A Garden Tapes special feature
by Eddie Edwards
The Garden Tapes » Led Zeppelin DVD » Earls Court 1975 » Going To California
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Going To California is from the 25th, with one cut and with some patching on the vocals.
The first noticeable difference from the original recording is at 0:01:26 where Robert's heavy breathing has been removed from the mix. On the screen at this point, Robert can clearly be seen not breathing into the microphone, thereby giving the game away that this shot has been edited in from another part of the footage. It's also not hard to spot that, while Robert is singing the first line, "Spent my days with a woman unkind, smoked my stuff and drank all my wine," the visuals move from one night to another, the angle of the microphone being the most obvious non-sequiteur. This kind of thing is not as prevalent or as blatant during Earls Court as it is during the Shepperton - sorry, Madison Square Garden - feature, but I've mentioned these examples just to illustrate that it does happen. How much of this was done out of choice for artistic effect and how much was out of necessity due to the original visuals being missing or damaged I can't say. Whatever the reasons, this is not The Garden Tapes' specialist subject and I don't intend to dwell on it any further.
At 0:02:20 the word "ever" has been patched. It can be deduced that the replacement word was supplied by the recording from the 23rd, as that was the only night on which Robert sang the melody in such a way as to include the high B note. Robert's spoken ad-libs "wake" and "no chance" have been mixed out at 0:02:38 and 0:02:48 respectively. The entire phrase "Throw me a line, if I reach it in time, I'll see you up there where the path runs straight and high" has been taken from the 24th.
At 0:04:13 the words "People, it's hard" have been silenced. Just after that, there's a fifteen second cut at 0:04:20, which is a bit of a shame as it means we don't get to hear Robert informing us that, "There are those that would vouch for it being hard. It's terribly hard." Still, I suppose an 18 certificate would have hit sales of DVD.
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