“The audience loved us”: The 1970s rock band Led Zeppelin wanted to sabotage
If you were a music fan, lucky enough to watch Country Joe & The Fish at Bill Graham’s Fillmore West in January of 1969, then you would have seen one of the greatest support acts of all time: Led Zeppelin.
Confirming the theory that you should always catch the support act, Led Zeppelin played a triumphant set to unsuspecting fans, who in turn got a glimpse of the most sought-after live shows of the following decade. With their debut album tucked away in their back pockets, the band were confident of their trajectory to stardom, with Page even recalling that the band “obliterated them in San Francisco on the first tour”.
While fans were treated to something of a double bill that night, Page and his band members would have noticed the danger that comes with booking such a triumphant support act. In one fell swoop, the live legacy of your career can be undercut by an up-and-comer who shows your otherwise devoted crowd how it’s done. Almost selfishly, then, Zeppelin developed a protectiveness over their live shows, in a bid to defend their status as kings of live rock and roll.
So later that year, when their debut album shot them to fame, and Grand Funk Railroad supported the band in America, they quickly snatched them out of the spotlight when they feared that their performance was beginning to threaten their rapid ascension.
“When we opened for Led Zeppelin, we were on the tour for two days. We started in Cleveland, Ohio, and man, we really put it to them,” Mark Farner recalled, “The audience loved us, they just absolutely loved us, and then we went to Detroit, our stomping ground, Olympia.”
The story goes that Zeppelin’s manager, Peter Grant, came storming out in a frenzy and ordered the technician, who was caught in the clutches of his grip at the time, to stop the show before it finished. Fearing for his own career, the stage technician did, leaving Grant’s band in pitch black with nothing but the raw acoustic of the drums rolling out to the crowd.
Naturally, the industry bigwigs in charge of this stunt, at the behest of Zeppelin, emerged on stage and gave the paying crowd some limp excuse about contractual obligations that render the show unplayable and for the band to sadly leave the stage. The band were yanked from their positions, the crowd were short changed and desperate to let everyone know about it.
Grant continued, “We started making exit, all these boos, and then the bottles of whiskey, bottles of wine, bottles of beer. Oh my god, the show stopped right there for an hour and a half before Zeppelin took the stage.”
It was a desperately shoddy move from the British band, who were uncompromising in their own ego pursuit at the time. Rather than viewing Grand Funk Railroad’s show as a raucous opener, warming up a rock-hungry crowd, they viewed the band as a threat and snatched them, amidst their crowning career moment.
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