Robert Plant - Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, NY, 9-17-2015

Slowly but surely, I'm determined to post all the best stuff from the leak of concert bootlegs from Port Chester, New York. Here's a 2015 Robert Plant concert.

Musical associate Lil Panda did some work on the files here and then set them to me. He's very good at audio adjustments, better than me, so this sounds excellent.

At the time of this concert, Plant was promoting his 2014 album "Lullaby and the Ceaseless Roar." It was the first of two albums he did with his back up band the Sensational Space Shifters. Only two songs performed were from that album though, maybe because it had been about a year since it had been released. He also mostly ignored his earlier solo albums. Instead, he leaned on cover songs and Led Zeppelin songs.

The music is unreleased. The sound quality is excellent. 

This album is an hour and 22 minutes long. 

01 Poor Howard (Robert Plant)
02 Tin Pan Valley (Robert Plant)
03 Trampled Under Foot (Robert Plant)
04 talk (Robert Plant)
05 Turn It Up (Robert Plant)
06 Black Dog (Robert Plant)
07 talk (Robert Plant)
08 Let the Four Winds Blow (Robert Plant)
09 talk (Robert Plant)
10 Rain Song (Robert Plant)
11 No Place to Go - Dazed and Confused (Robert Plant)
12 talk (Robert Plant)
13 The Lemon Song (Robert Plant)
14 talk (Robert Plant)
15 Little Maggie (Robert Plant)
16 Win My Train Fare Home (Robert Plant)
17 I Just Want to Make Love to You (Robert Plant)
18 talk (Robert Plant)
19 Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down - In My Time of Dying (Robert Plant)
20 Rock and Roll (Robert Plant)
21 talk (Robert Plant)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/jNg7sJS7

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/On8nUBjOq9RY3Ke/file

The cover image is a screenshot I took from a video of this exact concert. Since Plant was bathed in purple light, I used purple text as well.

Texas International Pop Festival, Dallas International Motor Speedway, Lewisville, TX, 8-31-1969, Part 4: Led Zeppelin

Here is the fourth and last album I have of music from the second day of the 1969 Texas International Pop Festival. This time, it's Led Zeppelin. According to die-hard fans, this often ranks in the top five in polls of their best live recordings, due to both sound quality and performance.

Led Zeppelin had only released their debut album at this point (in January 1969), but it was such a smash that they were one of the biggest stars of the festival. The two music acts that were paid the most, $10,000 each, were Janis Joplin and Led Zeppelin, so that's a good sign they were the two most anticipated performances. That can also be seen in the fact that they had the prized closing spot on the second day. (I think they went on right after B.B. King, but I'm not sure.)

In 2024, the band's lead guitarist Jimmy Page posted some photos of himself at this festival. He also wrote a little bit about it, which I include here: 

"Festivals were starting to become well-established in the US and the Texas Pop Festival offered a substantial bill of performing artists. I watched Sam & Dave perform and hung out with Janis Joplin, whom I had hung out with at Steve Paul's Scene Club in New York in the Yardbirds days. Led Zeppelin played a good set on this day."

There also is an interesting story about events that led up to this performance. They played Fair Park Coliseum, in Dallas, Texas, on August 4th, a mere three weeks before the festival. Angus Wynne III, promoter for this festival, saw a chance for some publicity. Wynne later said, "We found [Led Zeppelin's] road manager, and we said we wanted to make sure the band recognized the festival from the stage. And he said, 'Well, the fellows think they're going to be on vacation then. They don't know about it.' The band gets on stage, and after a couple of songs, [lead singer] Robert Plant says, 'Anyone heard of the Texas International Pop Festival? We got into town today and saw the posters with our name on them. We've never heard of it. It's a classic ripoff, and if you have tickets, you need to get your money back.'"

Wynne had recently signed the band to perform at his festival, so he was furious. He found the road manager locked inside a limousine. He and some friends pounded on the windows and almost tipped the car over before the manager emerged. Wynne said, "He ran out there [on stage] and he pulls Plant over to the side and whispers in his ear. Then Plant grabs him by the lapels and starts shaking him. At the end of the song, Plant goes to the microphone and says, 'Yeah, we're going to play [at the festival]. Our weasel road manager just told us.'"

So that's why, if you listen to the banter between songs in this album, Plant says: "It's very nice to be back in Texas. Last time we were here, it was a near disaster when we said we weren’t doing the festival and everything. We'd like to, this is the last date before we go back to England. So we really want it to be, have a nice time."

It seems likely to me that the band was supposed to be back in England by the time of this festival, but the band's management couldn't resist the $10,000 prize for doing this festival, so they signed a contract for it without consulting the band members first. The band members were pissed because it meant their trip back home was cut short. Happily though, it all worked out in the end, and the band happened to perform one of their best concerts.

This performance was professionally filmed. Unfortunately, nothing was done with it, and it seems most of it was lost or destroyed. There are some short clips you can find on YouTube. Also, in the 2025 documentary "Becoming Led Zeppelin," a minute or two of "Dazed and Confused" can be seen from this film. But that supports the suggestion that most of the film no longer exists, because most of that song cuts to a different performance at a different concert. (One can tell by a sudden change in the clothes, and other factors.) 

If you want to know more about this performance, the website ledzeppelin.com has a webpage about it. It includes excepts from reviews in newspaper articles, as well as photos of the band, memorabilia, and photos of more newspaper articles about the whole festival. Here's a link:

Texas International Pop Festival - August 31, 1969 / Lewisville | Led Zeppelin Official Website 

Although this is the last of only four albums from the second day of the festival, I have ten albums for the third and final day of the festival. Those will be coming soon.

This album is an hour and four minutes long. 

01 talk (Led Zeppelin)
02 Train Kept A-Rollin' (Led Zeppelin)
03 I Can't Quit You Babe (Led Zeppelin)
04 talk (Led Zeppelin)
05 Dazed and Confused (Led Zeppelin)
06 talk (Led Zeppelin)
07 You Shook Me - Rock Me Baby - You Shook Me (Led Zeppelin)
08 How Many More Times (Led Zeppelin)
09 The Hunter - The Lemon Song - Bye Bye Baby (Led Zeppelin)
10 How Many More Times [Reprise] (Led Zeppelin)
11 talk (Led Zeppelin)
12 Communication Breakdown (Led Zeppelin)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/1kXJhtqa 

alternate: 

https://bestfile.io/oyVob9ClcUWrBAx/file 

I found two photos from this concert that I really liked, one of Jimmy Page and one of Robert Plant. Instead of picking one over the other, I used Photoshop to include both of them. Page is the one in the purple shirt.

Robert Plant - PBS Soundstage, WTTW Studios, Chicago, IL, 9-16-2005

Here's another episode of the "PBS Soundstage" TV show. This time, it's Robert Plant in 2005.

A few months prior to the concert, Plant released the studio album "Mighty ReArranger." Four of the songs come from that: "Shine It All Around," "Freedom Fries," "Tin Pan Valley," and "The Enchanter." All the others are either Led Zeppelin songs or covers ("Hey Joe" and "Girl from the North Country").

Note this isn't the complete concert. According to setlist.fm, the following songs were also performed: "That's the Way, "Another Tribe," "All the King's Horses," "Takamba," and "Mighty Rearranger." It looks like whoever was in charge of shortening the concert preferred Led Zeppelin songs to Plant's solo songs.

This album is unreleased in audio format, but it is mostly sourced from an official DVD of this concert. That contained two bonus songs at the end: "Hey Joe" and "Girl from the North Country." It so happened that "Girl from the North Country" was the last song (according to setlist.fm) so I left it there. But "Hey Joe" happened earlier in the concert, so I moved it to its proper spot.

This album is an hour and five minutes long.

01 No Quarter [Edit] (Robert Plant)
02 Shine It All Around (Robert Plant)
03 Black Dog (Robert Plant)
04 talk (Robert Plant)
05 Freedom Fries (Robert Plant)
06 Hey Joe (Robert Plant)
07 talk (Robert Plant)
08 Four Sticks (Robert Plant)
09 Tin Pan Valley (Robert Plant)
10 talk (Robert Plant)
11 Gallows Pole (Robert Plant)
12 The Enchanter (Robert Plant)
13 Whole Lotta Love (Robert Plant)
14 talk (Robert Plant)
15 Girl from the North Country (Robert Plant)
16 talk (Robert Plant)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/W1nJchmW

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/EKHGTW9gvOVaroJ/file

The cover photo is a screenshot I took from this exact concert.

Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary - Madison Square Garden, New York City, 5-14-1988, Part 5: Yes, Rufus Thomas & Led Zeppelin

Here's the fifth and final part of a six-hour long version of the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary concert. 

