photograph by terry manning
It was April 17, 1970, and I had a conundrum: Should I pay $6.50 and catch Led Zeppelin at the Mid-South Coliseum, or should I work the Friday-night shift at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor?
This new job — with benefits like leftover pizza and a promotion someday to “beertender” — paid $1.60/hour, so I decided to work that night at Shakey’s. I was only 17; I would catch the band the next time they passed through town. Smart, huh?
Look, I never thought I’d have to wait 25 years for that to happen, and only half the quartet would be on stage.
Kids today can’t comprehend the musical experience from that period. With the swipe of a finger, anybody who enjoys “classic rock” can download a band’s entire playlist, and listen to their songs in any order they please. But when I was growing up, you needed patience to enjoy your favorite bands, and you heard their music in the order they created it. You listened for their songs to play on FM100. You read Rolling Stone and hoped their tour included Memphis. And you waited for their singles and albums to come out.
I still remember the afternoon in 1969 when my friend David brought over the debut album from a new British band. “Just listen to the incredible solo on ‘Dazed and Confused,” he said. I studied the Hindenburg artwork on the sleeve, placed the record on my turntable, and lowered the tone arm into the fourth set of grooves on the “A” side. Wow! Here was a guitarist — Jimmy somebody — playing so fast that engineers had surely sped up the track (they hadn’t), a drummer pounding the drums so hard that he probably burst the skins, and a singer hitting notes so high they had to come from Mt. Olympus.
Years before, somebody had spray-painted on a London wall, “Clapton Is God,” and my favorite group was Cream, featuring Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker — three of rock’s greatest musicians. But as I listened to Led Zeppelin, with only nine songs, I discovered something on another level.
Led Zeppelin II came out barely eight months later, featuring hits like “Heartbreaker” and “Whole Lotta Love,” where headphones let the eerie solo travel through your brain. Diehard fans bought black lights and pinned the gatefold sleeve to their walls and watched it glow. I did all that, too.
A few months later, that band rocked a sold-out crowd at the Coliseum, while I burned pizzas that evening.
photograph courtesy dreamstime / grzegorz czapski
And then, in late 1970, the music stores here offered Led Zeppelin III. This was a departure — hard-rockers playing acoustic melodies and slow blues? As we gathered around the stereo again, my friends gradually came to admire the brilliance behind now-classics like “Gallows Pole” and “Since I’ve Been Loving You.”
Then we noticed something intriguing. Tiny print at the bottom of the album listed two engineers, Andrew Johns in London and “Terry Manning, Ardent Studios, Memphis, Tennessee.” What in the world? I played bass in a garage band that never left my cousin’s garage, and I thought I knew the local music scene. Yet one of the world’s biggest acts had come to Memphis and nobody told me about it? Alex Greene shares that amazing story — a huge event in our city’s musical history, here.
Other Zeppelin albums followed, and every year I waited for the group to hit Memphis, but they never came back. In 1980 any hopes of seeing the band here ended with the death of drummer John Bonham. I had missed my chance.
Fast forward to 1995, and my colleague Frank Murtaugh and I found ourselves inside The Pyramid, cheering as Jimmy Page and Robert Plant took the stage. The guitarist and vocalist had reunited, bringing along backup musicians and even an Egyptian orchestra. The music wasn’t quite the same, and they played only a half-dozen Led Zeppelin numbers, but that was good enough. There they were, right in front of us — no cover bands screeching out “Stairway to Heaven” or stumbling over the drum intro to “Rock and Roll.” Here was the real thing, from way back.
Three years later, Page and Plant returned, this time performing two dozen Led Zeppelin songs. They didn’t have John Paul Jones or Bonzo, but even in their 50s they played with the power they displayed so many years ago. When the last notes faded away, I left the arena in a daze, feeling as if I had been hit, as Page himself once said, with the “hammer of the gods.”
“It’s been a long time since I rock-and-rolled,” sang Plant that evening, and I’ve been listening to Led Zeppelin for half a century now. Okay, I was wrong to miss that Coliseum concert in 1970, but years later, I was lucky enough to hear the band — or as close as anyone could get at the time — twice.
And hey, I still have my old Shakey’s hat.
