Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes teamed up for a series of concerts at the end of the ’90s revisiting the guitar legend’s past with Led Zeppelin. It seems like a given that they would end up recording the shows for some sort of live release. There was just one problem: Page didn’t want to.
As a result, the idea that eventually became 2000’s Live at the Greek: Excess All Areas was just a fever dream that didn’t really exist. But Crowes manager Pete Angelus, known also for his previous work managing Van Halen in the David Lee Roth era, knew the shows needed to be documented. It was Kevin Shirley, who had overseen sessions for the band’s latest album, 1999’s By Your Side, who helped to make it happen.
The producer, known now for his work with groups like Iron Maiden, Journey and Rush, had seen the Crowes and Page play together at a charity gig in London in June of 1999. “When they came to the States to play live, I approached Pete about recording it. He said, ‘Jimmy’s not interested at all. In actual fact, maybe we can do something, but it has to be under the radar,” he recalls in a conversation for the UCR Podcast.
“So at that point, I hired the mobile truck, because it wasn’t as easy to record live then as it is now. I [secured] the Le Mobile truck, which we parked underneath trees, far away from everything and we [also] put stuff around it. We got a feed from the desk and Jimmy didn’t know about the recording. I mixed it live in the truck, straight to CD. I went backstage after the first night and said, ‘I recorded the show, by the way. Here are the tapes if you want to do anything with them. If not, we’ll scrap them entirely.’ I gave them the CD and we kind of left it at that.”
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“I recorded the two shows [at the Greek] and left them with the guys. The manager of Zeppelin and Jimmy Page was Bill Curbishley at the time,” he continues. “So Bill and Pete had the [recordings] and they found an outlet to release the product through a startup internet company, Musicmaker.com. They got a nice advance. I don’t know the number, but at that point, I was able to submit my bill for the truck and for my time. I think it was maybe 75 thousand dollars, which was not a big budget for anything of that ilk [then].”
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Shirley worked to prepare the recordings for release, doing the final mixes on the weekends when he had time away from working with Iron Maiden. As he recalls, they weren’t allowed to use any of the Black Crowes’ own songs for the planned release and surprisingly, the comments on his mixes were minimal. “They only had one comment on one song,” he remembers. “Jimmy asked me to turn his guitar up a little and I turned it up one dB. That was the only comment out of all of those mixes.”
Revisiting ‘Live at the Greek’ 25 Years Later
A newly available expanded reissue of Live at the Greek adds 16 previously unreleased tracks, including the Crowes originals that were performed during the tour, plus additional music captured during soundchecks. As the producer shares, the idea of revisiting the recordings had been in the air for a decade, but the problem was that the tapes had gone missing. “I kept looking through things and ended up not finding everything, but I found all of the Greek [material] with soundchecks and everything,” he says. “I found some of the [music] from Jones Beach, but I didn’t find all of [it]. I would have loved to have found [songs like] ‘Horsehead.’ I have my live mixes of all of that stuff, but it sounds different than the studio mixes [of the same performances].”
He fully remixed all of the songs for the revamped version of Live at the Greek and notes that the passage of time helped to color his approach. “25 years ago, I was a little more conscious of embracing the space, in the way Zeppelin had used ambiance, you know, things like drum room stuff — and I had kind of put that front and center,” he explains. “This time, I was so aware of the intricacies of the guitar orchestration that Jimmy has labored over [with] making those Zeppelin records. I really wanted to pinpoint all of the individuals and I [also] felt I had a bit more time.”
Live at the Greek is a project that ultimately had a huge impact on Shirley, a lifelong fan of Led Zeppelin. His work on the original Greek recordings triggered Page to contact the producer a few years later to help him oversee the audio restoration work for the Led Zeppelin DVD and also the How the West Was Won live retrospective. He’s grateful for the experience he had doing the Page/Crowes recordings that opened those doors. “The live recording embodies all of [Jimmy’s] gorgeous guitar orchestration with the energy of live,” he says now. “And you know, Chris Robinson is one of the few people that could even attempt to, you know, sing the Golden God’s [Robert Plant] bits.”
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Gallery Credit: Michael Gallucci
