Led Zeppelin London 10/12/07
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- Randd0
"as for Jimmy Page, his guitar solos weren’t as frenetic and articulated as they used to be, but that only drove home the point that they were always secondary to the riffs, which on Monday were enormous, nasty, glorious. (He did produce a violin bow for his solo on “Dazed and Confused” during that song’s great, spooky middle section.)
John Paul Jones’s bass lines got a little lost in the hall’s acoustics — like all such places, the 22,000-seat O2 arena is rough on low frequencies — but he was thoroughly in the pocket with Jason Bonham; when he sat down to play keyboards on “Kashmir” and “No Quarter” and a few others, he simultaneously operated bass pedals with his feet, keeping to that same far-behind-the-beat groove.
And what of Jason Bonham, the big question mark of what has been — there’s no way to prove this scientifically, but let’s just round it off — the most anticipated rock reunion in an era full of them? He is an expert on his father’s beats, an encyclopedia of all their variations on all the existing recordings. And apart from some small places where he added a few strokes, he stuck to the sound and feel of the original. The smacks of the snare drum didn’t have exactly the same timbre, that barbarous, reverberant sound. But as the show got into its second hour, and a few of the sound problems were gradually corrected, you found yourself not worrying about it anymore. It was all working.
Led Zeppelin has semi-reunited a few times in the past, with not much success: short, problematic sets at Live Aid in 1985 and at Atlantic Records’ 40th anniversary concert in 1988. But this was a reunion that the band had invested in, despite the fact that there are no plans yet for a future tour; among its 16 songs was one it had never played live before: “For Your Life,” from the album “Presence.”
The excitement in the hall felt extreme, and genuine; the crowd roars between encores were ravenous. At the end of it all, as the three original members took a bow, Mr. Bonham knelt before them and genuflected."
- I like all the roadies standing around in the back.capsize