This double album showcases Led Zeppelin’s electrifying concert at the Forum, in Inglewood, California, on 4th September 1970, during their summer 1970 North American Tour.
Featured here, are a multitude of Zeppelin classics the set is dominated by three outstanding folk/blues rock medleys: “From the Midnight Sun” (later titled “Immigrant Song”) and “Heartbreaker”; “Communication Breakdown,” “Good Times Bad Times,” “For What It’s Worth” and (not listed) “I Saw Her Standing There,” and Zeppelin’s signature blues rock medley comprised of “Whole Lotta Love,” “Let that Boy Boogie Woogie,” “I’m Movin’ On,” “Think It Over,” and “Lemon Song.” The bass and guitar transitions between the tunes on “Communication Breakdown” medley are funky, and the explosive renditions of Stephen Stills’ “For What It’s Worth” and Lennon/McCartney’s “I Saw Her Standing There” are priceless in their inventive approach. “Live on Blueberry Hill” also features fresh performances of “What Is and What Should Never Be” (with a pleasantly coarse Page guitar), an exhilarating, ultimately exhausting “Moby Dick,” and John Paul Jones’ freaky “Organ Improvisation.” “Since I’ve Been Loving You” is the peak performance of the evening. In the course of eight minutes, Plant’s wails and screams, Page’s raw electric guitar, and Bonham’s deep, thundering drums generate music that could accompany the damned to hell. Originally a bootleg recording of the English rock group Led Zeppelin’s performance at the Los Angeles Forum on September 4th, 1970, which took place during their summer 1970 North American Tour.
The audience recording is one of the first Led Zeppelin bootlegs, and one of the first ever rock and roll bootlegs. It was released on the Blimp label. The album was reissued on the Trademark of Quality label and shipped to England. The album sold so many copies that many fans thought it was a legal release. The sleeve notes describe it as “One hundred and six minutes and fifty three seconds of pure alive rock.” Led Zeppelin perform a powerful set of songs (prior to recording “Zeppelin III“) comprised of heavy blues numbers and a dense onslaught of rock & roll. While the sound clarity is adequate at times, at other moments the sound is faint and simply flat — common flaws in bootleg recordings from this era. Still, the music on “Blueberry Hill” packs a punch.
“Live on Blueberry Hill” derives its name from Zeppelin’s performance of Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” as a final encore. The bootleg also features one of the few known live performances of “Out on the Tiles”, from the group’s third album, plus “Bron-Yr-Aur”, which would not be released officially until five years later, on “Physical Graffiti”.
From the 1980s the bootleg became available on CD as a two-disc set, often under the titles “Blueberry Hill” and The Final Statements. “I actually prefer …Blueberry Hill to [pioneering Zeppelin bootleg] Pb,” remarked photographer (and Jimmy Page’s friend) Ross Halfin, “even though it isn’t such good sound quality, but because it includes the whole show.” In 2017, the Empress Valley bootleg label released the nine-CD, “Live On Blueberry Hill: The Complete 1970 L.A. Forum Tapes”, which includes five different source recordings of the concert.
The Fat Angel Sings 