Well…okay, you know I’m a big music geek and love Neil Young and Led Zeppelin, and what I just saw surprised the hell out of me….when I was reading one of my news sites, I came across a video of Neil and Zeppelin doing a live version of “When the levee breaks” and it even had Robert Plant playing guitar…and it was just so cool to see these guys having so much fun and Neil being Neil…now, this is something I would pay big bucks to see…in the same article it alluded to a collaboration between Donald Fagen and David Crosby….now I need to go look for that…
Tag Archives: Led Zeppelin
Stairway to Heaven…
Well…do I have your attention after that title? Hope so…but this one is a little obscure but I wanted to do something a little different today…one of my favorite bands, Led Zeppelin, and it’s founders and last surviving members Page, Plant, and Jones, have been involved in a plagiarism lawsuit brought by the estate of the lead guitar player of a band called Spirit…who you may or not have heard of…who wrote a song called Taurus back in the early 70′s that had a few chord progressions that sound something like the intro to STH. I listened to it the other day and I did find a couple of notes that kind of sound like one part of STH but the rest of it is nothing like it…and today, the court in LA agreed that the parts that the plaintiffs said were stolen have existed in the public domain for hundreds of years and that Page and Plant didn’t steal them….so two years of a cloud over the guys has been cleared and STH has been shown to be an original work….with the climate of litigation these days, I am really surprised that the case was decided as it was…and I think it was decided correctly….
January 20, 1975
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…
Unbelievable if true….
Well…have been thinking about this one since I read the article last week and thought I’d talk a little about it…if you are a fan of Led Zeppelin like I am, I’m sure you’ve read about the offer that Richard Branson (of Virgin everything) made to the remaining members of the band…that he would pay them 800 million dollars to do a tour of 32 shows next year…yep, that’s 800 million dollars….around 25 million a show…and the even stranger thing? Robert Plant said no so there will be no tour…now, I’m not sure what the hell happened between these guys to have Robert feel this way but turning down 800 million? I guess he doesn’t need the money….geez….