By Hugh Jones

I am writing this on September 4, 1996-twenty six years to the day after Led Zeppelin and Fairport Convention both played concerts that are still regarded as some of the most exciting and enduring performances of their career. I've been listening to the music recorded on this day in 1970 all week, and there's no doubt that its endurance and reputation is deserved. Here are two innovative, young English bands caught at respective peaks, both early in their careers, and both caught up in the heady atmosphere of rock stars on tour in the vast, welcoming wilds of the United States.

For Led Zeppelin, it was on their sixth tour of North America in less than two years, and they faced a crowd of some 20,000 people at the Los Angeles Forum. In another part of the city, Fairport played the first evening of a three-night stand at Doug Weston's Troubadour club, to a far more intimate gathering of only a few hundred. It was only their second trip to America, but a return engagement in a club that had seen the triumphant culmination of their first tour earlier that year.

Both performances were captured for posterity on audio tape. At the Forum, not one but two bootleggers were in action, unbeknownst to the band or Peter Grant. Both were using high quality reel-to-reel tape decks-one stereo and the other mono. Both recordings have been circulated and released as bootleg albums and CDs over the years, and the better of the two-the stereo one-made rock and roll history as one of the first and most successful bootleg albums, Live On Blueberry Hill. It is still available today, now in a form vastly upgraded from the original, and it surely stands as one of the best selling and most widely known bootlegs in rock.

Over at the Troubadour, Fairport's performances were being captured on professional 8-track recording equipment by engineer John Wood, under the auspices of the band's producer and mentor Joe Boyd. The resulting recordings were eventually edited down to become the 1976 album Live At The L.A. Troubadour, released only in England, and then revamped for release in the USA in 1986 to create a second album-with some variations in material-called House Full.

Blueberry Hill and House Full stand right up among the very best recordings by both of these bands. What's ironic is that a unique combination of these musicians also occurred on the night of September 4, 1970, and this too was captured on tape by John Wood and Joe Boyd. The Night That Zeppelin Jammed With Fairport has been talked about for years, and the recording made-which has never seen the light of day, bootleg or otherwise-more or less constitutes the Holy Grail to collectors of both bands. While the tape supposedly resides deep in a vault and we may never get to hear it, our imaginations can be fueled with help from the various anecdotes related by eyewitnesses and participants in the event.

Following their triumphant two and a half hour show at the Forum, all four members of Led Zeppelin and Peter Grant showed up at the Troubadour in time to catch Fairport's second set. Though Joe Boyd does not recall Bonham being present, Fairport drummer Dave Mattacks has described Bonzo's trashing of his drum set at the Troubadour jam on more than one occasion, so we can assume that perhaps Boyd was so distracted by Peter Grant that he didn't realize Bonham was playing!

The musicians changed around a bit from song to song, Richard Thompson playing a Les Paul and Page using Simon Nicol's hollow body electric Gibson L5, strung with heavy gauge strings that caused him some consternation and prompted him to remark afterwards, ". . . it was like trying to play railway lines!" (Jimmy has always been known to use 'super slinky' light gauge strings).

Dave Mattacks not only got to hear how his drum kit sounded from the crowd, he had the dubious distinction of having to repair it and replace the heads after Bonzo gave it a sound thrashing! Simon Nicol recalls that "Mattack's bass drum had been totally solid the whole night, but I saw it jump forward three or four inches on Bonzo's first strike!"

Indulging in some tech-talk about drum tuning, Mattacks says, "When John played my drums there was very little distinction between my three toms. And although he was playing very hard, which does make a difference, my drums were [tuned] way too low. The drums just sounded soggy. I remember getting off stage, hearing him play and thinking, 'Oh, they don't sound very good.' He was beating the shit out of them; he played great but the drums didn't sound too hot. I got back up and it was my lovely Super Classics-heads all dented!"

With various combinations of musicians including Plant on vocals and Jones on bass, the heavy metal folk rock combo played a handful of tunes, including the jig that challenged Page and some blues. Common ground was found with then-popular rock chestnuts like "Hey Joe" and "Morning Dew," Elvis Presley's "Mystery Train" and "That's Alright Mama" and Fairport's own rendition of the traditional folk tune "Banks Of The Sweet Primroses."

And the mobile recording equipment was rolling the whole time, by some accounts capturing as much as three hours of music!

As legend has it, the party continued on even after the Fairport/Zeppelin jam. Nearby after hours bar Barney's Beanery was the site of a drinking contest involving Fairport's Dave Pegg, Bonham and Janis Joplin, who no doubt was found hanging out at Barneys.

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