Just in: wow! JASON BONHAM publicly gets real On His LED ZEPPELIN EVENING Show” I Started It Purely As A Therapeutic Way To Get The LED Out Of Me’ Jason hints despite strange turn around. See details…
Guitarist Jason Bonham, son of the late great LED ZEPPELIN drummer John Bonham, talked about what it has been like to play in front of packed houses with his LED ZEPPELIN EVENING show across North America this fall in a recent interview with Terrie Carr of WDHA-FM 105.5 FM, the rock music station licensed to Dover and Morristown, New Jersey. According to BLABBERMOUTH.NET’s transcription, he stated: “I always discover
it’s a pinch-yourself moment because I look at it as I started this purely as a therapeutic way to get the LED out of me. After playing with the real McCoy, the real deal, in [December] 2007 [at London’s O2 arena], I remember when it stopped, it was a huge, ‘Now what?’ … Because I just spent six weeks with the [surviving LED ZEPPELIN] guys
In order to get ready for the London show, we spent every day together, hanging out and telling stories. They would tell me things that I didn’t know, and now that I’m an adult, they would tell me all these different things. As a result, you feel like you’re a part of it. My mother asked, “Are you going to be okay when it stops?” and I replied, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve got this.” Because you’ve been given the keys to the kingdom, and you sat in the throne of
the greatest rock and roll band in the world. So when it stopped, it was hard, I must say. And then when the idea came, ‘Why don’t you do a band, a tribute thing”, I’m, like, ‘Are you kidding me? I’ve just played with [the original guys]. I don’t wanna tarnish that.’ So it became more therapeutic. And I realized it’s about the fans. The reason why we’re still doing it, after I got over the my stories and me — ‘it’s about me and my dad’ — it’s not. It’s about our love for dad, me and everyone, because we all have stories of what he meant to us. I lost my dad; you lost your drummer. So that’s the only reason — the love and the passion that we do it and still do it. Because there’s a lot of other things that I like to do.”
Before renaming the band JASON BONHAM’S LED ZEPPELIN EXPERIENCE to JASON BONHAM’S LED ZEPPELIN EVENING, Jason Bonham toured with the group for almost ten years. Later, Bonham clarified that the LED ZEPPELIN camp requested the switch because they intended to utilize the “Experience” term for a project that involved the library of ZEP live recordings.
In honor of Bonham’s father, who passed away in 1980 at the age of 32, JASON BONHAM’S LED ZEPPELIN EXPERIENCE was established in 2009. In a 2017 interview, Jason told Mixdown, “It was meant to be part of my way of expressing myself with a tip of the hat to my father and my love for music.” Soon after completing the 28 performances we performed with an
orchestra, everyone said, ‘You’re not going to stop now, are you? You haven’t been here, you haven’t played there…’ And so I said, ‘As long as you guys want me to do it, I’ll do it.’ It’s really fan-based. It’s not us and them; it’s about love for LED ZEPPELIN, and that’s how it’s grown, as a very honest, natural, fan-based show. You guys all knew him as Bonzo; I knew him as dad, and there’s a great interaction.”
Two years after participating in LED ZEPPELIN’s previously mentioned one-off performance at London’s O2 Arena tribute show for friend and Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, Jason started JASON BONHAM’S LED ZEPPELIN EXPERIENCE. In 2012, “Celebration Day” was published, a rare live performance in which Jason took up the drums from his late father.
He told the Chicago Tribune about JASON BONHAM’S LED ZEPPELIN EVENING: “We’re not LED ZEPPELIN. We are fans. We love the music. We give it 150 percent energy and time to make it as good as we can make it to give people that feeling and make people go back to their youth.
“I never intended for us to be merely performing music. Stories that were personal have to be used to describe Dad’s personality at home. Knowing that so many people like listening to that music performed live is comforting.
The performance includes LED ZEPPELIN favorites as well as deep cuts. For this year’s tour, JASON BONHAM’S LED ZEPPELIN EVENING has worked up a number of fresh inclusions on the setlist, such as “Friends”, “Achilles Last Stand” and the arrangement of “Dazed And Confused” from “The Song Remains The Same” concert movie.
The hardest thing is picking the songs,” Bonham told the Chicago Tribune. ” “There’s more deeper songs — ‘In The Light’, ‘Friends’, ‘Four Sticks’ — songs that never got played live and never made it to a ZEPPELIN show. The list could go on for the more obscure ones that fans like to hear. Of course we still do ‘Kashmir’, ‘Stairway To Heaven’ and ‘What Is And What Should Never Be’. We started doing ‘Dancing Days’, ‘Houses Of The Holy’ and ‘That’s The Way’. This show is one of the most fun things to do because I get to play all this great music in front of people that really appreciate it.”
