Twisted Sister guitarist Jay Jay French has put in his two cents about the Led Zeppelin live performance, sharing that he believes the quality of the band’s live shows deteriorated during their final days.
French recently sat down with The Cassius Morris Show, in an interview that saw him muse that the influence of drugs and alcohol lead to a decline in quality in Led Zeppelin’s performance.
“I saw Zeppelin many, many, many times, and they got worse as time went on,” he shared. “That was the real story about Zeppelin – drugs and alcohol had its effect on Jimmy [Page], so as the years went by, they deteriorated.”
French continued, “’69, ’70, ’71, ’72, ’73, they were amongst the greatest bands you would ever want to see live – your mouth would fall open. You’d watch John Bonham play drums, you just – your jaws are dropped.”
The guitarist reckons that Zeppelin started to lose it following the release of 1975’s Physical Graffiti.
“Come ’75, Robert’s [Plant] voice starts deteriorating a bit, and Jimmy’s playing starts to deteriorate. There’s plenty of stuff online to prove it, and I’m not saying this with any glee, trust me,” he shared.
“By ’77, on their last tour – here we are in 1977, Twisted is one of the biggest bar bands in the Tri-State Area, and a friend of ours is a ticket broker, and he gave us four tickets to give away for one of our shows.
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“We couldn’t give tickets away to Zeppelin in 1977 because nobody wanted to see them. If you were a kid in Long Island and you wanted to hear Zeppelin, you’d go see Zebra, this band Zebra, because they did Zep better than Zep, and they were phenomenal. And you go, ‘Why would I waste my time seeing this band that can’t play Zeppelin songs?’ So we couldn’t give tickets away.”
He adds, “I had four tickets to see Zep at the Garden, I couldn’t give them away, but I went, I went with some friends, and we’re all sitting there bored to death.
“I swear to god, I spent three hours watching John Bonham play drums because I couldn’t listen to this, but this is a byproduct of my age.”
In other news, Twisted Sister frontman Dee Snider recently revealed that his forthcoming solo record Leave A Scar will feature a track inspired by internet trolls.
“Today I recorded a song inspired by my taking on trolls on social media. @jameyjasta & @charliebellmore came up with the idea & chorus lyrics for ‘Open Season’ & I ran with it the rest of the way,” Snider wrote in a tweet back in February. “No loss for words here. Opening line: ‘Hey mutha fucker are you kidding me?!’”
