Concert kicked arse:
NY Newsday:
www.newsday.com/entertainment/music/wire/sns-ap-led-zeppelin,0,2909352.story?coll=ny-rightrail-bottompromo
"Rave Reviews for Led Zeppelin ConcertBy CHRIS LEHOURITES | Associated Press Writer
9:28 AM EST, December 11, 2007
LONDON - On the morning after Led Zeppelin's long-awaited reunion concert, the music reviewers were already calling for more.
Playing a full set for the first time in nearly three decades, the authors of "Stairway to Heaven" and "Whole Lotta Love" rocked the O2 Arena on Monday for more than two hours, leaving fans from around the world gasping in delight.
"With a synergy like this going on, it would be an act of cosmic perversity to stop now," Pete Paphides of The Times of London wrote.
The band's three surviving members -- singer Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist-keyboardist John Paul Jones -- were joined at the sold-out benefit show by the late John Bonham's son Jason on drums.
The 16-song set mixed the classics with the thumping "Kashmir" and the hard-rocking "Dazed and Confused," which Plant introduced by saying, "There are certain songs that have to be there, and this is one of them."
Plant's high-pitched screeches and moans also filled the arena, while Page used a cello bow during the solo in "Dazed and Confused" and picked on his double-necked guitar to ring out the famous notes to "Stairway."
Although a full tour remains a mystery -- Plant is reportedly due to tour with bluegrass star Alison Krauss -- the band surely proved that it still had what it takes to keep an audience interested.
"Page dispensed power chords like an aged Thor lobbing down thunderbolts for kicks," Paphides wrote about "Black Dog," the band's third song of the night.
Other media also hailed the show as a success.
"They sound awesomely tight," Alexis Petridis wrote in Tuesday's The Guardian. David Cheal of The Daily Telegraph said the band's "familiar old sinew and swagger were still there."
The Independent was a little less effusive in its praise, but Andy Gill did write that the call-and-response routine between Plant and Page during "Black Dog" was "one of the night's more engaging moments."
Gill also singled out Bonham, who was sitting in for his father. John Bonham died in 1980 after choking on his own vomit, leading to the band's breakup a few months later.
"Jason Bonham makes a more than merely able replacement for his father on drums: indeed, there's a stronger funk element to his playing which kicks the songs along with more elan," Gill wrote.
In the Evening Standard, John Aizlewood gave the concert five stars.
"Two hours and 10 minutes after they began `Good Times Bad Times,' ... they had assuaged the doubts and delivered a show of breathtaking power and spine-tingling excitement," Aizlewood wrote.
The New York Times reviewer Ben Ratliff said Plant "was authoritative; he was dignified."
"As for Mr. 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," Ratliff wrote.
Kim Murphy of the Los Angeles Times said the band "played the first sets with easygoing confidence. Their good humor built into triumphant intensity as the night wore on."
Daily Star writer James Cabooter may have written what all Zep fans have been thinking since the concert was announced months ago.
"Led Zep were pure class," he wrote. "Now bring on the full reunion tour."
"The Telegraph (London)
www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/12/12/bmzepmick112.xml"Led Zeppelin: Why rarity made the Led Zep reunion so precious Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 12/12/2007
Mick Brown salutes the phenomenal return of the rock gods, but says that this should be the last time
I have never met Jimmy Page, but I did once visit his home. Page had a passionate interest in the life and work of Aleister Crowley, the black magician known as "the wickedest man in the world", and in the mid-'70s he provided facilities at his Gothic-revival home for American filmmaker Kenneth Anger to edit a film about Crowley.
The band who reinvented the blues: Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant on stage at the O2 Arena
But, for reasons that were not entirely clear, the two men fell out over the project - and, as an acquaintance of Anger's, I helped to remove his belongings from Page's mansion. I remember him now, walking down the garden path throwing dark spells over his shoulder as he departed.
It's difficult how say how effective those spells were. On the one hand, Page's life, or so the stories have it, was somewhat troubled in the ensuing years. But then again, more than a million people applied for tickets to watch the group cast their own spell over the O2 Arena on Monday.
The superlatives have been thrown around with reckless abandon. This, apparently, was the greatest rock-and-roll band in the world performing the greatest rock-and-roll show ever. Perhaps it was. But nothing enhances the value of a commodity - or a reputation - more than scarcity.
The fact that Zeppelin were the last remaining supergroup of the era not to have reunited was enough in itself to make it seem as if the gods had descended from Olympus to walk on stage in Docklands.
But there was more to it than that. These great orgies of nostalgia and self-congratulation - Pink Floyd at Live8, the Cream at the Royal Albert Hall - are a chance for the generation who came of age in the '60s and '70s to remind themselves that they really did have the best of it, and that music would never be as good nor as meaningful again; and a chance for their children grudgingly to agree with them.
Monday's performance was a benefit on behalf of the late Ahmet Ertegun, who signed Led Zeppelin to his Atlantic label in 1968, at a time when they were playing to audiences of 300 people in clubs. Ertegun was prescient enough to see that Led Zeppelin's borrowing of the blues was a solid commercial proposition, although not even he could have guessed quite how solid. By the time the group disbanded in 1980, they had sold more than 300 million records.
John Lennon famously described the blues as "a chair, not a design for a chair, or a better chair… It is the first chair."
Led Zeppelin upholstered it, etched it with elaborate carvings, painted it in the most lurid, loudest colours, made it the biggest and most expensive chair in the music business. They reinvented the chair as heavy metal, and in the process pioneered a series of defining characteristics: the crunching axe-meister guitar solo; the quasi-mystical allusions; the tight-trousered posturing and ear-splitting vocals. All things that were Xeroxed an infinite number of times by any number of inferior imitators to end up with… Judas Priest.
But Zeppelin's appeal went far beyond the music. They became not simply famous, but - much more important at the time - infamous; the epitome of moral dereliction and decadence. The template not only for rock and roll the music, but rock and roll the life.
I vividly recall being backstage at the group's last British performance at Knebworth in 1979. The sense of anticipation surrounding their arrival was electric. I remember Page arriving, at last, in the backstage area in a Rolls Royce and, if memory serves, being, quite literally, carried from the car by his minders - a vision of elegant dereliction, wreathed in silk scarves, crushed velvet, the palpable aroma of excess.
If the music was thrilling in itself - and it certainly was - the dark promise of a life sacrificed to debauchery and self-indulgence seemed more thrilling still. At least until the drummer John Bonham expired a few months later, choking on his own vomit after a day's drinking, which had begun with a "breakfast" of four quadruple vodkas.
The presence of Bonham's son, Jason, playing drums with the group brought a particular poignancy to Monday's performance. For we are all parents now, or most of us, and our most earnest hopes are not to lose our innocence, but to somehow rediscover it. That and to clear the mortgage, pay the school fees and - the odd rock concert notwithstanding - look forward to a quiet night in.
In this, too, Led Zeppelin are true to the dreams of their audience. Apparently, their contractual rider for Monday's performance contained no Dom Perignon, Bolivian marching powder or magical impedimenta - just an ironing board and limitless pots of tea.
There is now talk a full world tour. They should
let it be.
"