Led Zeppelin Concerts - History

History

Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, Led Zeppelin made numerous concert tours of the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe in particular. They performed over 600 concerts, initially playing small clubs and ballrooms and then, as their popularity increased, larger venues and arenas as well.

In the early years of their existence, Led Zeppelin made a concerted effort to establish themselves as a compelling live music act. As was recalled by bass player John Paul Jones:

Zeppelin was a live band and that's how we got our reputation. The press hated us in the early days. Our only way of promotion was to play a lot of live shows, especially in the UK. It used to spread by word-of-mouth.

However, though the band made several early tours of the UK, by far the bulk of Led Zeppelin's live concerts were performed in the United States, which was settled on as the primary foundation for their fame and accomplishment. In 1969, for example, all but thirty-three of the band's 139 shows were performed in the US, and between the years 1968 and 1971 they made no fewer than nine tours of North America. "It felt like a vacuum and we'd arrived to fill it," guitarist Jimmy Page once told journalist Cameron Crowe. "It was like a tornado, and it went rolling across the country." After touring almost incessantly during its early years, Led Zeppelin later limited its tour appearances to alternating years - 1973, 1975, 1977 and 1979.

From the early 1970s, the commercial and popular drawing power of Led Zeppelin was such that the band began to embark on major stadium tours which attracted vast crowds, far more than they had previously performed to. During their 1973 tour of the United States, they played to 56,800 fans at Tampa Stadium, Florida, breaking the record set by The Beatles at Shea Stadium in 1965. Similar crowds were drawn on Led Zeppelin's subsequent US tours, and they continued to break attendance records (on April 30, 1977 they played to 76,229 fans at the Pontiac Silverdome, Michigan, a world record attendance for a solo indoor attraction). It is for these reasons that Led Zeppelin, as much as any other band or artist in this era, is widely credited for helping to establish what has come to be known as stadium rock. Many critics attribute the band's rapid rise as much to their tremendous appeal as a live act as they do to the quality of their studio albums. One interesting note from their touring days, in 1977 the band reprised their previous sellout at Tampa Stadium, but were driven off the stage by one of the frequent thunderstorms prevalent in Florida during late spring and summer. Despite "Rain or Shine" being prominently displayed on the tickets to the show, the concert was cancelled after playing part of "The Song Remains The Same". This precipitated was was afterward known as the Tampa Stadium Riot.

Led Zeppelin also performed at several music festivals over the years, including the Atlanta International and the Texas International Pop Festivals in 1969, the Bath Festival of Blues in 1969 and the next one in 1970, the "Days on the Green" in Oakland, California in 1977, and the Knebworth Music Festival in 1979.