Yes had big success in the 1980s, especially with their massive 1983 hit "Owner of a Lonely Heart," so they were given a 25-minute long time slot in this concert. According to some accounts, such as setlist.fm, they also did the song "Changes." But I've seen claims that isn't true. I suspect they didn't, because 25 minutes already made their set the second longest set of the night.

I find it very odd if it's true that Rufus Thomas performed the song "Walking the Dog" between big sets by Yes and Led Zeppelin. The acts tended to get more and more famous the longer the concert went on, but Thomas was nowhere near as popular as the acts around his performance. It could be that he actually sang that much earlier and it was only shown on TV during a break between sets. I know this rearranging did happen some with the HBO TV broadcast. But all the sources I've seen have his song here, and I haven't seen anything to contradict it, so I'm leaving it here (for now, at least).

The thing this concert is best remembered for, by far, is the 32-minute-long reunion of Led Zeppelin. The band broke up in 1980 after their drummer John Bonham died. They reunited to play three songs at the massive Live Aid benefit concert in 1985. But that was widely considered a fiasco. Lead guitarist Jimmy Page was in a bad way with drug addiction at the time. Also, Phil Collins tried to play drums, but he was just winging it and discovered the songs were more complicated than he'd realized.

The band's reunion for this concert has also been criticized. Later, lead guitarist Jimmy Page called it "one big disappointment," and lead vocalist Robert Plant later said "the gig was foul." But I disagree. The band certainly played better than at Live Aid. A key change was the drums. This time, deceased drummer John Bonham's son Jason Bonham was old enough to replace his father in the band, and he did a good job of it. I saw some article reviews of the concert just after it happened, and the Led Zeppelin performance was praised. I think in retrospect opinions soured a bit because the performance was badly mixed. For instance, the bass playing of John Paul Jones could barely be heard at all for the first song and half of the second song. There were some other problems too. I attempted to fix this with the editing program UVR5. I think I made some improvements. However, the bass was so low for "Kashmir" that I couldn't make a fix there.

Also, I think one reason Page and Plant have bad memories of the concert is due to bad vibes happening off stage. Apparently, Plant was really, really sick of the song "Stairway to Heaven" by 1988, and didn't want to play it at the concert. But Ahmet Ertegun, the founder and long-time president of Atlantic Records, heard about this in advance and talked him into playing it the night before. Then, hours before the concert began, Plant changed his mind again and had big arguments with Page about it. Ultimately, the song was played, and understandably so, since it's one of the best and most popular songs of all time, overplayed though it is. And if you look at the cover photo I've chosen for this album, Plant and Page seemed genuinely happy during the concert.

The original idea was to have a final song with everyone from earlier in the concert brought on stage to perform together, which is the usual tradition for concerts like this. But ultimately it was decided that nothing could top the Led Zeppelin reunion, so there was no big finale after that. 

After this concert, Led Zeppelin reunited twice more. Once was for the band's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame reunion in 1995. The other was a full concert in 2007. Interestingly, that was for a tribute concert for Ahmet Ertegun. Note Ertegun was one of the people to introduce Led Zeppelin in this concert. The 1995 and 2007 reunions were considered much more musically successful than the 1985 and 1988 ones.

Oh, by the way, I didn't mark it as such, but I severely edited down the introduction to the Led Zeppelin set. The bootleg version I found had Robert Townsend, Phil Collins and Ahmet Ertegun talking for five minutes, mercilessly teasing the audience about who was going to be the final act of the concert, when everyone already knew it was Led Zeppelin. They dragged things out so long that it was downright painful to hear, so I cut the intro in half. Even then, it's probably still too long. I'm guessing that the band wasn't ready - maybe last minute arguing between Plant and Page? - so they were stalling for time to a ridiculous degree. 

This album is an hour and five minutes long.

088 Hold On (Yes)
089 Make It Easy (Yes)
090 Owner of a Lonely Heart (Yes)
091 I've Seen All Good People (Yes)
092 Roundabout (Yes)
093 talk (Paul Shaffer)
094 Walking the Dog (Rufus Thomas)
095 talk (Robert Townsend, Phil Collins & Ahmet Ertegun)
096 Kashmir (Led Zeppelin)
097 Heartbreaker (Led Zeppelin)
098 Whole Lotta Love (Led Zeppelin)
099 talk (Led Zeppelin)
100 Misty Mountain Hop (Led Zeppelin)
101 talk (Led Zeppelin)
102 Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin)
103 talk (Led Zeppelin)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/oWK5DxhD

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/3Qsjm78mYpHJKct/file

The cover photo of Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin is from this exact concert.

Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary - Madison Square Garden, New York City, 5-14-1988, Part 2: Ben E. King, Roberta Flack, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, the Average White Band, Ruth Brown, Debbie Gibson & Robert Plant

Here's the second part of a six-hour long version of the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary concert.

I explained the basics about the concert in my write-up for part one. So read that if you want to know about the concert in general.

Ben E. King was a big soul music star back in the 1950s and early 1960s, both with the Drifters and as a solo act. But in 1986, two years prior to this concert, a reissue of his song "Stand by Me" reached the Top Ten in the U.S. and Number One in Britain.

Technically, Emerson, Lake and Palmer didn't perform at this concert. Instead, for one album only in 1988, Greg Lake left the group and was replaced by Robert Berry. They released a studio album using the group name "3." Then Lake rejoined the band, replacing Berry in time for the next album. For this concert, they were introduced as "Emerson and Palmer," with Berry and the group name "3" being ignored. I'm calling the band "Emerson, Lake and Palmer" so their music can be easily found with site searches and labels and such.

In retrospect, I think Debbie Gibson got too much time in this concert. Her set was 15 minutes long, making it longer than a lot of other acts who made it into various halls of fame. For instance, she had a longer set than Ruth Brown, despite the fact that she was such a big star for Atlantic Records for the first ten years of the company's existence that its nickname was "The House that Ruth Built." (Even the Wikipedia entry about the record company mentions that nickname.) But the timing was just right for Gibson. She had a huge debut album in 1987, which sold three million copies in the U.S. Her second album in 1989 would also be a big seller. But after that her sales fell off a cliff and she largely disappeared as a big star. I give her kudos for writing all her own songs. But I wouldn't be surprised if some people skip or delete her set.

I know of some music from this part of the concert that I couldn't find. Ruth Brown sang a second song, "Mama, He Treats Your Daughter Mean." Emerson, Lake and Palmer (or 3, or Emerson and Palmer) played one other song, "Fanfare for the Common Man." The Average White Band did two other songs, "I Got Work to Do" and "Person to Person." I don't know when it happened, but probably early in this concert, Herbie Mann played a set of the songs "Push Push," "Soul Serenade," and "Memphis Underground." Also at some point, Vanilla Fudge played two songs, "You Keep Me Hangin' On" and "Take Me for a Little While."

Robert Plant had lots of success as a solo artist in the 1980s. So he got a three song set in this portion of the show, while also singing lead with Led Zeppelin later in the show.

This album is an hour and 15 minutes long. 

By the way, note that the track numbering continues from the numbering of the previous part, in case you want to listen to all the concert as one huge album.

021 talk (Stephen Stills)
022 Spanish Harlem (Ben E. King)
023 talk (Ben E. King)
024 There Goes My Baby (Ben E. King)
025 Save the Last Dance for Me (Ben E. King)
026 Killing Me Softly with His Song (Roberta Flack)
027 The Closer I Get to You (Roberta Flack & Peabo Bryson)
028 America - Blue Rondo a la Turk [Instrumental] (Emerson, Lake & Palmer)
029 Pick Up the Pieces [Instrumental] (Average White Band)
030 Teardrops from My Eyes (Ruth Brown)
031 talk (Lisa Bonet)
032 Staying Together (Debbie Gibson)
033 Foolish Beat (Debbie Gibson)
034 Out of the Blue - Shake Your Love - Only in My Dreams (Debbie Gibson)
035 talk (Debbie Gibson)
036 Happy Birthday (Debbie Gibson)
037 talk (Phil Collins)
038 Heaven Knows (Robert Plant)
039 talk (Robert Plant)
040 Ship of Fools (Robert Plant)
041 talk (Robert Plant)
042 Tall Cool One (Robert Plant)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/FWMHka7W

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/njDAQ0s6ftPW7fx/file

The cover photo of Ben E. King is from this exact concert.

Robert Plant - VH-1 Storytellers, Westway Studios, London, Britain, 6-6-2002

I'm running out of "VH-1 Storytellers" albums to post, but there still are a few to go. This one features Robert Plant.

A month after this concert, Plant released his seventh solo studio album, "Dreamland." It got good reviews from critics, but it didn't sell well. As I write this in 2024, it's the only Plant solo album to not at least go Gold in the U.S. (sales of at least 500,000). Perhaps a problem was it had been nine years since his last true solo album, so his career lost some momentum. (He did a reunion with Jimmy Page in the meantime.)

