For Your Weekend Listening Pleasure: Zeppelin at Memorial Auditorium, ’75

Led Zeppelin played Memorial Auditorium six times between March 28, 1970, and April 1, 1977 — including back-to-back, attendance-record-setting gigs on March 4 and 5 in ’75. Those shows remain perhaps the two best-documented concerts in local hard-rock history: The band’s official Web site features dozens of photos from the concerts taken by Carl Dunn — the lifelong Dallas resident whose work is celebrated here and collected in his tome This is Rock and Roll — as well as ticket stubs, the tour program, a print ad and video from the show augmented with the original radio spots advertising the March 3 Fort Worth gig and the Dallas shows.

There’s also a review from The Dallas Morning News penned by one Charlie Bates — not a huge fan:

Page’s style appears uncontrolled, very aggressive and almost always at a high level of unvarying intensity. His guitar and Plant’s scorching vocal tones embody the Zeppelin sound. When back-grounded by John Paul Jones’ bottom-heavy bass and drummer John (Bonzo) Bonham’s booming licks, that group sound is thunderous, jagged, overbearing.

Sounds good to me — real good, as evidenced by this 2-hour-42-minute soundboard recording of the March 4 show, commonly known as Chasing the Dragon. It opens with “Rock and Roll,” closes with “Heartbreaker,” and somewhere in the middle of the 15-song set list is a half-hour “Moby Dick” that is, sure, thunderous. I used to think that was the climax of the concert — years ago I paid $39.95 for a “remastered special-edition” double-disc-er titled, simply, Dallas 1975 that left off the final five tracks. Dang it.