An historic show immortalized on the first-ever LP bootleg, Blueberry Hill. After the concert, JP, RP and JB jam at the Troubadour with Fairport Convention. "It was mainly Plant and Page who got up onstage and joined Fairport. They did things like “Hey Joe,” “That’s Alright Mama,” “Mystery Train,” and other stuff. This was after Sandy Denny had left Fairport, so it was the all-male Fairport lineup." - Joe Boyd

Press Review: Led Zeppelin Plays for Forum Audience

Musically reactionary, overbearing, plagiaristic and exploitative. Though these adjectives may remain occasionally applicable, they no longer suffice in summing up Led Zeppelin, as was quite lucid at the group’s Friday evening performance at the Forum.

To rest one’s case after simply cataloging the group’s musical deficiencies is first to wither in the face of responsibility of explaining its awesome commercial success (which is indicated by the fact that the current one is the second consecutive American tour in the last five months during which the group has played to capacity audiences in Forum-proportioned venues).

This success may be attributable at least in part to the accelerating popularity among the teen-age rock and roll audience of barbiturates and amphetamines, drugs that render their users most responsive to crushing volume and ferocious histrionics of the sort Zeppelin has heretofore dealt in exclusivity.

Combine this condition of the audience with Jimmy Page’s veneration as a super-guitarist and Robert Plant’s ability to brilliantly caricaturize the archetypal sexy lead singer and shatter bottles at 40 paces with his shrieking and it’s not at all difficult to see how the group has achieved astonishing success.

A contextual consideration is also in order. The advent of such practitioners in roughly the same as Mountain and Grand Funk, which picked up where Zeppelin left off in sacrificing everything possible to volume and histrionics, has had the effect of making Zeppelin look terrific in comparison.

Whole Lotta Love for instance, strikes ears that have survived Mark Farner and Black Sabbath as a masterpiece of subtlety. Which is not to imply that many of Zeppelin’s ridiculously overblown heavy workouts aren’t enormous absurd fun on their own, for they are.
Finally, it must be mentioned that, apparently a trifle bored with being enormous fun, Zeppelin has taken to slipping quiet and definitely musical bits in between its dreaded screamers, bits like a pleasant (if far from dazzling) organ interlude by John Paul Jones. [J.Mendelsohn/LATimes/9-7-70]