The album largely consisted of cover versions. Three of those covers were performed here: "Funny in My Mind (Fixin' to Die)," "Darkness, Darkness," and "Morning Dew." Three of the remaining songs were songs he first did with Led Zeppelin.

As usual, the first song started halfway through. Unfortunately, this was a case where I couldn't find a fix. The song, "Ship of Fools," was one that he only played a few times around 2002, and none of those other recordings sounded good. He did play it a bunch of times in the early 1990s, but I thought that was too big of a time jump.

This album is 43 minutes long.

01 Ship of Fools [Incomplete] (Robert Plant)
02 talk (Robert Plant)
03 Funny in My Mind [Fixin' to Die] (Robert Plant)
04 Whole Lotta Love (Robert Plant)
05 Tall Cool One (Robert Plant)
06 talk (Robert Plant)
07 Four Sticks (Robert Plant)
08 talk (Robert Plant)
09 Darkness, Darkness (Robert Plant)
10 talk (Robert Plant)
11 Going to California (Robert Plant)
12 talk (Robert Plant)
13 Morning Dew (Robert Plant)
14 talk (Robert Plant)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17191027/ROBRTPLNT2002StrytllrsWstwyStdosLndonBrtin__6-6-2002_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/RJYh6vff

The cover photo is from a concert at the Hammersmith Apollo, in London, Britain, on October 30, 2002.

Knebworth Festival, Knebworth House, Knebworth, Britain, 6-30-1990, Part 4: Robert Plant with Jimmy Page

The fourth performance at the 1990 Knebworth Festival was given by Robert Plant. He was joined by his former Led Zeppelin Jimmy Page on the last three songs.

Robert Plant's solo career was going very well in 1990. In fact, he was the winner of the British music industry's Silver Clef award that year, which was one of the purposes of the concert. His fifth studio album, "Manic Nirvana," had been released three months prior to this concert.

Later in the 1990s, Plant and Page would collaborate quite a lot. They would get together for a live album ("Unledded") and a studio album ("Walking to Clarksdale"), and tour together from 1994 to 1998. However, in 1990, having Plant and Page appear on stage together was very rare, and was considered a big deal. They have taken part in limited Led Zeppelin reunions in 1985 (as part of Live Aid) and 1988 (at an Atlantic Records anniversary concert), and there had been some studio collaborations between them. I could be wrong, but I think this is the first time Page appeared on stage at a Plant solo concert. At least it was the first high profile one. They played three Led Zeppelin songs together to end the set.

This album is 51 minutes long.

01 talk by Gary Davis (Robert Plant)
02 Hurting Kind [I've Got My Eyes on You] (Robert Plant)
03 Immigrant Song (Robert Plant)
04 Tie Dye on the Highway (Robert Plant)
05 talk (Robert Plant)
06 Liar's Dance (Robert Plant)
07 Going to California (Robert Plant)
08 talk (Robert Plant)
09 Nirvana (Robert Plant)
10 Tall Cool One (Robert Plant)
11 talk (Robert Plant)
12 Misty Mountain Hop (Robert Plant with Jimmy Page)
13 Wearing and Tearing (Robert Plant with Jimmy Page)
14 talk (Robert Plant with Jimmy Page)
15 Rock and Roll (Robert Plant with Jimmy Page)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/sQg12KoA

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/pDI0g7HuYVcS4c4/file

alternate:

https://www.imagenetz.de/exoqZ

The cover photo is from this exact concert.

Various Artists - Heart Beat 86, National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham, Britain, 3-15-1986

Here's an impressive 1986 benefit concert with performances by the Moody Blues, Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), Robert Plant, George Harrison, Roy Wood, UB40, the Fortunes, and more. It's completely unreleased, but the sound quality is excellent.

The inspiration for the concert began with Bev Bevan, the drummer for ELO. He was inspired by the Live Aid benefit concert in 1985, and wanted to do something for his hometown of Birmingham, England. All the proceeds went to benefit the Birmingham Children's Hospital. The concert ended up having a unusual Birmingham focus, with the vast majority of the musical performers originally coming from Birmingham. Some acts that hadn't been in the spotlight for some time, such as the Fortunes and Applejacks, got back together for this concert.

The concert was massive, nine hours long. Big acts like ELO and the Moody Blues played sets that lasted an hour or so. However, this album only contains an hour and a half of that. That's because all I could find was the portion that was later broadcast on BBC TV and radio. Parts of it also was broadcast on MTV in the US, and two songs ("The Voice" and "Lucille") come from that, with slightly lower sound quality. If anyone has any more of this, please let me know so I can add it in. But while it's sad that so much of the concert is missing, at least what is here has excellent sound quality.

One big act to perform was Robert Plant. Although he was having a very successful solo career, he avoided that kind of music and played rockabilly covers with the backing band the Big Town Playboys instead.

I think the ELO set is particularly interesting. Normally, ELO concerts were big productions, with lots of orchestral instruments and backing tapes and so on. This was a much more stripped down kind of performance, but the band showed they could still rock. It also was the band's first concert in four years. They would only play an additional handful of concerts in 1986 before breaking up. I'd especially love to hear the rest of their set, because I don't know of any other concert recording by the original ELO from after 1978 with this level of sound quality.

The Moody Blues were the last big act of the concert. But then everyone from all the earlier acts joined them on stage for a finale. Three songs were played: "Lucille," "Money (That's What I Want)," and "Johnny B. Goode." Unfortunately, I couldn't find a recording of "Money." But probably the highlight of the concert was "Johnny B. Goode," because a very unexpected guest star showed up on stage: George Harrison. He sang lead vocals on part of the song. But just having him there was a big deal, since he'd been pretty reclusive for the last decade or so. Apparently, even most of the other musicians were starstruck to be on the same stage as the ex-Beatle. 

By the way, it was hoped that there would be a reunion of the 1960s band the Move, since two major figures from that band, Jeff Lynne of ELO and Roy Wood, were at the concert. Plus, this was all about highlighting the best musical acts from Birmingham, and the Move definitely were one of those. It was announced the Move would reunite for the concert, but band member Carl Wayne didn't show up for some reason, so the reunion never happened. This was the closest to a Move reunion ever. That is no longer possible since Wayne passed away in 2004.

Note also that Denny Laine performed a set. However, his set was plagued by sound problems, and none of it was included in the BBC broadcast. He did sing lead on one verse of "Johnny B. Goode" for the final encore though. Also, Dave Edmunds was at the concert, but only had a minor role, playing a guitar solo on the song "Lucille" during the encore. And Noddy Holder, the lead singer of Slade, was at the concert, but his only role was singing a verse of "Lucille."

One final note. The emcee, Oliver Spencer (formerly known as Roger Spencer), used to be a member of the 1960s band Idle Race, also from Birmingham. The BBC recording included some stand-up comedy he did between acts, but I cut most of that out, since it doesn't have the same relistening value as the music.

This album is an hour and 37 minutes long.

01 Share It with You (Steve Gibbons Band)
02 B.S.A. (Steve Gibbons Band)
03 talk (Oliver Spencer)
04 Let It Be Me (Fortunes)
05 talk (Fortunes)
06 You've Got Your Troubles (Fortunes)
07 talk (Oliver Spencer)
08 See My Baby Jive (Roy Wood)
09 Are You Ready to Rock (Roy Wood)
10 talk (Roy Wood)
11 I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day (Roy Wood)
12 talk (Oliver Spencer)
13 I Got You Babe (UB40 & Ruby Turner)
14 Tell Me When (Applejacks)
15 talk (Oliver Spencer)
16 She Walks Right In (Robert Plant)
17 Come On (Robert Plant)
18 [Every Time I Hear] That Mellow Saxophone (Robert Plant)
19 He's in Town (Rockin' Berries)
20 talk (Oliver Spencer)
21 Telephone Line (Electric Light Orchestra)
22 talk (Electric Light Orchestra)
23 Do Ya (Electric Light Orchestra)
24 Rockaria (Electric Light Orchestra)
25 talk (Electric Light Orchestra)
26 Hold On Tight (Electric Light Orchestra)
27 Don't Bring Me Down (Electric Light Orchestra)
28 talk (Oliver Spencer)
29 Tuesday Afternoon (Moody Blues)
30 Question (Moody Blues)
31 Nights in White Satin (Moody Blues)
32 The Voice (Moody Blues)
33 Lucille (Noddy Holder, Roy Wood, Dave Edmunds & Everyone)
34 talk (Oliver Spencer)
35 Johnny B. Goode (George Harrison, Denny Laine, Robert Plant & Everyone)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/oygUAcFT

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/ldz5LsvyWmzV42C/file

The cover photo shows Jeff Lynne and George Harrison during the "Johnny B. Goode" finale from this exact concert. The photo was originally in black and white, but I used the Palette program to colorize it, then made some additional changes in Photoshop. Note that Lynne and Harrison were just starting to get to know each other around this time. They would go on to become good friends, as well as band mates in the Traveling Wilburys.

