"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."
