For Your Weekend Listening Pleasure: Led Zeppelin's Gonna Groove at Memorial in 1970

Via.

Click to embiggen if you want to remember laughter. Or Minsky's Music.

​For those playing along at home, this long-weekend's offering fills in an estimable blank. Because so far we've time-traveled back to that field in Lewisville in '69, when Led Zeppelin joined Janis Joplin, B.B. King, Johnny Winter Sly and the Family Stone and others for the Texas International Pop Festival; tripped down Amnesia Lane to Memorial Auditorium for the band's May 18, 1973, stopover on the Houses of the Holy tour; and returned to the Dallas Convention Center Arena for the first of two March '75 shows that shattered all kinds of attendance records and eardrums. But till this evening, I'd yet to come across the March 28, 1970, show at Memorial -- the band's first trip through Dallas proper, according to the official Zep website, which includes this bizzaro footnote: "After the show, Dallas news reports the band attend a screening of the Woodstock film at the Preston Royal Theater." (Man, I miss that theater.)

Truth told, it's not nearly as top-notch as its FYWLP predecessors; one curator of such keepsakes accurately describes this back-pocket recording as "distant, hissy and distorted but ... listenable once the ears adjust to the fidelity." So you've been warned.

That said, it's quite the curio -- a set list that opens with a cover (Ben E. King and James A. Bethea's "We're Gonna Groove," a second-record outtake that wouldn't show up on vinyl till Coda) and includes Jimmy Page's Yardbirds carryover "White Summer," a fledgling "Since I've Been Loving You" (recorded later that year for the October-released third album) and a 20-minute "Moby Dick," said to be one of the longest versions played during that spring tour. In other words: You could do worse. Stick some rolling papers in your ears and you'll never notice the hiss. Or the chatty audience (some thing never change).

But, look, since it's far from perfect, and since there's a long weekend ahead, I'll make you this deal: Over the weekend, I can cough up another rock-and-roll-and add-on. Your call. Do you want a) John Cale at the Palladium in 1979, 2) Lindsey Buckingham at Bass Performance Hall in '07 or 3) Depeche Mode at Starplex in '09? Or all of the above. Because I can make that happen. Anything for you.