Concerts for the People of Kampuchea, Hammersmith Odeon, London, Britain, 12-26-1979 to 12-29-1979: Day 4: Elvis Costello, Rockpile & Paul McCartney

This is the fourth and final part of the Concerts for the People of Kampuchea, featuring music from the fourth night. Like the two previous nights, there were three music acts: Elvis Costello, Rockpile, and Paul McCartney. Technically, McCartney was billed as "Paul McCartney and Wings." This was the last Wings concert ever. Also, Robert Plant was the guest lead singer for one song in Rockpile's set.

As with the previous parts, I've only included the songs with what I consider worthy sound quality. I got lucky with those parts in that I found a decent amount of music from each of the acts. But I wasn't so lucky this time. I was only able to include two songs by Elvis Costello and three by Rockpile (including the one with Robert Plant). I couldn't find any more, not even with terrible sound quality.

I also didn't do that well with McCartney's set. I found a bootleg with all of the songs from his set, but most of it comes from an audience bootleg with poor sound quality. I didn't deem any of that worth keeping. (If anyone has any of the missing songs, please let me know. I saw some mentions that some more songs by McCartney exist in good sounding versions, like "Getting Closer," but I couldn't find them.) 

As a result of that, everything here sounds very good, but this is the shortest part out of the four. The other three parts are all at least an hour and 10 minutes long, with one of them being an hour and a half long, but this one is only 48 minutes long. The first track here is track 68, in case you want to put all four parts into one folder and play this as one massive concert.

The sourcing was pretty much the same as for the previous two parts. I relied on the official double album, long out of print, and a bootleg of high quality outtakes that had been considered for inclusion to the double album. One song by Elvis Costello, two by Rockpile, and six by McCartney are from the official album. Most of the rest are from that bootleg. But I believe I found McCartney's "Hot as Sun" elsewhere, since it was in the movie of the concerts but not the album. I also found some of McCartney's banter from the poor sounding bootleg of his set. Those talking bits didn't sound bad. I suspect some of them came from the movie, because they sounded a lot better than the other songs and even other banter.

The last three songs were performed by a rather curious McCartney-led "supergroup" called "Rockestra." McCartney had previously gathered lots of big names to play on two songs for his 1979 album "Back to the Egg," including the "Rockestra Theme." Most of those reprised their roles for this concert. Some who played in this version of Rockestra for the concert included: Pete Townshend, Gary Brooker, John Bonham, John Paul Jones, and Dave Edmunds. But in my opinion, it was kind of a waste of all that talent, because they only did three relatively short songs, all led by McCartney, and they pretty much sound like the other McCartney songs.

As mentioned above, this album is 48 minutes long.

68 The Imposter (Elvis Costello)
69 You Belong to Me (Elvis Costello)
70 Three Time Loser (Rockpile)
71 Crawling from the Wreckage (Rockpile)
72 Little Sister (Rockpile with Robert Plant)
73 Introduction [Instrumental] (Paul McCartney)
74 Got to Get You into My Life (Paul McCartney)
75 talk (Paul McCartney)
76 Every Night (Paul McCartney)
77 talk (Paul McCartney)
78 I've Had Enough (Paul McCartney)
79 Hot as Sun [Instrumental] (Paul McCartney)
80 talk (Paul McCartney)
81 Twenty Flight Rock (Paul McCartney)
82 talk (Paul McCartney)
83 Coming Up (Paul McCartney)
84 Lucille (Paul McCartney & Rockestra)
85 talk (Paul McCartney & Rockestra)
86 Let It Be (Paul McCartney & Rockestra)
87 talk (Paul McCartney & Rockestra)
88 Rockestra Theme (Paul McCartney & Rockestra)

https://www.upload.ee/files/17362756/VA-ConcrtsfrthPeplofKmpchea1979Day4CstelloRckpileMcCartny_atse.zip.html

alternate:

https://pixeldrain.com/u/E9X4FPne

The cover photo is from the Rockestra portion of this show. From left to right in the front is Denny Laine, Pete Townshend, and Paul McCartney. I improved the pic using Krea AI program.

Various Artists - Prince's Trust Rock Gala, Dominion Theatre, London, Britain, 7-7-1982

I had decided that, in addition to working on my big BBC project and having other musical attentions, I want to make a more concerted effort to post "various artists" concerts. People know of the big ones, like Woodstock and Live Aid, but there are many lesser ones that often slip through the cracks, where they don't get officially released in full or at all, yet bootlegs aren't common either since there isn't one big performance by someone famous to draw attention.

Here's one such example. It's the first of several semi-annual Prince's Trust concerts from the 1980s that I plan on posting. I don't know much about these concerts since I'm not British and only recently discovered recordings of them. But I looked up the Prince's Trust on Wikipedia. It's a charity that was founded in 1978 by then Prince Charles, who is now King Charles III as I write this in 2023. It funds a variety of programs to help troubled youths. According to Wikipedia, it has been very successful and is the country's biggest youth-targeted charity.

This was the first benefit concert for the charity. More would be held in the 1980s, though not every year. They stopped happening around 1990, but then have resumed occasionally in the 2010s. The 1980s versions typically had impressive line-ups of usually British musical acts. 

What I think is particularly interesting about them is that different stars didn't just perform with their usual backing bands and then leave the stage. That was sometimes the case, but other times, a house band would be formed that played for a bunch of different artists. For this show, Madness started out with a 26-minute long set, easily the longest of the show, and it was just them. Then came a reggae band called Unity, and it was just them. Joan Armatrading performed two songs next, alone on stage with her acoustic guitar.

After that, Phil Collins played his classic "In the Air Tonight" in an unusual stripped down version with just him on piano and no drums. From that point on, I'm pretty sure he didn't leave the stage for the rest of the concert. He backed "Jethro Tull" on drums. I put that name in quotes because it was really just lead singer Ian Anderson. Then the same band stayed on stage for the rest of the concert. It featured some big names playing together, including Phil Collins on drums, Pete Townshend on lead guitar, and Gary Brooker on keyboards. I found it especially interesting having Townshend playing guitar behind the likes of Kate Bush and Robert Plant. I don't know if that's happened on other occasions. You can watch the whole concert on YouTube if you want to see who played what exactly.

Speaking of Townshend, he was still mostly preoccupied being a member of the Who at this time and almost never performed in concert without them. So that's interesting all by itself. But he also said that his performance of "Slit Skirts" was the first time he'd played piano in public. But what really surprised the heck out of me is that the final song of the concert, "I Want to Take You Higher," was a cover of the Sly and the Family Stone classic funk sung mostly by Townsend (with Robert Plant on backing vocals). I looked it up on setlist.fm, and that's the only time he ever performed that.

Speaking of rare, Kate Bush concert appearances are slightly less rare than hen's teeth. She only sang one song and then left the stage. But this seems to be the only time she ever sang "The Wedding List" in front of an audience.

In case you're curious, Prince Charles and his new wife Princess Diana (they married the year before) sat in the balcony and watched the entire show. I wonder if they really enjoyed these musical styles or if they were just being polite.

The sound quality is pretty good, but not great. I took it from YouTube videos, and there was some loss of quality along the way. However, I used the UVR5 audio editing program to boost the lead vocals relative to the instruments in some cases, and that helped. I especially did a lot of that for "In the Air Tonight." In the beginning of the song especially, the vocals were very low. That's why that one song has "[Edit]" in its title.

The album is an hour and 25 minutes long.

01 God Save the Queen (Madness)
02 House of Fun - Shut Up (Madness)
03 talk (Madness)
04 Tomorrow's Dream (Madness)
05 Madness (Madness)
06 talk (Madness)
07 One Step Beyond (Madness)
08 Baggy Trousers (Madness)
09 Driving in My Car (Madness)
10 It Must Be Love (Madness)
11 talk (Unity)
12 Crab Race (Unity)
13 talk (Joan Armatrading)
14 Love and Affection (Joan Armatrading)
15 talk (Joan Armatrading)
16 Steppin' Out (Joan Armatrading)
17 In the Air Tonight [Edit] (Phil Collins)
18 Jack in the Green (Jethro Tull with Phil Collins)
19 talk (Jethro Tull with Phil Collins)
20 Pussy Willow (Jethro Tull with Phil Collins)
21 talk (Midge Ure)
22 No Regrets (Midge Ure)
23 Let My Love Open the Door (Pete Townshend)
24 talk (Pete Townshend)
25 Slit Skirts (Pete Townshend)
26 A Whiter Shade of Pale (Gary Brooker)
27 talk (Gary Brooker)
28 The Wedding List (Kate Bush)
29 talk (Pete Townshend)
30 Worse than Detroit (Robert Plant)
31 I Want to Take You Higher (Pete Townshend & Everyone)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/vGspapgK

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/gOWdPKGbgy9TK02/file

alternate:

https://www.upload.ee/files/15483233/VarArtsts_1982_PrincsTrstRckGalaDomnionTheatrLondnBritain__7-7-1982_atse.zip.html

I could have taken a screenshot of the video for the cover art, but the video quality was merely okay. Luckily, I found a couple of photos. I chose one with Robert Plant (left), Mick Karn (center, the bassist in the band Japan), and Pete Townshend (right). The photo was in black and white, but I knew the colors from the video, so I made sure they matched, especially Plant's "Where's Waldo"-styled red and white shirt.

