Rhino Factoids: Introducing Led Zeppelin

48 years ago today, Led Zeppelin made their live debut…sort of.

Yes, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham performed together as a proper band for the first time, but they weren’t actually being billed as Led Zeppelin: this was when they were still calling themselves The Yardbirds...or the “New” Yardbirds, if you will.

You surely know the story by now, but if you don’t, then suffice it to say that Page found himself in a situation where he was the last Yardbird standing and had to fulfill the band’s contractual touring obligations, and he did so by putting together a new Yardbirds lineup featuring the three other gentlemen mentioned in the opening words of this very paragraph.

The first of these tour dates took place on September 7, 1968, at a venue called Teen-Clubs, in Egegaard Skole, Scandinavia, and while we don’t have a precise set list for the performance, we do know that the band performed “Communication Breakdown,” “I Can't Quit You Baby,” “You Shook Me,” “Dazed & Confused,” “Babe I'm Gonna Leave You,” and “How Many More Times” at various points during the course of this initial jaunt.

A few months after these performances, Page admitted in an interview that “we were really scared, because we only had about fifteen hours to practice together, adding that “it was sort of an experimental concert to see if we were any good, I guess." As it turned out, they were actually pretty great, and the rest – as the kids say – is history.