excellent. One nice thing about these recordings from a listening point of view is that the band was brand new, with the debut album "Led Zeppelin" only coming out two months earlier, and the audience was small and polite. So these are almost like studio recordings, with just a bit of applause when the songs are all over. Things would be very different a few months later, when the band was selling millions of albums.

The final five tracks from from March 15th. I've put them out of chronological order because the sound quality is little lower on these. So you could remove them and still have 41 minutes with great sound quality. But I doubt you'll want to do that, because these sound pretty darn good too. Originally, they weren't so great, but I made some adjustments to all five of them with the audio editing program UVR5, including boosting the lead vocals. I think that helped a lot. At the end of "The Train Kept A-Rollin'" the band immediately went into a different song. But that one already appeared earlier on this album from a different performance. So I patched in some applause from the end of a different song to give it a decent sounding finish.

This is practically a live version of the band's debut album, "Led Zeppelin." It has all the songs from that that they commonly played in concert. (I still don't get why they almost never played "Good Times, Bad Times.") But there's a few extra ones: "I Gotta Move," "The Train Kept A-Rollin'," and "As Long as I Have You." The cover song "As Long as I Have You" in particular is a really interesting 12-minute long epic. It's frustrating that no version of this has ever been officially released. 

This album is an hour and five minutes long.

01 I Can't Quit You Baby (Led Zeppelin)
02 talk (Led Zeppelin)
03 I Gotta Move (Led Zeppelin)
04 Communication Breakdown (Led Zeppelin)
05 Dazed and Confused (Led Zeppelin)
06 Babe I'm Gonna Leave You (Led Zeppelin)
07 How Many More Times (Led Zeppelin)
08 The Train Kept A-Rollin' (Led Zeppelin)
09 talk (Led Zeppelin)
10 As Long as I Have You (Led Zeppelin)
11 talk (Led Zeppelin)
12 You Shook Me (Led Zeppelin)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15322997/LdZepp_1969ca_CpenhagnDenmrk__3-15-1969_to_3-17-1969_atse.zip.html

The cover photo comes from the "TV Bren" performance on March 17th. You can find the whole thing on YouTube in black and white. Luckily, there also were a few color photos taken, so I used one of those. I used Photoshop to move the bassist John Paul Jones a little closer to the others.