Led Zeppelin - Royal Albert Hall, London, Britain, 1-9-1970

I've been in a Zeppeliny mood in recent weeks, so I'm posting yet another bootleg concert from them. This one has many similar songs to other concerts I've posted, but it's too important and too good not to be posted here, as I will explain.

This isn't a BBC recording, but it ALMOST is, because it was recorded by the exact same BBC team that recorded the band's BBC concerts around this time period. However, instead of recording for the radio, that team was privately contracted to record the audio and video of this concert with the intention of making a live album and/or movie. But there were problems with recording several songs, as I'll detail below, so that didn't work well for a live album. And by the time the band got serious about making a movie a couple of years later, they decided this footage was too old to be used. However, when the band put out a DVD of film footage in 2003, they included all the full songs from the concert they had, but with some cuts, and none of the banter between songs.

Due to that background, this is one of the best sounding Led Zeppelin live recordings, period. In fact, it sounds so good that two songs from the 1982 studio album "Coda," "We're Gonna Groove" and "I Can't Quit You Baby," actually are performances from this concert with some edits and overdubs. Additionally, the band was in peak form, with Robert Plant's lead vocals in particular as good as they ever got. So if you're a fan, you really should give this a listen.

By the way, lead guitarist Jimmy Page later said this about the concert:

"Albert Hall was a massive gig for us, and we really wanted to do the best we could. On top of that, it was something of a homecoming for [bassist] John Paul Jones and I, because we had both grown up around there. So we were all really paying attention to what we were doing."

Another interesting tidbit: according to an article in a newspaper the next day, the band was extremely nervous before the show began, in part due to the fact that they'd heard musical stars like John Lennon, Eric Clapton, and Jeff Beck had gotten tickets to the show.

However, there have been a number of problems marring this recording, until now. First off, there's the matter of the missing songs mentioned above, when something went wrong with the recording equipment. Those songs are "Since I've Been Loving You," "Organ Solo," and "Thank You." (A fragment of "Thank You" has been included on the DVD mentioned above, but it's not much use since it's only about 30 seconds long.) In order to give a listener an appreciation of what the entire concert sounds like, I've used versions of those songs from a concert in Montreux, Switzerland, on March 7, 1970. I had to rely on an audience bootleg for those, but it actually sounds better than many soundboards, and is a very popular Zeppelin bootleg. 

Another problem was that only the first four minutes or so of "Heartbreaker" survived. That's a shame, because the band was really wailing on that one. So again I relied on a version from Montreux to patch in the last two minutes. That's what that song has "[Edit]" in the title.

I also noticed that the versions of "We're Gonna Groove" and "I Can't Quit You Baby" from the "Coda" album sounded a little bit better than any other versions. But both "Coda" versions had cuts of a minute or more each. Furthermore, I noticed the guitar solo in "We're Gonna Groove" was totally different - no doubt overdubbed in the studio years later. So I used the parts that were identical, which ended up being more than half of both songs. That's why those two have "[Edit]" in their titles.

Furthermore, I'm relying on editing work done by others. All the other songs are from a version made by Plumdusty. That person put together the best version possible from all the known sources. Some of the banter between the songs is at lower quality since those bits come from audience bootlegs. But I've done further editing on those to make them sound better. Using the audio editing program UVR5, I found that virtually all the hiss was put on a different track than the talking, so I just deleted that track in each case. Plumdusty also patched in some cuts to "How Many More Times."

Another problematic track is the last one, "Long Tall Sally." This was not included in the DVD, because a big chunk in the middle wasn't recorded properly. There was an audience bootleg for that, so Plumdusty used that as a patch. The sound quality there is noticeably worse. However, I used UVR5 again to boost the lead vocals for that section, and I think it sounds a lot better now, though still not as good as the rest of the song.

Regarding the performance, note that although this is a 1970 concert, it was only nine days into 1970. The band's album from that year, "Led Zeppelin III," hadn't been recorded yet, much less released. So the set list has much more in common with 1969 set lists. One exception is "Since I've Been Loving You." It had only been played in concert twice before, in the days just before this concert. (Although remember the version here is actually from Montreux two months later.) 

But, as usual from this time period, they did many interesting cover versions as well, often as parts of medleys. In some cases, I added the song names to the titles if I felt it was a significant enough inclusion. But in other cases I didn't, when there were just short snippets. For instance, there are two brief references to Neil Young's "Down by the River" that I didn't mention. Also, sometimes, I broke the medleys up into different tracks if I felt there were clear breaks between songs, but other times, I didn't.

So there have been lots of edits, some by me, some by others. (I could have put "[Edit]" in way more song titles, but I saved that just for the most drastic edits, and only the ones that I did.) But despite all that, the sound quality is excellent throughout, with only a couple of minor exceptions, and hopefully you won't even notice most of the edits. This really is one of the best live recordings of the band, period.

As an aside, I've included three songs from this concert on the album "BBC Sessions, Volume 4." In the near future, I plan on reconfiguring that, and eliminating those duplicates, while also posting an album of the band's live rarities.

This concert is an hour and 19 minutes long.

01 talk (Led Zeppelin)
02 We're Gonna Groove [Edit] (Led Zeppelin)
03 I Can't Quit You Baby [Edit] (Led Zeppelin)
04 talk (Led Zeppelin)
05 Dazed and Confused - Cocaine Blues - Judy, Judy, Judy - Dazed and Confused (Led Zeppelin)
06 talk (Led Zeppelin)
07 Heartbreaker [Edit] (Led Zeppelin)
08 talk (Led Zeppelin)
09 Since I've Been Loving You (Led Zeppelin)
10 talk (Led Zeppelin)
11 White Summer - Black Mountain Side [Instrumental] (Led Zeppelin)
12 Organ Solo [Instrumental] (Led Zeppelin)
13 Thank You (Led Zeppelin)
14 What Is and What Should Never Be (Led Zeppelin)
15 talk (Led Zeppelin)
16 Moby Dick [Instrumental] (Led Zeppelin)
17 talk (Led Zeppelin)
18 How Many More Times (Led Zeppelin)
19 Boogie Chillun - Further on Down the Line - Bottle Up and Go (Led Zeppelin)
20 The Lemon Song (Led Zeppelin)
21 That's Alright Mama (Led Zeppelin)
22 How Many More Times [Reprise] (Led Zeppelin)
23 talk (Led Zeppelin)
24 Whole Lotta Love (Led Zeppelin)
25 Communication Breakdown (Led Zeppelin)
26 talk (Led Zeppelin)
27 C'mon Everybody (Led Zeppelin)
28 Something Else (Led Zeppelin)
29 talk (Led Zeppelin)
30 Bring It On Home (Led Zeppelin)
31 talk (Led Zeppelin)
32 Long Tall Sally - Move On Down the Line - Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On - Long Tall Sally (Led Zeppelin)
33 talk (Led Zeppelin)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/X2wQaRGJ

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/zYFxpRw5CorrPEa/file

alternate:

https://www.imagenetz.de/mH9T7

The cover photo comes from this exact concert. Because this concert was filmed, I had a bunch of pictures to choose from. This one only shows lead singer Robert Plant, and he's a small part of the image, but I really liked the overall look of it anyway.

Led Zeppelin - Richfield Coliseum, Richfield, OH, 4-27-1977

I recently posted a 1975 concert of Led Zeppelin when they were touring to promote their album "Physical Graffiti." I said I also want to post a 1977 concert when they toured to promote their 1976 album "Presence." Here it is.

Like the 1975 concert I posted, I wanted to pick the best 1977 show, for those who would only want one from that year. Many die-hard Led Zeppelin fans will tolerate poorer sound quality in order to enjoy better performances. But I only considered the best sounding soundboard bootlegs. Luckily, for 1977, this concert is very well known as a bootleg because it's both an excellent performance with excellent sound quality. There are many versions, but most are given the name "Destroyer," for some reason. It's so well known that there's a Wikipedia page for it, which is here:

Destroyer (Led Zeppelin bootleg recording) - Wikipedia

As that webpage notes, it was the first professionally recorded mixing desk tape to be leaked to the public. The sound quality has been described as "almost perfect." I used the best quality version available, passed along by musical associate Mike Solof.

