A Garden Tapes special feature
by Eddie Edwards
The Garden Tapes » Led Zeppelin DVD » Earls Court 1975 » Stairway To Heaven
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This is once again from the 25th, the night which was chosen to supply five of the six Earls Court tracks on DVD. The vocals have been left untouched on this one, which makes a nice change. There are a couple of small adjustments elsewhere, though.
Something has been done to the fanfare section that begins at NTSC 0:43:29, PAL 0:43:32 - the timing was a bit scrappy on the night but this is not evident on the DVD version. A few seconds might have been taken from another night but it's more likely that Jimmy managed to fix the untidiness by adjusting the individually recorded tracks to bring everything into line.
At NTSC 0:46:13, PAL 0:46:15 Jimmy is down to 17 strings as his B breaks, forcing him to make some major adjustments to the climax of his solo. The familiar motif that he always employed to announce that the last eight bars of the solo were under way has to be played an octave lower than usual, radically diminishing its effectiveness. Seemingly unimpaired, though, is the final flurry of triplets heard at NTSC 0:46:38, PAL 0:46:41. A nifty piece of work to pull that off with the B string out of commission, but those high notes are clearly not coming from the part of the fretboard that Jimmy is seen to be attacking! They are, in fact, from the 23rd or 24th.
Right near the end, where the band stops at NTSC 0:47:42, PAL 0:47:45, we switch to the 24th for "And she's buying..." and the closing moments of the song. By this time on the 25th, Robert was getting a little hoarse and his delivery of that final line was rather tentative, hence the switch to the previous night when things were a little smoother.
previous - Trampled Underfoot | next - Knebworth 1979