The first two concerts of the 1973 tour were at Atlanta Stadium and Tampa Stadium, both baseball parks.
I was sitting with the band in their dressing room in Atlanta, looking out the window watching the throngs of kids walk in, when John Paul Jones sarcastically quipped, “Come on, kiddies, and bring us your money.” Robert looked at him, genuinely shocked, and admonished him without a trace of cynicism, “Jonesy! Those are our fans.”
Zeppelin played a three-hour set without an opening act, and at some point during the middle Peter pointed to a window that overlooked a highway in which cars were speeding by. “Look at that,” he said to me with childlike excitement. “In here people are screaming and jumping around and having the time of their life, and out there those people in those cars don’t have the slightest idea what is going on.” I later told of this moment to Stephen Davis, who used it in his best-seller about the band, Hammer of the Gods, but in Stephen’s version Peter was making this observation to exhort me to make the band more famous. My actual interpretation was quite different. I felt that in the euphoria of the moment he was simply tripping out on the notion of parallel realities occurring so close to each other. Rock concerts at their best generated a tribal reality for the fans, in which they shared moments of all-consuming joy and later felt they shared a secret that nonfans could never understand.
—Danny Goldberg, from his 2008 memoir Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business
