And the shows themselves? “On two different nights in June 1972, at the Long Beach Arena, each band blew me away. The Stones were pure adrenaline, the show almost seemed over before it started; Led Zeppelin was deeper, louder (creating a tiny perforation in my left eardrum), and just generally ‘heavier’, in both a musical and philosophical sense.”
A sub-argument rages – and this really is one for the rock nerds – about which tour was more profitable. The answer seems plain: the Stones tour as a whole made more money as it was three times longer, but Zeppelin made more money on a per-show basis. Indeed, Jagger was said to have been annoyed that Zeppelin’s gate receipts were so high.
Why does this any of this matter? Because impact was everything. Nowadays a band’s ‘reach’ is defined by how many social media followers, ‘likes’, YouTube views or Spotify streams they have. But back then, reach was a physical thing. It was determined by how many people saw bands and talked about them, how many headlines they made, and how many cities they visited. Reach sowed seeds in New York or Nashville or Nantucket, and from these seeds a band’s mythology sprouted, grew and germinated. It was crucial. And in the summer of 1972, the Stones won.
But Zeppelin would have their redemption. They toured the US again the following year with Goldberg in their entourage (they also, incidentally, had a bigger plane – a Boeing 720 known as The Starship – for much of the tour). And Goldberg was determined to put things right. He tells me he “lucked into” a “gimmick” that would transform Zeppelin’s status in the eyes of the world. He’s being modest – what he did was genius.
