ABSTRACT
Compared with studio recordings, concert events, and official live albums, unofficial concert recordings fulfill a marginal, yet not insignificant role in the consumption of rock music. Valued by fans as affording experiences of a musician's work beyond official releases, bootlegged and fan-traded concert recordings also provide means for the analysis of the music of evanescent performance events. While not without problems of practicality (sound quality, completeness) and interpretation (limitations of recordings in capturing performance, questions of the recording as document or representation), these recordings may be understood as an archive of aural documents that facilitate the analysis of the details of rock music in performance, an under-examined area of creativity within rock practice comparative to the studio recording.
The over 300 unofficial recordings of Led Zeppelin's concerts enable a comprehensive assessment of the group's contribution to rock performance practice. A case study of Led Zeppelin's performances of “Dazed and Confused” between 1969 and 1975 demonstrates the value of these recordings as sources for the analysis of rock music in performance. This chapter thus asserts the need for a more substantive analytical consideration of rock music as performed live, and the value of unofficial recordings as documents of performance to that end.