That said, there still were some big problems with this version. The biggest was that parts of different songs were cut off. For instance, the first couple minutes of the first song, "The Song Remains the Same," were missing. A big chunk of over 10 minutes of "No Quarter" was missing. Most of the "White Summer - Black Mountain Side" medley was missing. Finally, the first minute of "Rock and Roll" was missing. 

So I decided to fill in the missing bits. In all four of those cases, I drew on a recording of a concert in Seattle on July 17, 1977. Luckily, this also is an excellent sounding soundboard bootleg. With "White Summer - Black Mountain Side," so much of it was missing that I decided to just use the Seattle version in its entirety. But for the other ones, I patched in the Seattle versions to fill in the missing sections. Hopefully when you listen it will sound seamless.

But there were some other problems too, despite the overall great sound quality. For one, sometimes the lead vocals were a bit low. That seemed to be more of a problem on some songs than others, based on my analysis of the sound files using the program Audacity. "Kashmir," for instance, had the lowest lead vocals. So I used the audio editing program UVR5 to boost the vocals relative to the instruments on all songs, but to varying degrees.

Another problem was that the soundboard was so good that there often wasn't much crowd noise at the ends of songs. This wasn't the case for every song, but it was for most of them. Luckily, there was enough for me to boost the cheering to a point where it sounded like a normal crowd reaction to my ears. I also boosted the banter between songs so that talking could be heard more clearly. Finally, the overall volume of some songs varied a lot. For instance, a couple (but not all) of the songs from the acoustic set in the middle of the concert were very quiet, especially "Going to California." I made adjustments to even all that out as well.

The end result is that this great bootleg sounds even better than before. Although there are many versions of this recording on the Internet, most people take a purist approach. Whereas I take more of a chainsaw approach, doing whatever it takes to fix what I consider problems. For instance, I couldn't find any other versions where someone filled in the missing sections of songs. (Although maybe such a version exists and I just didn't find it.)

Like the 1975 concert I recently posted, this is a very looooong concert. Lead singer Robert Plant would say of the tour:

"By 1977... that sort of wild energy that was there in the beginning had come to the point where we were showboating a bit. Unfortunately, we had no choice. We were on tours where places were going ape-shit. There was no way of containing the energy in those buildings. It was insane. And we became more and more victims of our own success. And the whole deal about the goldfish bowl and living in it, that kicked in."

So yeah, lots of excess and showboating (especially considering this was the year punk rock shook the music world by rebelling against all that). For instance, "No Quarter" is nearly half an hour long. But hey, by 1977, Led Zeppelin was arguably the biggest rock band on the planet, breaking records for playing in the largest venues for the most amount of money. They were the biggest for good reason, and on a good night like this they still kicked ass.

This album is three hours and two minutes long.

01 The Song Remains the Same [Edit] (Led Zeppelin)
02 Sick Again (Led Zeppelin)
03 talk (Led Zeppelin)
04 Nobody's Fault but Mine (Led Zeppelin)
05 talk (Led Zeppelin)
06 In My Time of Dying (Led Zeppelin)
07 talk (Led Zeppelin)
08 Since I've Been Loving You (Led Zeppelin)
09 talk (Led Zeppelin)
10 No Quarter [Edit] (Led Zeppelin)
11 talk (Led Zeppelin)
12 Ten Years Gone (Led Zeppelin)
13 talk (Led Zeppelin)
14 The Battle of Evermore (Led Zeppelin)
15 talk (Led Zeppelin)
16 Going to California (Led Zeppelin)
17 talk (Led Zeppelin)
18 Black Country Woman (Led Zeppelin)
19 Bron-Y-Aur Stomp (Led Zeppelin)
20 White Summer - Black Mountain Side [Instrumental] (Led Zeppelin)
21 Kashmir (Led Zeppelin)
22 talk (Led Zeppelin)
23 Out on the Tiles - Moby Dick [Instrumental] (Led Zeppelin)
24 Guitar Solo [Instrumental] (Led Zeppelin)
25 Achilles Last Stand (Led Zeppelin)
26 talk (Led Zeppelin)
27 Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin)
28 talk (Led Zeppelin)
29 Rock and Roll [Edit] (Led Zeppelin)
30 talk (Led Zeppelin)
31 Trampled Underfoot (Led Zeppelin)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/DV8WJtUp

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/7maVHRnGWzGvN6c/file

alternate:

https://www.imagenetz.de/moZVQ

The cover art is from a poster promoting a Led Zeppelin concert in Oakland, California, on July 24, 1977. I think it's really cool. I wish there were most stylish concert posters like this. As usual with posters, I had to do some cropping to fit the rectangular poster into a square shape. The purple text surrounded by a red circle had been below the bottom edge of what I've included. I moved that, and changed the text to fit this concert.

Led Zeppelin - Earls Court, London, Britain, 5-24-1975

Since there seems to be a lot of interest, I've resolved to plug the biggest remaining holes when it comes to live Led Zeppelin sooner rather than later. Most critically, I want at least one show from their 1975 and 1977 tours. Here's something for the 1975 tour.

There are lots of soundboard bootlegs from the 1975, but it was kind of a no-brainer to pick a concert from Earl's Court. They were the largest and most important concerts in the band's history up until that point. There's even a Wikipedia page on the concerts:

Earls Court 1975 - Wikipedia 

Here's what author Dave Lewis had to say about the concert, from a book he wrote about the band:

"When Led Zeppelin undertook the series of five shows at London's Earl's Court Arena on May of 1975 they were at the very peak of their creative powers. Spurred on by the critical and commercial success of their sixth album, the double set 'Physical Graffiti,' each show they played took on event-like proportions. The 17,000 capacity Earls Court afforded them the luxury to showcase in the best possible setting, the sheer enormity of their stage act. Over five nights of May 1975 Zeppelin delivered perhaps the most impressive series of shows of their entire career ... Photographic images from the shows still light up the pages of countless Zep features and books, bootleg performances are eagerly snapped up, and the official video footage of the gigs projects the sheer magnitude and power of Led Zeppelin in full flight more than any other surviving film of the group."

As mentioned in that quote, there were five Earls Court concerts, on May 17th, 18th, 23rd, 24th, and 25th. Die-hard fans consider the May 17th and 18th shows the best in terms of performance, but the only soundboards that have reached the public are from the 24th and 25th. Video footage of a few songs from the 25th show were released on the 2003 DVD "Led Zeppelin." I chose to feature the 24th here because fans generally consider that the better performance, and there are fewer problems with the recording.

The sound quality is excellent. The only problems had to do with the songs "Going to California" and "That's the Way." For some reason, the soundboard of all of the first song and the beginning of the second song doesn't exist. There is an audience bootleg, so people have used that to fill in the gap. However, in my opinion, the sound quality is way worse, and I didn't like it. So instead I used the soundboard versions from the next night, May 25th. 

There were a couple of problems with that though. Both versions of those songs began with lots of cheering, but the lead in from the previous track had no cheering. So I used the audio editing program UVR5 to get rid of the cheering for the first ten seconds or so on each song. Also, lead singer Robert Plant talked some between the two songs on the 24th, but there was apparently no talking on the 25th. So I included the talking from the 24th, using the audience bootleg for that. I used UVR5 again to get rid of as much background noise and cheering during the talking as possible. Even so, the sound quality of that talking is noticeably worse than anything else here. For "That's the Way," I spliced the two versions together about twenty seconds into the song, so that vast majority of that comes from this show, the 24th. All of that is why three tracks have "[Edit]" in their titles.

I also edited down some of the cheering. For instance, after "Stairway to Heaven," there was an encore break of about seven minutes of cheering. That's way too much applause for me, so I cut that down to more like two minutes.

There are different versions of this bootleg circulating with slightly different mixes. I read up on what fans consider the best version. I ended up going with the "Watch Tower" version.

This album is a whopping three hours and 31 minutes long! This was a time of rock and roll excess, not long before punk rock came along and shook things up. So, for instance, "Dazed and Confused" is 33 minutes long, and "Moby Dick," which is basically a drum solo, is 28 minutes long. But the concert also has an acoustic set of short songs in the middle of the show.

