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://www.imagenetz.de/dhVWU

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.