Led Zeppelin - "Treading The Boards"
June, 7th, 1977, New York City, New York, Madison Sqaure Garden
Remastered Soundboard Recording, (A Group/Personal Project)
Lineage: "Magical Sound Boogie", (EVSD), Silver CD > EAC > WAV > TLH > Flac (Level.8) > TLH, Decode > WAV > Remaster > Flac Frontend, Encoding Options, Level.8, Align On SBE'S > Flac (All Tracks Tested With TLH, No Errors Occured)
Label: N/A
Original Taper: N/A
This is a Group/Personal Project by "Those Guys That Have Learned That Life Is Just One Crushing Defeat After Another Until You Just Wish Flanders Was Dead", The 7th Son, Joel, Mark, Mike, and Acapulco gold.
We hope that who ever picks this up will enjoy it, and will pass it along and share it with others, or just pass, the choice is yours, this not meant to be a "Definitive" recording.
Cheers and thanks go out to:
- The taper for taping and sharing their recording with everyone in the community, if you're out there, and happen to pick this up, we hope that you'll enjoy the work we've done on the recording.
- To Fishey for originally sharing his silvers on Dime, and to Roundhead for sharing his rip on the Den, thank you both for sharing with everyone in the community.
- My mate Mark for once again coming through and putting together some great artwork for this release, always fun working with you mate.
Dedicated to Liz.
Disc One:
1) Introduction (Fades In)
2) The Song Remains The Same
3) Sick Again
4) Nobodys Fault But Mine
5) In My Time Of Dying (Includes: "You Shook Me")
6) Since I've Been Loving You
7) No Quarter (Has A Small Tape Cut Near The Beginning Of Song, Includes: "The Nutcracker Suite", Fades Out)
Disc Two:
1) Ten Years Gone (Fades In)
2) The Battle Of Evermore
3) Going To California
4) Black Country Woman (Cut, Incomplete Fragment)
5) Bron-Y-Aur Stomp
6) White Summer/Black Mountain Side
7) Kashmir (Fades Out)
Disc Three:
1) Over The Top/Moby Dick (Fades In, Contains A Small Tape Cut)
2) Guitar Solo (Includes: "The Star Spangled Banner")
3) Achilles Last Stand
4) Stairway To Heaven
5) Whole Lotta Love
6) Rock And Roll (Fades Out)
Enjoy!
Please Do Not Convert To Lossy Formats
Please Do Not Sell
Please Share With Others
Notes:
The 1st of a 6 night string of gigs at Madison Square Garden, the band were looking forward to coming back and playing for the New York crowds, and Jimmy himself looked back on this show quite fondly, claiming that it was "Electrifying".
However, Zeppelin collectors have a difference of opinion/mixed feelings about this performance.
Some collectors state that this show was not a bad start for the New York shows, and comparable to some of the L.A 77 shows, while others say it's rather sloppy with either one (or all) of the band members missing their cues, and not really giving it their all.
I personally find this show to be quite a decent performance, it's definately not the tightest performance of the 77 tour, but for what the show lacks in technical ability, it makes up for in spades with energy and presence.
Their playing is "gutsy", and quite powerful actually, the band probably had a case of the "1st night jitters" for this show.
But aside from all of the issues I've discussed, the soundboard really is an upgrade for collectors to have of this show because the audience recordings of this show didn't really give us a clear sounding recording that validated the opinions/reviews of this show by people who attended it saying that they were something special.
They were able to tighten up their performances at the Garden as the stint wore on, (the performances on the 10th, and the 11th are quite nice and are worth checking out).
For those that may not know, there are 2 audience recordings of this show in circulation.
The 1st tape source was recorded by the legendary NYC Zeppelin taper "Artie", who's taped the band in 71,72,75,and 77, I'm not sure who taped the 2nd tape source.
Both tapes are decent sounding recordings, and both sound rather simular to each other, they were both taped from quite a distance from the stage, and both contain that "boominess" you hear in alot of those large arena recordings.
But if you want to know if one recording is superior over the other, than it's definately the 2nd tape source because it's sound is fuller, more dynamic, and doesn't have all the excessive taper chatter that the 1st source has.
The sound quality of this recording is quite good, you can hear alot of details in the tape like Jimmy scrapping the strings of his guitar, banter between the band, and some crowd cheers, but it does feel a little compressed, sort of simular to the sound on one of the last 77 boards EVSD released "The Powhattan Confederacy".
We decided to work on this recording because we wanted to see if we could try and fix some of these issues in the recording, and breathe some life into it, and we decided to just make it a straight soundboard remaster because the soundboard tape was pretty much complete aside from "Black Country Woman", and the tape itself had so many issues that needed fixing, we thought that just working on the soundboard and making it more listenable for collectors would be more rewarding.
For this project, we used Roundhead's EAC rip instead of Fishey's silver rip because the 1st rip had a few techical glitches that are not found on the silvers (but were just an honest mistake on his end, so please don't be cross with him), whereas Roundheads rip didn't have any glitches, so we used his for the remaster.
What we've done to make this recording:
- We've tried to balance the instruments as much as possible, and bring out some instruments that were buried in the mix, this is probably the 1st Zeppelin tape I've ever heard where I've hardly heard any cymbals in the mix, I could hear drum fills, but no high hat, so we wanted to bring out those buried instruments in raw tape.
- We've tried to bring out some of the ambience of the venue, and bring out more of the crowd.
- We've tried to reduce as much tape hiss as possible.
- We've reduced some of the "hotness" found in the recordings, and have tried to make the volume a little easier on the ears.
In regards to the title:
The title is a reference to being on stage, "Treading The Boards" is a reference to being on the stage, and it can also be a reference to the soundboard tape, we thought it sounded clever and suiting for this project.
We were originally going to try and make references to the fact that this show took place on the 2nd day of the silver Jubilee, we had ideas for titles that sounded good at first, but the more you said them, the more they lost their punch, so we went with this instead.
Hope everyone here will enjoy this.
Cheers