Well…sitting here watching ‘Celeration Day”…the concert film with Led Zeppelin and it made me think back to when I saw them in person…January 20th, 1975 at the old Chicago Stadium, of course in Chicago. I know my friends have heard this story many times but I just realized today that I missed my chance to write about it on it’s 40th anniversary last January, so I thought I’d do a short one on it today. Getting the tickets is another story that I’ll talk about another time but it involved standing outside for a day at the box office…and had blood, ripped stitches and other cool stuff in it so maybe there is a post in there somewhere. The crazy day started when we checked into our room at a Holiday Inn at 1 south Halstead, in what we didn’t know at the time was the real inner city…we realized it when we noticed we were the only white faces in the place, and coming from west Michigan, it was a surprise to say the least. Okay, to the concert…we took a cab out to the stadium, which, at the time, was in the middle of a part of the city that looked mostly abandoned….the concert was cool but Robert Plant’s voice was totally fried and you could barely tell it was him…one funny aside, at the time I wasn’t really a Zep fan yet so I don’t know a lot of the songs but it was still fun….after the concert, the plan was to catch a cab back to the hotel but the cab driver that took us out neglected to tell us that they didn’t run out into that neighborhood after 11 pm since so many of them had been robbed…so, we set off walking through the worst neighborhood in Chicago, dressed for a cab ride, on the 20th of January, 20 blocks back to the hotel…a bunch of white kids freezing and stumbling through the dark. After the first block, my girlfriend at the time got some of the swirling dirt in her eyes and, wearing contacts, was basically blind the remaining 19 blocks. But, we made it okay…I think it may have been too cold for any muggers to be out and I was really glad we had turned the heat up to 85 before we left our room. It’s a day I remember vividly even 40 years later….the crazy crap you do when you are 21….
Oh, one last thing….the tickets cost $7.50….a lot of money at the time when I was renting a two bedroom house for 100 bucks a month…