Led Zeppelin - BBC Sessions
On November 11, 1997, "BBC Sessions", the double live album and historical compilation by the band "Led Zeppelin", was released.
For twenty-one years, since the release of the live album and film soundtrack "The Song Remains the Same" in 1976, "Led Zeppelin" fans around the world have been clamoring for a new official document that would document the British quartet's unimaginable power in real time. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the radio recordings the band made for the BBC in their early years became the holy grail of bootleg collectors, recordings passed down from hand to hand on pirated records and poor-quality tapes. When Jimmy Page took the time in the mid-1990s to curate, edit and polish the original tapes with veteran sound engineer Jon Astley at Metropolis Studios in London, the result, released in November 1997 on Atlantic Records, stunned the rock world. "BBC Sessions" doesn't sound like another dusty archive collection, but like a live, raw, and electrifying time machine that captured Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and legendary drummer John Bonham at the exact moments when they reinvented the language of hard rock.
To understand the album's historical uniqueness, one must go back to Britain in the late 1960s. At that time, the BBC held a complete monopoly on radio broadcasting in the UK, but due to strict regulations by the British Musicians' Union that drastically limited the number of minutes that commercial records could be played on the air, music programs were forced to invite bands to record live and unique performances in the corporation's studios. While the British music press initially regarded "Led Zeppelin" with suspicion and cynicism, the pioneering radio broadcaster John Peel immediately recognized the quartet's genius and opened the doors of his flagship program, Top Gear, to them. Recording conditions in the BBC studios were spartan and harsh, with recording equipment limited to two or four channels and sound engineers dressed in white coats who gave bands just a few hours to record and immediately begin mixing. But it was precisely these limitations, without the safety net of complex studio productions, that forced Page, Plant, Jones, and Bonham to rely on the telepathic chemistry and the immense hunger they developed on their first tours.
(Photo: Atlantic Records)
The first disc of the double album focuses entirely on 1969, the meteoric year in which the band went from relative obscurity in Britain to global phenomenon following the release of their first two albums. The recordings open with the band's first session on March 3, 1969, at the Playhouse Theatre in London, produced by Bernie Andrews and engineered by Pete Ritzema. The performances of the two Willie Dixon-penned blues songs, the opening track You Shook Me and the song I Can't Quit You Baby, show a band approaching Chicago blues with the force of a jackhammer. Plant's voice, then only twenty, is heard here at the height of its wild flexibility, conducting a call-and-response dialogue with Page's harmonica and wailing Telecaster guitar, while Bonham's creaking bass pedal gives the recording an almost tangible physical presence. An early, tight six-and-a-half-minute version of "Dazed and Confused" was also recorded during the same session, allowing us to hear the skeleton of the song in all its psychedelic glory before it became a half-hour improvisational work in the later performances.
A treasure trove awaits listeners in the recordings made on June 16 and 24, 1969, at Maida Vale Studios and Aeolian Hall Studios in London for the Chris Grant and John Peel shows. Alongside an early, stripped-down, groove-filled version of "Whole Lotta Love" and a masterful rendition of "What Is and What Should Never Be", the band unveils three songs that never made it onto their official studio albums in real time. The first is "The Girl I Love She Got Long Black Wavy Hair", a heavy, deadly blues-rock song based on a Sleepy John Estes song, in which Page unleashes one of his sharpest and most infectious riffs from 1969, a riff that many fans have wondered for years why it didn't make it onto the "Led Zeppelin II" album.
A second gem from those days in June 1969 is "Traveling Riverside Blues," an electrifying tribute to blues legend Robert Johnson, in which Page delivers mesmerizing slide-guitar work on a 12-string electric guitar, while Jones holds a rolling bass line and Plant weaves into the lyrics quotes that later became the basis of "The Lemon Song." The trio of exclusive songs is rounded out by a wild, fast-paced rockabilly rendition of Eddie Cochran's classic "Somethin' Else," in which the band sounds more liberated and smiling than ever. The first disc was signed with four tracks recorded on June 27, 1969, in front of a live audience at the Playhouse Theatre for the Sunday Night at the London Palladium show, led by virtuoso extended versions of the ten-minute "You Shook Me" and the twelve-minute "How Many More Times", which includes a sweeping blues string section and Page's famous Bolero opening.
If the first disc documents the band as an explosive blues-rock force in its infancy, the second disc transports the listener two years ahead, to April 1, 1971, to a historic and intimate performance in front of a small audience at the Paris Theatre on Regent Street in London. The performance, recorded for John Peel's show as part of the "Back to the Clubs" tour, in which the band returned to performing in small clubs despite already filling stadiums, caught "Led Zeppelin" at a critical turning point, six months after the release of "Led Zeppelin III and seven months before the release of their fourth album. The show opens with a Viking storm with "Immigrant Song" that leads directly into "Heartbreaker", before the band dives into a chilling and unforgettable performance of "Since I've Been Loving You", in which Jones' Hammond keys and Page and Bonham's dynamics build tremendous emotional tension.
The historic highlight of the Paris Theatre performance is that it was on this stage that the band gave UK radio listeners the world premiere of three songs from their masterpiece album "Led Zeppelin IV" months before it was released in stores. After an aggressive and fiery performance of "Black Dog" and a dark eighteen and a half minute psychedelic journey of "Dazed and Confused", Plant introduces the audience to a new song that the band recently finished recording at Headley Grange, "Stairway to Heaven". Hearing one of the most famous songs in music history played in front of an audience listening to it for the first time, without the familiar cheers of enthusiasm in advance but in a hypnotic silence that gives way to excited applause at the end, is a moment that sends shivers down the spine of any rock fan.
The quartet then moves on to the acoustic portion of the evening with another radio premiere of the gentle "Going to California", where Jones' mandolin and Page's acoustic guitar envelop Plant's bare vocals, alongside a beautiful rendition of "That's the Way". The show closes with a fourteen-minute powerhouse of "Whole Lotta Love", which becomes a loose rhythm and blues party that includes a string of tributes to songs by John Lee Hooker, Bukka White, Arthur Crudup and Elvis Presley, and finally a moving and powerful encore of "Thank You", where Jones' organ solo and Page's guitar raise the ceiling of the hall.
On 16 September 2016, the project received a historic expansion with the release of the triple-disc edition of ""The Complete BBC Sessions" under Page's supervision. The new edition added a third disc containing nine additional tracks, including Page's virtuoso instrumental "White Summer" from the June 1969 performance, and, more importantly, three recordings from the lost March 19, 1969 session for Alexis Korner's Rhythm and Blues program. For decades, the recordings of this session were considered lost after being erased from the BBC archives, but a surprisingly high-quality home recording preserved by a fan who heard the original broadcast has been meticulously restored, officially revealing for the first time the original and rare song "Sunshine Woman", a rough blues-boogie that the band improvised in the studio and never recorded anywhere else.
Standing the test of time, nearly thirty years after its first release and more than fifty-five years after the sounds were recorded in London studios, "BBC Sessions" stands as one of the most important and essential live albums in the history of classic rock. If the later live albums document "Led Zeppelin" as a royal empire dominating huge stadiums, the recordings for the BBC immortalize the four musicians in moments when they were hungry, fast, dangerous and uninhibited, a young band that connected the rootsy blues to a high-voltage current of electricity and changed the face of music forever.
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