01 talk by Nicky Horne (Led Zeppelin)
02 Rock and Roll (Led Zeppelin)
03 Sick Again (Led Zeppelin)
04 talk (Led Zeppelin)
05 Over the Hills and Far Away (Led Zeppelin)
06 talk (Led Zeppelin)
07 In My Time of Dying (Led Zeppelin)
08 talk (Led Zeppelin)
09 The Song Remains the Same (Led Zeppelin)
10 The Rain Song (Led Zeppelin)
11 talk (Led Zeppelin)
12 Kashmir (Led Zeppelin)
13 talk (Led Zeppelin)
14 No Quarter (Led Zeppelin)
15 talk (Led Zeppelin)
16 Tangerine (Led Zeppelin)
17 talk (Led Zeppelin)
18 Going to California [Edit] (Led Zeppelin)
19 talk [Edit] (Led Zeppelin)
20 That's the Way [Edit] (Led Zeppelin)
21 talk (Led Zeppelin)
22 Bron-Y-Aur Stomp (Led Zeppelin)
23 talk (Led Zeppelin)
24 Trampled Underfoot (Led Zeppelin)
25 talk (Led Zeppelin)
26 Moby Dick (Led Zeppelin)
27 talk (Led Zeppelin)
28 Dazed and Confused - Woodstock - Dazed and Confused (Led Zeppelin)
29 talk (Led Zeppelin)
30 Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin)
31 talk (Led Zeppelin)
32 Whole Lotta Love - Turn On Your Love Light (Led Zeppelin)
33 Black Dog (Led Zeppelin)
34 talk (Led Zeppelin)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/aLMcYYxU

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/bZFecB2kDRK3HTW/file

alternate:

https://www.imagenetz.de/a7Gxj

The cover is based on a promotional poster. Basically, the band had just played a tour of North America, and only played these five shows in Britain. They were then going to do a tour of South America (which ultimately got cancelled due to Robert Plant getting in a car accident). To appease British fans outside of London, the band arranged for special trains to pick up and return fans from other towns just for the concerts. So the poster was promoting that - you can see a map of the train lines towards the bottom.

I had to make some adjustments to get the rectangular poster to fit into the square space. I cropped off part of the bottom, but that wasn't enough. I had to stretch things a bit, so the band name and the little train illustration is a bit distorted. I kept the text mostly the same, but I replaced a mention of all five dates with just May 24, 1975, and I moved the mention of ticket prices from a section below that I cropped off.

Led Zeppelin - The Old Refectory, Southampton University, Southampton, Britain, 1-22-1973

How much do you value a spirited performance vs. sound quality? I recently looked at some Led Zeppelin social forums, and this is considered quite possibly THE best sounding live recording of the band, even though it's a bootleg. It's not just a soundboard; this was a professionally done multi-track recording that somehow got leaked to the public. I think the sound quality is freaking amazing. 

The downside for die-hard fans is that this was considered merely a good night for the band, not an outstanding one. But I think that's nitpicking. The band sure sounded "on" to me. I'd much rather listen to this than some supposedly great performance that's buried in hiss and muck.

As amazing as this sounded already, I think I made it sound even better. I used the audio editing program UVR5 to make a few changes. For starters, the lead vocals were a bit low, so I boosted them for all the songs. There also were occasional sections of songs when the vocals were especially low - perhaps lead singer Robert Plant wasn't singing close enough to the microphone. So I took care to give those spots an extra boost, sometimes adjusting line by line. I also boosted the banter between songs so the talking could be heard better over the crowd noise. Finally, the applause was rather low, which is common for soundboards. I also boosted that for most of the songs.

Oh, one more edit I made was that I cut the length of some of the applause way down. Towards the end of the show, there were several encore breaks with cheering that lasted for three or four minutes at times. It's boring for me to hear nothing but applause for that long, so I cut those down to a minute or two each instead.

One other great thing about this concert is that it was played in a small venue of only a few hundred people. That's extraordinary, because by 1973, Led Zeppelin was one of the biggest musical acts on the planet. Their 1971 album "Led Zeppelin IV" sold over 20 million copies, making it one of the top ten best selling albums of all time. I'm not sure why they deigned to play such a small place in 1973, but maybe it was part of a plan to record this for a possible live album. Whatever the case, that helped even more with the sound quality. It's as if the band was still playing small clubs like they did when they started in early 1969, only with a set list that included tons of classics like "Stairway to Heaven" and "Black Dog." Frankly, I don't understand why this recording isn't a lot better known, or even officially released.

At the time of this concert, the band's next album "Houses of the Holy" was still two months away from being released. But a few songs from that album were played anyway: "The Song Remains the Same," "Over the Hills and Far Away," "The Rain Song," and "Dancing Days." They also did a 23-minute long version of "Whole Lotta Love" that effectively have some full versions of interesting cover songs inside it, such as "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care" and "Let's Have a Party."

I'm still working my way through understanding Led Zeppelin bootlegs. If anyone knows of other "best of the best" shows with outstanding sound quality like this one that you think I should post at my blog, please let me know. I'd especially like to fill in some gaps by finding the best shows from 1975 and 1977.

This concert is two hours and 28 minutes long.

01 talk (Led Zeppelin)
02 Rock and Roll (Led Zeppelin)
03 Over the Hills and Far Away (Led Zeppelin)
04 talk (Led Zeppelin)
05 Black Dog (Led Zeppelin)
06 Misty Mountain Hop (Led Zeppelin)
07 Since I've Been Loving You (Led Zeppelin)
08 talk (Led Zeppelin)
09 Dancing Days (Led Zeppelin)
10 talk (Led Zeppelin)
11 The Song Remains the Same (Led Zeppelin)
12 The Rain Song (Led Zeppelin)
13 talk (Led Zeppelin)
14 Dazed and Confused (Led Zeppelin)
15 Stairway to Heaven (Led Zeppelin)
16 talk (Led Zeppelin)
17 Whole Lotta Love - Everybody Needs Somebody to Love - Whole Lotta Love (Led Zeppelin)
18 Boogie Chillun’ - [You're So Square] Baby I Don't Care (Led Zeppelin)
19 Let's Have a Party (Led Zeppelin)
20 I Can't Quit You Babe - Whole Lotta Love [Reprise] (Led Zeppelin)
21 talk (Led Zeppelin)
22 Heartbreaker (Led Zeppelin)
23 talk (Led Zeppelin)
24 Organ Solo [Instrumental] (Led Zeppelin)
25 Thank You (Led Zeppelin)
26 talk (Led Zeppelin)
27 How Many More Times - The Hunter - How Many More Times (Led Zeppelin)
28 Communication Breakdown (Led Zeppelin)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/JK3hXr6S

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/T4TS4YQhLpi9ECC/file

alternate:

https://www.imagenetz.de/fGJCg

The good news is, the cover photo shows Led Zeppelin at this exact venue. The bad news is, it's from the one previous time they played there, on March 11, 1971. So, two years earlier. But I figure the band members more or less looked the same, and this photo gives you a sense of just how small the stage was. I did find a few photos from the correct date, but they were only black and white (and not easily colorized), and none of them are as well composed as this one is.

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.

Robert Plant - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: In Concert, Wembley Arena, London, Britain, 9-10-1985

Robert Plant has performed for the BBC many times over the course of his long solo career (not to mention his additional appearances as part of Led Zeppelin). But even though there's a very big interest in bootlegs of his music, I haven't seen his BBC shows put together in any systematic way. So I'm going to try to do that, starting here.

Led Zeppelin broke up in 1980, with the death of drummer John Bonham. It took a couple of years for Plant to get a solo career going, but by 1985 he already had two very successful solo albums under his belt. For most of his 1980s solo concerts, he avoided his Led Zeppelin entirely. But around this time, he also was getting back in touch with his musical roots by performing lots of songs from the early years of rock and roll. That interest led to the big success of the 1984 Honeydrippers EP "Volume One," which sold over a million records in the US and spawned a couple of big hit singles too.

This concert, while relatively short, shows both of his musical sides at the time. The first six songs are from his 1980s solo albums and are in a modern rock / new wave style. The rest are all covers, generally of 1950s songs, with the exception of his solo hit "Big Log" near the end.

There are more songs played at the concert that I couldn't find with this sound quality: "Like I've Never Been Gone," "Pink and Black," "Burning Down One Side," "Too Loud," and "Messin' with the Mekon." I didn't want to mess with the recording too much, but I figured "Burning Down One Side" was a hit at a time and was a key song in his concerts that year. So I used a soundboard bootleg of a Birmingham concert hat year and added the song in the order it was played.

The order of the songs was slightly different in the bootleg I found for this concert. For instance, "Big Log" was in the first half of the concert instead of at the end. But I found a set list that I think is likely the correct order, so I moved a couple of songs around to match that. It's probable that the BBC changed the song order at the same time they cut out a few of the songs.

Out of all of the "oldies" Plant covered in concert around this time, my favorite is "(Every Time I Hear) That Mellow Saxophone." It was written and recorded by Roy Montrell in 1956. He was an in demand session guitarist, but only ever released two singles. Neither was a hit, but this one has been covered by lots of musicians because it's such a fun song. It wasn't played in this show, but I couldn't resisting adding in a version from a 1986 show. I've added it at the end as a quasi bonus track.

This concert is an hour and 19 minutes long.

