Site Charter

      The site is built on top of a full relational database. It contains thousands of records pertaining to Zeppelin's music and performances including everything from venues, cities, countries, festivals, bootlegs, sources, albums, songs played, artists covered, artists played with, lyrics, setlists, cancelled shows,recorded shows and unrecorded shows. It also has a complete searchable transcription of plantations for their entire career, hundreds of photos, ticket stubs, press clippings, posters, programs, advertisements, audio samples of recordings and screenshots of footage. As time progresses and I continue to add everything that I want to add there will be historical notes on performances and subjective ratings of performances and recordings, as well as a number of other things that I want to try to do. The depth of knowledge and passion of the Zeppelin community combined with all the power and flexibility of a database concentrates all of the pertinent Zeppelin information into one place, and enables you to cross reference and sort the data in a lot of fun and interesting ways.

      I hope that this site can become the ultimate resource for accurate information on Zeppelin on the web. I want this to be the place where newbies come to see what's out there and a place where the fact geeks come to answer obscure questions. It can also be a visual companion when listening to Zeppelin concerts or a vehicle to statisfy the whims of the listener to find other shows where they played the same Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, or Elvis cover, the longest version of Dazed and Confused, or the obscure performances of Out On The Tiles, or Gallows Pole. It is also a venue for me to say things that I have always wanted to say about the subject of Live Zeppelin and an excuse for me to learn more about web programming.

      The database, at any given moment, is as accurate as I could make it, but there are many holes to be filled by people as they are noticed, and the main reason that a forum has been included is to give people the ability to give feedback. The forum is broken into categories and over time they will be refined and new ones will be added. If someone thinks that a certain piece of information in the database is incorrect they can post it in the appropriate place on the forum and we can have a discussion on the topic and see if we can arrive at a consensus. There is no fact or detail that is too small to be worth correcting.

      I have made a lot of judgment calls on how to classify dates,and map out the songs in the medleys. Many of these choices may be wrong and I'll let the community help to decide where certain lines should be drawn. Mapping out the songs in the medleys was extremely difficult, and in some places impossible, as Plant would sing lines from multiple songs in succession over the same music, such as the case with 'Truckin Little Mama' and 'Bottle Up and Go' in the 'How Many More Times' medleys in 69 and 70.

      I had to decide what constituted a song, and where to mark its beginning and end. For example, I didn't consider the start of 'Boogie Chillun' to be when he sang "One night I was laying down" as sometimes he would start with that line and never actually get to the song, or perhaps they would play another song in between. I started it when the main riff came in. I also had to invent several 'Pseudo Songs' that were just musical sections that developmed and evolved like any Zeppelin song did on stage, but weren't actually real songs in and of themselves. Examples are 'Theremin Dual' for the call and response sections of 'Whole Lotta Love between the vocals and the theremin, or 'Lounge Jam' for the oddball piano based sections of 'No Quarter' on the 77 tour. What made Zeppelin so dynamic live also made them very difficult to catalog and I have done the best that I could. I figure that we can improve on this as well through discussion.

      For songs covered, I tried to differentiate between the writer of the song and the popularizer of the song. A song's credit is a fact, but often times the popularizer is a judgment call. A Popularizer is the artist that we most associate with a given song, or more accurately, the artist whose version was the biggest influence on Zeppelin's version of the song. Keeping track of the popularizer is important because people may want to see how many Elvis tunes Zeppelin covered, even though Elvis himself didn't write any of them, or learn that while 'I Can't Quit You Baby' was a song written famously by Willie Dixon, that Zeppelin's version was really based off of the cover by Otis Rush.

      I want the site to be a formal record of their live career and therefore nothing that isn't concrete will be included. There is always more out there for those who search, but the setlists and lists of recordings will only ever include things that commonly circulate. There will be no speculation of what may be out there and no guesses of songs that were played. Nor will there be any discussion of privately held things that members of the site may, or may not have. If a given source hasn't been booted or torrented then it is not considered to be part of the record and therefore will not be part of the database. I am sensitive to privacy issues and there are a number of things that were deliberately not mentioned here because of various agreements. Since I am an active collector and buyer of Zeppelin material for my own enjoyment, the distinction between what is public and what is private is an important one to make.

      This site is not a business of any sort and there are no commercial aspirations or implications associated with it at all. If the cat is out of the bag on something that helps to document Zeppelin's live career,(meaning it is available for all on the internet already) then I will collect it freely here for reference and entertainment purposes only. If a copyright holder is upset about something being included here then please contact me at YourOverlord@ledzeppelin-database.com. I will work with you to accomodate your wishes even if your wish is for it to be removed immediately.

      The plantations are rife with typos and inaccuracies. Sometimes I would understand only a word or two in a given sentence from a poor recording and just skipped the sentence altogether. As better versions of tapes come out and more people tune their ears to what was said I hope to continue to get the plantations more and more accurate. I also would like to add some stage direction in them as well. Things like (band leaves stage) or (audience member shouts) will add context to the plantations so a reader can better understand what was going on. If Robert is talking to an audience member it is awkward to just read his half of the conversation if we don't point out what is happening.

So that's what you should see here. I am happy to receive suggestions or answer any questions that anyone has.

Thanks for reading...

Sincerely, Your Overlord