Led Zeppelin - BBC Sessions, Volume 1: March 1969

I've made a point of compiling albums of BBC performances whenever I can. Now, it's Led Zeppelin's turn.

At first glance, this isn't needed, because an official album of BBC recordings was released in 1997 called "BBC Sessions." But this was flawed in that it failed to include many songs. This was fixed in 2016 by the release of "The Complete BBC Sessions." It had all the songs from the two disc previous version, and added a third disc of the songs that had been missed. That's well and good, but the albums weren't re-sequenced. So you often had the songs from a particular BBC appearance split between discs.

Thus, my first goal here has been to put all the songs in correct chronological order. Not only have I done that, but I also have the songs appear in the order they were played in each session.

But that's not all. I don't have a problem with adding in some performances that didn't actually come from the BBC, especially if they were broadcast on TV or the radio at the time. So I've done a fair amount of that. In so doing, I've taken all the songs from the three disc compilation "The Complete BBC Sessions" and added enough music from other sources to make a five album series. This is the first album.

My albums are generally shorter than those on the official compilation, typically around 45 minutes (except when keeping a single performance together) as opposed to around 70 minutes. One nice benefit to that is I was able to arrange things to minimize the number of repeated songs. For instance, on the first disc of the official compilation, there are no less than three versions of "Communication Breakdown," as well as two versions of some other songs. You won't find that here.

By chance, all the songs here date to March 1969. Led Zeppelin's first album had come out two months earlier, and the band probably did more promotional appearances in March than any other time in their history. The first four songs come from a BBC appearance, and I have another March 1969 BBC appearance on the next album in this series.

The rest of the songs come from three different dates, but they were all recorded in Denmark. The band was in that country in mid-March, and made appearances on TV and radio, as well as playing some concerts. In putting this album series together, I've strived to use only recordings of a very high sound quality. I've also tried hard not to repeat the exact same performances from my series of stray tracks albums (though I had to in some cases when I used BBC versions for those stray track albums). Happily, there are some songs from those Denmark dates that were recorded very well and aren't just repeats of the usual suspects.

I really like the "As Long as I Have You" medley. I've included parts of this medley for my stray tracks albums, but those came from a different version of the song that was recorded at the Fillmore West. I've found a little known version that comes from Denmark and also sounds great.

"I Gotta Move" is an interesting case. The band almost never played this song. But while recording some songs for a Danish radio show, guitarist Jimmy Page broke a guitar string. Apparently the band was being recorded live, so they couldn't just wait for him to fix the string. Instead, while they were fixing it, they played this blues cover without him. Note that it has lots of vocalist Robert Plant singing and playing harmonica, but no guitar whatsoever.

"The Hunter" is another interesting case. Led Zeppelin had a common habit of playing very long versions of certain songs, and then nestling snippets of other songs within them. The "As Long as I Have You" medley here is a good example. This recording of "The Hunter" actually comes from a long version of "How Many More Times." I selected just the portion of that that was "The Hunter," a blues song originally done by Albert King. There were clear starting and ending points, though if you listen to the end, it sounds pretty obvious that the band is just about to break back into "How Many More Times."

By the way, it wasn't labelled as such on the official release, but the version of "I Can't' Quit You Baby" here includes about a minute of the blues song "She's Nineteen Years Old." Since so many blues songs have the same basic chord changes and musical structures, Robert Plant very often liked to bring in lyrics from other blues songs.

Anyway, the bottom line is this series should fix the ordering issue of the official BBC albums, and add in more songs with a similar high sound quality.

This album is 49 minutes long.

01 You Shook Me (Led Zeppelin)
02 Communication Breakdown (Led Zeppelin)
03 I Can't Quit You Baby - She's Nineteen Years Old (Led Zeppelin)
04 Dazed and Confused (Led Zeppelin)
05 The Train Kept A-Rollin' (Led Zeppelin)
06 As Long as I Have You - Fresh Garbage - Bag's Groove - I Just Want to Make Love to You - As Long as I Have You (Led Zeppelin)
07 I Gotta Move (Led Zeppelin)
08 The Hunter (Led Zeppelin)
09 Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You (Led Zeppelin)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15252798/LdZepp_1969b_BBSessionsVolum1_atse.zip.html

The album cover features the band playing at "TV Eyen" in Copenhagen, Denmark, on March 17, 1969. I selected this photo because the last two songs on the album come from that exact performance.