01 In the Mood (Robert Plant)
02 Pledge Pin (Robert Plant)
03 Little by Little (Robert Plant)
04 Burning Down One Side (Robert Plant)
05 Thru' with the Two Step (Robert Plant)
06 Slow Dancer (Robert Plant)
07 Rockin' at Midnight (Robert Plant)
08 talk (Robert Plant)
09 Young Boy Blues (Robert Plant)
10 Sea of Love (Robert Plant)
11 talk (Robert Plant)
12 Honey Hush (Robert Plant)
13 Big Log (Robert Plant)
14 talk (Robert Plant)
15 [Every Time I Hear] That Mellow Saxophone (Robert Plant)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15165007/RobertP_1985_BBSessionsVolume1InConcrtWmbleyArena__9-10-1985_atse.zip.html

The cover photo is from a concert in Illinois in 1985. By the way, the color in his hair is due to red lighting.

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - BBC in Concert, Glastonbury Festival, Worthy Farm, Pilton, Britain, 6-24-2022

Robert Plant has performed often for the BBC over the course of his long solo career. I plan on posting much of that material someday, in chronological order. But I'd like to start with this. I recently found this concert on video, and then converted it to individual mp3 tracks.

Robert Plant has recorded two studio albums with bluegrass star Alison Krauss. This concert was in support of their 2021 album "Raise the Roof." Naturally, they mainly played songs from that, but also songs from their first album, and some Led Zeppelin classics.

It seems that just about everything from Britain's yearly Glastonbury Festivals gets played on the BBC at one time or another, although many of the recordings can't be found by me. This was a high quality webcast, so I took the audio from that. The sound quality is like an official album.

This concert is an hour and one minute long. It appears to be the full performance.

01 Rich Woman (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss)
02 talk (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss)
03 Quattro [World Drifts In] (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss)
04 Fortune Teller (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss)
05 The Price of Love (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss)
06 Rock and Roll (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss)
07 Please Read the Letter (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss)
08 Trouble with My Lover (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss)
09 High and Lonesome (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss)
10 It Don't Bother Me (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss)
11 talk (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss)
12 Gone, Gone, Gone (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss)
13 The Battle of Evermore (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss)
14 talk (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss)
15 When the Levee Breaks (Robert Plant & Alison Krauss)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15124154/RobertPnAK_2022_BBConcertGlastonburyFestivl__6-24-2022_atse.zip.html

The cover photo is taken from a screenshot from this exact concert. The two singers were more separated, but I used Photoshop to move them closer together.

Robert Plant - The Boardwalk, Sheffield, Britain, 9-25-1999

The other day, I posted a Robert Plant concert that mostly consisted of him singing fairly obscure cover songs. That reminded me of this concert, which entirely consists of Plant singing fairly obscure cover songs. There isn't a single Led Zeppelin or Plant solo song in sight, unless one counts "We've Gotta Groove," which is a song that Led Zeppelin covered and put on their album "Coda."

The backstory behind this is fairly interesting. Around 1967, a year before Plant joined Led Zeppelin, he was in a band called the "Band of Joy." They mostly did cover songs, especially folk rock from the West Coast of the US. They never had much success, and only recorded a few songs in the studio. By 1999, it seems Plant was tired of being a musical superstar and playing his same hits over and over in concerts. instead, he got involved with musical programs at Kidderminister College. That's a pretty obscure college in Britain, but it's very near where he grew up. He even briefly took chartered accountancy classes there before dropping out and becoming a musician. 

The main connection was that guitarist Kevyn Gammond had been in the Band of Joy with Plant in the 1960s, but went on to become a professor in the Kidderminister College music department. Plant ended up forming a band with Grammond and other professors and students from the college. They called themselves the "Priory of Brion." The name combined "Priory of Zion," a supposed ancient French secret society made famous in Dan Brown novels like "The Da Vinci Code," with "The Life of Brian," a classic Monty Python movie.

At first, in 1999, Priory of Brion was very low key. They played small venues in Britain of only a few hundred people. They were billed just as "Priory of Brion," so few knew that it was really Plant's latest band. They only played cover songs of the type the Band of Joy played back in the 1960s. But the word about them slowly grew, and they began playing larger venues. By 2000, Plant's involvement was well known, and the band played big festivals and the like. But still, they only did relatively obscure covers. 

Plant broke up the band by the end of 2000, and he has never released any material by the band, either live or in the studio (with an obscure exception I'll detail below). However, he did carry over some of the songs with his next band, the Strange Sensations. And when he put out his next studio album in 2002, "Dreamland," there were some Priory of Brion covers on it, including two songs played here, "Morning Dew" and "Darkness, Darkness."

So this is a relatively lost chapter of his music career, but a particularly interesting one, I think. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there is only one Priory of Brion bootleg with excellent soundboard sound quality, this one. I wish there were more, because the band played at least 40 different cover songs, and there are only 17 here. The band also recorded three of those songs in the studio, but they've only come out on extremely obscure various artists compilations that were linked to benefits related to Kidderminister College. 

Although this bootleg generally sounds great, it did have some flaws. I had to edit four songs enough that I put "[Edit]" in their names. For instance, "Morning Dew" had a blast of loud noise in the middle of it that lasted a couple of seconds. I managed to patch it up with a section from elsewhere in the song. "Early in the Morning" had some very small skips in it, some of them less than a second. I closed them as best I could, and patched up the second where most of them were. So it went for the others. And some songs ended abruptly, with no applause. So I added applause taken from the ends of other songs to those.

However, there was one serious flaw I couldn't fix. The last song, "High School Confidential" is brutally cut off. It lasts less than a minute. And this was a song played as a special request for a friend. I couldn't find any other instances of Plant ever singing it, so there was nothing I could do to fix the short length. I considered dropping it altogether, but Plant had some interesting comments leading up to it, and it is super rare, so I kept it in.

But that meant the concert ended on a disappointing note. So I added one more song to the end, taken from a different Priory of Brion concert (Rome, Italy, in September 2000). The sound quality is worse than the rest, but still decent. It's one of my favorite obscurities, "Flames," originally by Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera. Hopefully with that song, the concert ends in a more satisfying manner.

Plant must have particularly liked that song too, because it was one of only three songs Priory of Brion recorded in the studio, as I mentioned above. I recently discovered recordings of those three songs. I'll probably add them to a stray tracks collection someday, but in the meantime I'm including them as bonus tracks here. They're all from really obscure compilation albums released in the early 2000s, but I've put 2000 for the year in the mp3 tag, because that's when they were recorded. As if they weren't obscure enough already, for the song "Flames," Plant used the pseudonym "Johnny Volcano!"

This album is an hour and 20 minutes long. That does include the extra song from a different concert at the end, but it does not the three studio bonus tracks.

Here's a list of the original artists for each song (some numbers are skipped due to the talking tracks):

02 Season of the Witch - Donovan
03 Morning Dew - Bonnie Dobson
04 A House Is Not a Motel - Love
05 Wondrous Place - Billy Fury
07 Girl from the North Country - Bob Dylan
08 If I Were a Carpenter - Tim Hardin
10 Darkness, Darkness - Youngbloods
12 Think - "5" Royales / James Brown
14 Early in the Morning - Ray Charles
16 We're Gonna Groove - Ben E. King
17 Baby Please Don't Go - Big Joe Williams / Them
19 No Regrets - Tom Rush
20 Gloria -Them
21 Trouble in Mind - Richard M. Jones / Muddy Waters
22 Evil Woman - Spooky Tooth / Canned Heat
24 High School Confidential - Jerry Lee Lewis
26 Flames - Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera

Here's the usual song list:

01 talk (Robert Plant)
02 Season of the Witch (Robert Plant)
03 Morning Dew [Edit] (Robert Plant)
04 A House Is Not a Motel (Robert Plant)
05 Wondrous Place (Robert Plant)
06 talk (Robert Plant)
07 Girl from the North Country (Robert Plant)
08 If I Were a Carpenter (Robert Plant)
09 talk (Robert Plant)
10 Darkness, Darkness (Robert Plant)
11 talk (Robert Plant)
12 Think [Edit] (Robert Plant)
13 talk (Robert Plant)
14 Early in the Morning [Edit] (Robert Plant)
15 talk (Robert Plant)
16 We're Gonna Groove (Robert Plant)
17 Baby Please Don't Go (Robert Plant)
18 talk (Robert Plant)
19 No Regrets (Robert Plant)
20 Gloria (Robert Plant)
21 Trouble in Mind [Edit] (Robert Plant)
22 Evil Woman (Robert Plant)
23 talk (Robert Plant)
24 High School Confidential [Incomplete] (Robert Plant)
25 talk (Robert Plant)
26 Flames (Robert Plant)

Morning Dew (Robert Plant)
Evil Woman (Robert Plant)
Flames (Robert Plant)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/zRWAk9XW

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/DHvMTMyQTzSEK7h/file

alternate:

https://www.imagenetz.de/bGAKS

I couldn't find any really good pictures of Plant in concert in 1999. This one is from August 2000, in Belgium, when he was still backed by the Priory of Brion.