Led Zeppelin, released an unreleased live version of Dazed and Confused


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According to some, i Led Zeppelin they should have played Dazed and Confused live approximately 400 times in their career. On few other occasions, however, this song, taken from the 1969 debut album, has been so distorted as in the concert held at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam on October 5 of the year of release of Led Zeppelin I. During the Dutch live the piece was lengthened and enriched, until it lasted almost a quarter of an hour. It is a unique and partly improvised performance, impossible to replicate in an exact way and which today becomes everyone’s heritage thanks to a recording uploaded to YouTube.

Chronicle of a Dutch night

Video allows us to listen again Dazed and Confused in a new guise and patience that audio quality is inevitably relative. The newly unearthed recording is probably the work of a fan of the band, who put part of the episode of the Dutch TV show on tape Dit is het beginaired on November 12, 1969. The audio was probably extrapolated directly from the speakers of his device by the unknown admirer of Robert Plant and associates, before being found and uploaded by Mark McFall on his channel Mark Zep 53 years later. McFall is not just any admirer, given that over the years he has accumulated various Led Zeppelin memorabilia and rarities, then collecting them on the site he founded: Zepfan. Today the rediscovered piece represents an important testimony of a concert which is talked about enthusiastically on the group’s website, which takes up an article of the time that appeared in the magazine Top Stars: “The hall was packed, cameras were everywhere and the atmosphere was crackling. Zeppelin’s heavy, thunderous sounds lifted the audience to another plane, and the timing of their applause indicated their appreciation for the material. The wild standing ovations brought the band back on stage time and again and left them exhausted.”

A piece with a “confused” origin

The enthusiastic review above is no deception: at the beginning of their career, Led Zeppelin still had many detractors, especially among critics. Not everyone was happy with this new project and at the time someone struck down the group without appeal, going so far as to define Robert Plant “a presumptuous who screams” and Jimmy Page at best “a talented young man but with poor writing and no imagination”. It must be said that to write Dazed and Confused actually Page didn’t need much imagination, since he reworked in music and text an already existing song of the same name by Jake Holmes. The guitarist had heard Holmes’s version some time before founding the Zep, when the obscure folk artist had opened for the band he was then a member of (the Yardbirds). It was August 25, 1967 and Jimmy Page was struck by this song that seemed so sad, so much so that he decided to immediately enrich it with the Yardbirds and propose it in a new version in concert. When Page then left the compound he took himself with him Dazed and Confused, further reworking it with Led Zeppelin to transform it into the song we know today. Holmes realized that that now successful song had become too different from him and refrained from filing lawsuits, trying to get something out of that exploit for which he was in fact co-responsible only many years later. In 1971, two years after Zeppelin’s version, it was released on a live record as well Dazed and Confused played by Page with the Yardbirds even if for everyone the most famous version will always be the one proposed by the guitarist with Zeppelin. However, as this video shows us, it is perhaps wrong to speak of “a” Dazed and Confused of the band of stairway to Heaven: this great rock classic, which Page often played using a violin bow on his guitar, is made of a musically malleable material that can be reworked in infinite ways and sound different even more than half a century later.



Source-tg24.sky.it