LED ZEPPELIN:: The Cutting Room Floor - FLOPPY BOOT STOMP

           I have been downloading and listening to a lot of Led Zeppelin over the past year and finding a mysterious if not sinister element in the work at times or rather as times progressed through their live career and while I bought the first three studio albums when they came out and the impact of the first album astonished us at the time and friends and I rushed round to each others houses as schoolboys to play and listen to this extraordinary debut over and over, the later development of the band seemed to possess darker moods or forebodings even. 

We were shaken (sic) by the first groundbreaking efforts finding them almost superhuman, the problem with believing the hype is that ego can play funny games and later times there seems to me to be a surly throw away element and a sinister tone begins to seep in to the work and especially the live performances . 

. . . . . the penultimate live bootleg for me is the long lost (so called) gig at Southampton (1973) and I have still never really found anything to equal it (I have kept on saying it is better than 'Mothership' of 2015) and yet recently there have been better and better quality soundboard tapes emerging of past performances. Also of late sites I enjoy have been posting some really heavy weird performances to be fair and I find them quite disturbing. 

One needs to study the progression of the band towards the end of their history both Robert and Jimmy and after the deaths of poor Robert's beloved son Karac aged 5 (1977) and then the terrible death of their cornerstone stalwart drummer in the demise of the tragically alcoholic John Bonham (1980); Bonham interestingly the only one to visit and truly respond to Robert's grief at the loss of his son, Jimmy was curiously silently which caused a schism between the brains behind the dirigible and if the apocryphal accounts are to be believed the two fell out at this point and maybe only really reconciled when Jimmy explained he came from a British middle class tradition of stiff upper lip and where you left someone alone to deal with too personal an aspect of life, which does kind of make sense but we thought our generation was different, that hugs and weeping, care and concern might come uppermost to the incarnations of the mystical and deeper generation, rather than our parents who had lived through WWII with stoic silence as a rule of thumb and the long held belief that we don't talk about such things especially the menfolk! In ten years the song was over . . . . . . for me as you will see the story remained pertinent to only about a year Led Zeppelin I & II coming out in 1969 and II in 1970 and that's where I left them . . . . . .the pomposity for me took over and the darkness descended 1973 to 1977 at least seemed to sound the death knell if that is not too heavy handed a simile

Well worth the visit and download for sure is this exception to the above experience of late and that is this extraordinary triple disc document Led Zeppelin: The Cutting Room Floor over at the mighty sharing site par excellence from the usual place our beloved Floppy Boot Stomp

Thanks to first bo'sun Brother Jobe

ALL MY LOVE SWEDEN 1978

This compilation is well worth downloading and whether you agree with my mini thesis or nay consider the following . . . . . . . .:

It actually started to freak me out a bit and the three disc set from Jobe is the first set I have been able to listen to in a while and I thoroughly enjoyed it . . . . .that something else entirely was going on later and nearing the end of the band's true incarnation is for others to decide

Interestingly I found most recently the more disturbing examples of what I found rather sinister or even doom laden . . . . . bad vibes if you will centred around the more than 50 Led Zepp boots and especially of late the last three or for after a really good one on weblog Fresh & Alive. There are some doozies here and it is worth checking them all out to be fair but the more recent ones started to give me the herbie jeebies . . . . . . . . .wether the boys went through a period of complacency and ego that meant the performances were more cursory and throw away is moot and I leave that up to you but that darker arts were involved seem at best to me (anyway) as unlikely. However notwithstanding the bad vibes something was happening . . . . .

Fresh & Alive link to Led Zeppelin concerts