By Sharon Oliver
Contributing Writer
BOSTON – Perhaps the most infamous Led Zeppelin concert in Boston was the one that never happened.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the British hard rockers were wildly popular at home and abroad. In 1969, the band performed at the Boston Tea Party nightclub and returned to the city in 1970 and 1971 for a series of concerts. They loved Boston and Bostonians (and surrounding areas) loved them. By the time the 1975 US tour rolled around, something had changed.
On January 6, 1975, thousands of Zep-heads lined up to spend the night in freezing temperatures outside the Boston Garden to purchase tickets for the band’s February 4 concert. Tickets were sold out by 6:00 a.m. the next day, leaving over 2,000 angry hopefuls empty-handed. Based on reports, people broke into and drank from, and then trashed the beer concessions, flooded the hockey rink and threw debris on it, and set fire to the old wooden seats. Boston Mayor Kevin H. White was not happy and soon afterward, the riot police arrived with dogs.
Ticket seekers gone wild
According to Stephen Davis, who covered the band’s 1975 tour and authored two books on the subject, “Pretty soon they were passing bottles of Boone’s Farm apple wine and Ripple—another kind of wine they had back then—and smoking joints and generally getting rowdy. The kids broke into the beer concessions and started feeding themselves. And when the next shift came on, they turned the fire hoses on them. Then they turned the fire hoses on Boston Garden, then they started to torch the seats.”
The venue’s ticket manager at the time, Steven Rosenblatt, explained, “For years and years, we had people line up overnight to wait for tickets. On this night, however, the campers were allowed into the lobby—and they broke into the seating area, leaving Garden officials with a crucial decision to make. You couldn’t have this kind of crowd running around untethered inside the building, so we decided to open the ticket windows.”
An estimated $50,000 to $70,000 worth of damage had been caused and the concert was canceled by Boston Mayor Kevin White. Such recklessness prompted Mayor White to also place a five-year ban on Led Zeppelin performing in Boston. Members would never return as a band since the group dissolved in 1980 following the death of drummer John Bonham.
Unaware of ban
Jimmy Page did return, however, in 1995 to perform with former bandmate Robert Plant at The Fleet Center as Page & Plant. Page shared an Instagram image of the crowd outside the Boston Garden in 1975 and commented on being unaware of the 1975 incident and ban.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Jim Summaria
“On researching for my website, I discovered that on January 6th, 1975, there had been an incident at the Box Office at Boston Garden in Boston, Massachusetts, that had involved a sale / non-sale of tickets to thousands of fans. Police were called, and it all ended with the scheduled Led Zeppelin show being canceled by Mayor Kevin H. White (who saw red) and, even more, there was apparently a five-year ban put on the band playing the venue. I was blissfully unaware of any of these shenanigans, but the Mayor was, by all accounts, a Rolling Stones fan.”
Incidentally, Mayor White had gotten the Rolling Stones released from jail so they could make their Boston appearance in 1972. Recently, 51 minutes of unseen footage shot from a Led Zeppelin concert in Montreal, Canada in 1975 has emerged. Perhaps it can be some sort of consolation for those who missed that magical era up close and personal.
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