Tuesday Rock Roundup
Led Zeppelin's first public performance in 19 years took place last night in front of 20 thousand screaming fans at London's O-2 arena. Zeppelin was the headlining act for a tribute concert in memory of the late Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun. The group's set opened up with "Good Times Bad Times" from their debut album and wrapped up just about two hours later with "Rock and Roll". The sold out crowd were somewhat subdued until the stage lights went down at 9pm London time. The stage long video screen behind the band's simple stage set up played a clip from The Song Remains the Same of a news report saying Zeppelin broke The Beatles' attendance record for a gig, and then introduced each member -- Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham were all dressed in black as they broke into "Good Times, Bad Times." Robert Plant didn't speak until just before their fourth song, and he just uttered a simple "good evening" before they did the Physical Graffiti track "In My Time of Dying." After the song, Plant told the crowd, "Thank you for the thousand and thousands of emotions we've been going through for the past few weeks." He introduced "For Your Life" by saying, "This is the first adventure for this song in public". Bassist John Paul Jones switched to keyboards for "Trampled Under Foot," and ended up playing keyboards on half of the remaining songs. Before "Dazed and Confused," Plant said, "I don't know how many songs we've recorded. It was tough choosing which ones would make a dynamic evening, but there are certain songs that have to be there and this is one of them." During the 10-minute epic, Jimmy Page played his guitar with a bow. The legendary "Stairway to Heaven" got a nice ovation when the band started playing it, but not as loud as perhaps it would have been in the U-S. After "Kashmir," the four band members came to the front of the stage and took a bow and left the stage to an ovation that lasted for five minutes. The band came back on stage and did "Whole Lotta Love." They went off again, with crowd applauding for five minutes until they came back. Page took the mic and said, "This has been a great night for all of us." They broke into "Rock and Roll" while vintage footage of the band played on the screen behind them. At end of song, all four took a bow and then Bonham got on his knees in front of Plant, Page and Jones and starting bowing, imitating the famous "We're not worthy" scene from Wayne's World. The audience was star-studded, with Paul McCartney, Queen's Roger Taylor, U-2 guitarist The Edge, Marilyn Manson, David Gilmour, Steve Winwood, Def Leppard's Joe Elliot, Bob Geldof, Mike Rutherford of Genesis, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Chad Smith, Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl and Oasis' Liam and Noel Gallagher, Naomi Campbell, Heart's Ann Wilson, Styx's James "J-Y" Young, and the Presley clan -- Priscilla, Lisa Marie, Lisa Marie's daughter Riley Keough and Riley's beau Ryan Cabrera, all in attendance.
An electric guitar once owned by Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones was recently discovered after having been missing for more than 40 years. The Harmony Stratotone model, which Jones used on the band's early British single "Come On," is supposedly the one on which he taught Keith Richards to play. Back when the Stones were still struggling musicians, Jones gave it to his dentist to settle a bill. The family of Doctor Basil Wilson has held onto the now-classic instrument since the '60s and last week revealed its existence to the media. They plan to let the public see the instrument soon. Thought to be worth a half-million-dollars, the guitar is on loan to a new museum dedicated to Jones at the Wheatsheaf pub near Cheltenham, England, where the rock star first performed in public.
Arguably Bob Dylan's most famous concert appearance, the night he "went electric" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, provides the dramatic conclusion of the Dylan documentary The Other Side of the Mirror, released last week by Sony. Filmmaker Murray Lerner, hired to capture the music and mood of Newport through the 1960s, found an even more compelling storyline -- Dylan's evolution from a rising voice in folk music to his embracing of rock and roll while he was becoming one of the dominant voices of his generation. Lerner says, "I didn't use any narration, any talking heads. [I] just let Dylan take you on a trip through the drama of his imagination and the changes in his artistic sensibility." "It Ain't Me Babe" and "Mister Tambourine Man," performed in 1964, show the direction in which Dylan was evolving -- followed his electrified performance of "Maggie's Farm" and "Like a Rolling Stone" in 1965. Though small portions of the footage were used in Lerner's 1967 documentary on Newport, Lerner estimates that 70 percent of The Other Side of the Mirror has never been seen before.
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