LED ZEPPELIN - GOOD TIMES, BAD TIMES

'When my woman left home with a brown eyed man and I still don't seem to care'

So, think of one of your favourite bands. You want to play something to a friend who doesn't know their music, so it has to be to the point and highlight what you like about that band. And how many bands or artists can you think of that have the opening track on the opening LP that does just that? And more...

Beginning with a double punch blast, Good Times, Bad Times does that extraordinary thing of not only introducing this new, vibrant and exciting band and their music but sounding the death knell for the band from whose ashes they rose. Although the gate and pop sensibility of  The Yardbirds is clearly an influence, the muscular dexterity and unnerving power and confidence is, with all due respect, way beyond anything The Yardbirds could achieve. And this is just a taster, a sample of what was to come.

Each and every member plays their part - Jonesy plays the greatest fills, percussive and rhythmic and at the same time deftly melodic. Robert's voice and lyrics are frightening. How could this voice come from a floppy haired teenager? Surely it's the bastard offspring of Howling Wolf, Janis Joplin, Robert Johnson and Steve Marriott mixed together in a lab by some mad Rock scientist. 

Jimmy was the conductor, the mentor. His economic guitar slashes and fills hold everything together and back, creating an increasingly unstable tension that gives way after the sudden stop before his first Led Zeppelin solo, a thousand notes a second flurry swirling out of the speakers from his Telecaster via that Supro amp and those revolving Leslie speakers.

But, above and beyond all of the above, was Bonzo. His immediate arrival, with that astonishingly syncopated and strident bass drum flurry is an instant head turner. What? How? Eh? Try and remember back when you first heard it. Astonishing doesn't even come close. 

So there you have it, the coming together of four extraordinary talents and the whole is even greater than the sum of their considerable parts. Rehearsed in Pangbourne and recorded at Olympic, it was chosen as a single alongside Communication Breakdown. Some of the rarest ever Led Zeppelin singles come from this, the UK Promo 7" (Atlantic 584 269) and the much rarer 1-sided EMIdisc acetate 584 268. 48 years on, even stock US copies are getting harder to find.

Live, we have no complete performances from Led Zeppelin. During the European shows in October 1969 and the subsequent US Tour the opening bars and riff start the show before the band hurtle into Communication Breakdown. On the 6th US Tour it returned the favour, morphing out of the opening encore of Communication until guitar solo time when it kinda falls away into a jam instigated by a John Paul Jones bass solo. 

So far, only shows at New Haven 15/8, Hampton 17/8, Tulsa 21/8, Oakland 2/9 and the fabled 'Blueberry Hill'  show from the LA Forum 4/9 have this medley. The later gigs of the tour morphed into American Woman, high in the charts from the Guess Who at the time.

The last we heard of it was the most complete, during the mad Japanese debut shows in 1971 it's played on the first night in Tokyo on September 23rd and in a long, breathtaking version at the final show in Osaka on September 29th, both inside long exhausting Whole Lotta Love medleys. 

We now have an amazing 30 minutes of that first Tokyo show on cine film with very good sound excellently dubbed on and it includes a few brief seconds...

Post Zeppelin, it was famously performed as the opening track at the O2 Ahmet Ertegun Tribute show, detuned yet still powerful and full of swagger and intent.