This is the earliest known live concert recording of um, Len Zefflin, as they played Gonzaga University prior to their first album’s release. Young Monkeystador’s parents did not take him to this show. The venue was unheated for rock events, and this was a December concert. It was their fifth show in the U.S., and they used propane heaters to keep themselves warm before going on.
Sounds, uh, great.
Within a year they were too big to ever come back to Spokane.
You’ll get Whitesnake and Foreigner, and like it.
That first US tour is legendary. By the end of the tour, headliners—Vanilla Fudge, Country Joe and the Fish, or Iron Butterfly, depending on the town—weren’t even showing up.
Zeppelin did not play in Memphis again after the ‘70 show. The stadium would have accommodated them, but the gun incident put them off. Page and Terry Manning did mix III here at Ardent, though.
I also believe the Paige / Plant No Quarter tour came to the Pyramid.
Yes, Page/Plant stopped here, but I’m not sure the Pyramid was built yet. I’d lost interest in them by that time. Plant has been here solo a few times.
I saw him with Alison Krauss (and T Bone Burnett!) at Mud Island in 2007 or so. It was outstanding.
https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/jimmy-page-and-robert-plant/1995/the-pyramid-arena-memphis-tn-23d0f883.html
For some reason I thought that tour happenened in the 80’s. I was probably thinking about an 80’s Plant solo tour that hit the coliseum. I remember someone telling me about how a Zep member finally was coming back there. Things were so much calmer by then.
For most of the 70’s, LZ had a reputation for ruthless, heavy-handed security. That was in part a reaction to the ’70 tour, which had the Memphis incident as well as one in Texas when guns were pointed at band members. This was long before the squeaky-clean world of Ticketmaster. Putting on shows was a world of cash-stuffed suitcases, guns, and paranoia-inducing drugs. Grant was the perfect manager for that era.