"They were playing over time, stringin' it out, and there was a curfew, so I was saying, I've got to get you off! I had to pull the plug on them."
Not many people can honestly say that they once threw Led Zeppelin off-stage, but Jeff Wolff is one of them. The date was May 25, 1969, the location the the Merriweather Post Pavilion amphitheatre in Columbia, Maryland, and Jimmy Page's band - incorrectly listed on the concert ticket as 'Lead' Zeppelin - were playing support to Wolff's bosses, The Who. Encoring with an early version of Whole Lotta Love, premiered one month earlier in San Francisco, but not due for release on Led Zeppelin II until October 22 in the US, the band were showing no inclination to vacate the stage. And so, as recorded in Anyway Anyhow Anywhere - The Complete Chronicle of The Who: 1958-1978, by Andy Neill and Mark Kent, Wolff was assigned the "unenviable" task of telling the quartet to stop playing, a task which likely made him the most unpopular man on the entire Eastern Seaboard that evening.
The night's entertainment was opened, in somewhat unorthodox style, by a comedian called Uncle Dirty, aka Bob Altman, whose main source of 'humour' on the night, revolved around jokes about homosexuality. A critic from the Washington DC newspaper The Evening Star described Uncle Dirty as "pretty funny... at least if you don't object to the subject matter."
"And you can hear the words," the review, which ran in the May 26 edition of the paper, continued, which is more than can be said for the performance of Led Zeppelin."
The man from The Evening Star wasn't terribly impressed by what he could hear from Zeppelin. Noting that the band were "getting very bluesy" he suggested that "the balance between words and music is shifted in words favour".
"Without them," he griped, "what is left is an exceptionally redundant - in the technical sense - musical style. And with all that redundance comes boredom."
Headliners The Who received a critique.that was only marginally less dismissive.
Playing no fewer than 16 songs from their bold and brilliant rock opera Tommy, released one week earlier, the west London quartet were praised for having "a way of dealing with unrelated triads that continues to sound fresh and interesting", but the Evening Star writer added, "So much of this music goes on for so long that one begins to long for the discipline of the 45rpm record. It is simply not true that longer is better or artier or anything except longer."
Still, as 20,000 fans left the outdoor amphitheatre on a high after an encore featuring covers of Shakin' All Over and Summertime Blues, plus The Who's own Magic Bus, even the most cynical observer could not fail to be moved.
"Old crabs can write what they want," The Evening Star man concluded. "The fact remains that the young people who packed the place had a fine time."
