re: Ramblin down the road

["jonathan newman" <jln32@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

What seems to be at the root of alot of the agro between record companies 
and fans is that fans feel that they are just keeping a lid on live stuff. 
Well I certainly agree that some live zep stuff should be realsed but I 
think there are a few things in the way out that.

1.Just how many people want to buy more live stuff? I know most of the 
people on this list would sell there granny for a 10 cd live box. However I 
dont remmber the BBC sessions selling that well when they came out and Im 
sure any new live material would sell even less. Most runs of bootlegs from 
japan are done in 1000 or less most of the time and you still see they often 
have more stock than they know what to do with and sell it off cheap. I know 
alot of this is becuase they are hard to buy but im sure if in offical live 
boxset was done it would have to sell "alot" of copies to break even.

2. Just how much live stuff is there out there? Nobody really seems to know 
this. I mean I know theres recordings of most of the bands latter shows in 
the vaults but I think you will agree that the badly balanced SB's we have 
from the 73 and 80 tours are just not good enough to release. I think most 
people would agree that zep were at there best from 69 to the euro tour of 
73 and Iv never seen any info on whether a large number of show from this 
period where recorded professionaly. One option I could see would be to 
release some live audience tapes officaly like deep purple and ELP have done 
resently. However either the former band members or the record company seem 
very keen on only releasing what could be called "A grade" zep titles so I 
dont see this happening.

3. Just how good would an offical release be I mean the live tracks on coba 
is just apauling, give me a good audience tape over them any day.