LED ZEPPELIN - DANCING DAYS

'I saw a lion he was standing alone with a tadpole in a jar'

In 1964 Martha and the Vandellas scored a #2 hit on Billboard with Dancing In The Street. A Motown classic Co-written by Marvin Gaye, the unforgettable lyric is 'Summer's here and the time is right for dancing in the street'. Fast forward to the spring of 1972. An ebullient Led Zeppelin are rehearsing, writing and recording at Mick Jaggers' Stargroves estate where they complete a number based on a alternate tuned snaking eastern riff full of groove, sex and most importantly Led Zeppelin.

Opening the second side of Houses Of The Holy, Dancing Days is a curious mix of many of the elements that made Led Zeppelin unique. Straight ahead rock, humour and an eastern tuning and timing slant. Robert's lyrics are obtuse and patently nonsense, but fun and mischievous at the same time.

Jonesy's mellotron melodies also lift the feel, giving it all such a summer complexion. Eddie Kramer has often spoken of memories of the four members of Led Zeppelin dancing on the lawn at Stargroves to a playback of this. Bearing in mind the companion disc states it was recorded at Olympic, could he have been mistaken? Was it D'yer Mak'er? More than likely the kernel, the main track was from Stargroves, the tweaking and polish at Olympic.

Jimmy is the star of this one for me. The unique eastern tinged riff provides a continual, insistent mantra he embellishes at every pause adding more layers to great effect. Another slant to the famed 'Guitar Army'. 

Originally thought to have been conceived in the spring of '72, the one-off live version allegedly performed at the Electric Magic show at Wembley on November 20th '71 had made us rethink everything. The poor quality bootleg tape sounds about right, but was always very doubtful. Originally I got the Wembley tape on two old BASF C90's, a brand I never liked as they shed oxide and lost quality really quickly necessitating a quick dub onto good old TDK's. Anyway, after trawling through all the live versions we have it's been agreed to be from the 2nd Ally Pally show 13 months later.   

So the first live version we have was to be some months later, in the Seattle June 19th show where they played it twice, including as a 6th encore!

From the West Coast end of the 8th US Tour it stayed in the set throughout Japan and Europe before being ditched again for the 9th US trip. It made the odd appearance at encore time, but after that there were only a few acoustic snatches on the 1977 Tour before the Black Country Woman medley extravaganza.

After that it was gone, even though a twisting version including an added stop start coda was revised by Page & Plant on about 3 dozen occasions in 1995.

Released as the b-side to Over The Hills And Far Away, the single was made available globally including various African countries, and many of these are now amongst the hardest to find single pressings, including Angola and South Africa. It was also the lead track of 4 on the Houses Of The Holy Little LP's juke box 7".

A great song of joy, of celebration. It seemed more than appropriate as the title of our second UK Convention in 1994,,,,,,