On Christmas Eve, 1968 Led Zeppelin flew to Los Angeles ahead of their first American tour, funded, with their own money, by manager Peter Grant, band leader/guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist John Paul Jones. The tour kicked off in Seattle on December 26, with Zeppelin playing in support to Vanilla Fudge, but it was their headlining club shows, and specifically their now-legendary four-night stand at the Boston Tea Party club from January 23 to 26, which truly set the quartet up as the hottest new rock band in the world. Famously, on the final night of their engagement, the audience reaction was so rapturous that the group played all their own songs, then kept playing for hours, throwing in covers of songs by The Beatles, Chuck Berry, Eddie Cochran and more.
In a new post on Instagram, Jimmy Page casts his mind back to the shows, of which he clearly has fond memories.
"The venue host was Don Law, who had established what was to be known as a bastion of underground music," Page writes. "It was during this run of concerts that we were to play a three and a half hour set – this became quite legendary on the musical grapevine – but the audience just wouldn’t let us go and Don Law was quite clearly a cool promoter."
Speaking about the gig later, Peter Grant recalled, "They absolutely pulverised them... people in the audience used to tell me it was like a force. It was in their heads for three or four days. I thought, There's no holding them back now."
Talking to NME in 1973, John Paul Jones recalled that the final show was the moment that he realised that the band were bound for glory.
"As far as I’m concerned, the key Zeppelin gig, the one that put everything into focus, was one that we played on our first American tour at the Boston Tea Party," he recalled, remembering, "by the end, the audience just wouldn’t let us offstage.
"The response was quite amazing," he marvelled. "There were kids actually bashing their heads against the stage – I’ve never seen that a gig before or since, and when we finally left the stage, we’d played for four plus hours.
"Peter (Grant) was absolutely ecstatic. He was crying, if you can imagine that, and hugging us all. You know with this grizzly bear hug. I suppose it was then that we realised just what Led Zeppelin was going to become."
Aerosmith's Steve Tyler was one of those in attendance at the shows, and during his speech inducted Led Zeppelin into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame he recalled that the middle section of Dazed and Confused "was so fucking heavy that it made me cry."
"Another time I cried over Led Zeppelin was an hour later," he continued, "when Jimmy Page emerged from the dressing room with a beautiful girl on his arm. I would have been very impressed, except it was the girl I've been living with up until that moment, and I was getting an incredible visual of all my clothes being thrown out into the alley on 21st Street. But Jimmy was such a motherfucker on stage [that] I couldn't hold it against him."
