No artist is immune to having the occasional bad gig once in a while. It’s always testing fate when trying to recreate a record live, and there are usually a lot of overdubs that are virtually impossible to reproduce onstage unless there are 12 guitarists in tow or a choir of backup singers waiting in the wings. Led Zeppelin could still rock the house even if they had to perform paired-down versions of their songs, but when it came to their biggest gigs at Knebworth, Robert Plant didn’t think that they came close to capturing their magic.
But by that time, Zeppelin didn’t know any gig that didn’t involve thousands of people screaming their name. They had started out as a humble version of a blues band tearing through covers, and now that the stages had become much bigger, there was a lot more sonic space that they had to fill.
It’s not like they didn’t stop making strides as a rock group, either. The amount of time they spent on crafting pieces like ‘Kashmir’ alone was bound to be extravagant, and the vocal leaps that Plant did on those songs were enough to leave any singer experiencing sympathy fatigue on tracks like ‘In My Time of Dying’.
When descending on Knebworth, though, this was the moment where everything seemed to click for them. They had been used to putting on massive shows, so why not deliver it to an open field and one of the biggest crowds that England had to offer? It did work like a charm, but Plant thought that something was off when he walked onstage that night.
Reminiscing on that time, Plant believed that the sound of the concert was awful until he saw the footage from the night, saying, “I watched Knebworth on DVD and thought, ‘That was a shit gig, and I know how good we had been and how we could be, and we were nervous’. And yet, within it all, my old pal Bonzo was right in the pocket. I’d thought he was speeding up, but I must have been so nervous myself that every single blemish or twist that was a little bit away from what I expected was making me hyper.”
At the same time, nothing that Zeppelin ever played was strictly locked on a grid or anything. John Bonham was known for playing slightly behind the beat, which perfectly complemented Jimmy Page’s habit of playing slightly ahead of the beat, creating this kind of restless tension in the group every time they took to the stage.
Even though there are times in the footage where Plant looks absolutely pissed about the show not going well, you’d hardly hear it when they play something like ‘Rock and Roll’. The studio version was made up on the fly, so hearing it pumped up on steroids like this was always going to be a very different animal.
But that might be the way that Plant always thought that Zeppelin was supposed to be. They were creatures of the blues clubs, and while the clubs had gotten a whole lot bigger than they used to be, that doesn’t mean that they had to stifle themselves to bend to their audience suddenly. If anything, their audience was going to bend to them.
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