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://www.imagenetz.de/iuFTm

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.