On this day in 1985, I jammed in a band with Elmer Gantry at a charity event called the ‘Blues ‘n’ Booze’ benefit, at Waltham St Lawrence in Berkshire. Curiously enough, in the first Led Zeppelin set in 1968 we covered ‘Flames’ by Elmer Gantry’s Velvet Opera. It was really great to play with him. More recently Elmer’s been in the bands Stretch and Rocky Recovery.
An excerpt from JP’s interview with Dave Schulps in Trouser Press magazine from September 1977
DS: How was the material chosen for the first Zeppelin album?
JP: The stuff was all originally put forward by me as the material to include in the program we played in concert. It had all been well rehearsed as we’d tour Scandinavia as the New Yardbirds before recording the album. We also had a few other things we were doing at the time which never got recorded: Flames, written by Elmer Gantry, was a really good number; As Long As I Have You, was a Garnett Mimms number we had done with the Yardbirds which Janis Joplin had recorded. There were a lot of improvisations on the first album, but generally we were keeping everything cut and dried. Consequently, by the time we’d finished the first tour the riffs which were coming out of these spaces, we were able to use for the immediate recording of the second album.