Eleven months...
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| 1969 17 October On This Day Led Zeppelin at Carnegie Hall (2 shows) |
- 1969 Led Zeppelin - New York at Carnegie Hall (2 Shows: 8:30pm and 12:00 midnight)
- 1988 Jimmy Page Outrider Tour - Chicago, IL at UIC Pavilion
Eleven months. That's all it took for Led Zeppelin to go from embryo to Carnegie Hall. No rock band had played that venue since the Rolling Stones, five years prior, when rock performances were banned after a riot at the Stones' show. But Led Zeppelin had shot into the stratosphere like a SpaceX rocket and could not be denied.
Two performances that night, the second starting at midnight. Donovan was at Madison Square Garden that night, a sold-out show. Led Zeppelin tickets had been sold out for weeks and were being scalped at twice the box office price.
"This performance makes me realize we can be bigger than The Beatles and the Stones," Peter Grant told Richard Cole shortly after.
~ Led Zeppelin: The Concert File, Dave Lewis 2005
"Travelling en mass, we managed to miss our plane out of Heathrow, so we caught the next available flight which got us into New York just a few hours before we were due to play this prestigious venue. Nevertheless, we played a blinding concert but this was the one and only time we ever got to play Carnegie Hall."~ Jimmy Page
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| 1969 Led Zeppelin at Carnegie Hall |
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| 1969 Led Zeppelin at Carnegie Hall |
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| 1969 17 October On This Day background image |
1988
Jimmy Page was 44 years old. Outrider was his first solo album, and it was not received well. People were stuck in the Led Zeppelin rut and couldn't seem to hear Jimmy Page if Robert Plant wasn't singing. Reviewers constantly lamented that Jimmy Page wasn't Led Zeppelin anymore.
And yet... in Chicago JP took 15 minutes to speak "through his guitar deliberately, angrily and with enough raunch to electrify the crowd", according to the Chicago Tribune's lukewarm review. The Trib reviewer noted that the band didn't show strength as a unit, which of course was Led Zeppelin excelled at as no other band has, the whole of them being greater than the sum of its parts (Aristotle).
Today, those who revere Jimmy Page, the mage musician, do appreciate Outrider for its glorious guitar work, if not for the band.
2012:
43 years after Carnegie Hall, Jimmy Page was in Japan promoting the remasters, which had reached top ten on the charts once again. JP was talking about working in his studio, but sadly we haven't gotten to hear any of it yet.
