In a new interview Terrie Carr of WDHA-FM 105.5 FM, the rock music station licensed to Dover and Morristown, New Jersey, drummer Jason Bonham — son of the legendary LED ZEPPELIN drummer John Bonham — spoke about what it has been like to perform in front of full houses with his LED ZEPPELIN EVENING show across North America this fall. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “I always find 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 every day [in preparation for the London show]. Every day we were together, hanging out, telling stories. They would tell me things that I didn’t know — now I’m a grown-up — they would tell me all these different things. So, suddenly you feel part of it. And my mom said, ‘Are you gonna be okay when it stops?’ I’m, like, ‘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.”
Jason Bonham spent nearly a decade touring as JASON BONHAM’S LED ZEPPELIN EXPERIENCE before changing the band’s name to JASON BONHAM’S LED ZEPPELIN EVENING. Bonham later explained that the switch was prompted by a request from the LED ZEPPELIN camp, who wanted to use the “Experience” name for a project involving the archive of ZEP live recordings.
JASON BONHAM’S LED ZEPPELIN EXPERIENCE was formed in 2009 to pay tribute to Bonham‘s father, who died in 1980 at the age of 32. “It was meant to be part of my way of expressing my love for music and expressing myself with a tip of the hat to my father,” Jason told Mixdown in a 2017 interview. “Soon after doing the 28 shows that we did 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.”
Jason launched JASON BONHAM’S LED ZEPPELIN EXPERIENCE two years after taking part in LED ZEPPELIN‘s aforementioned one-off performance at London’s O2 Arena tribute concert for friend and Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun. The rare live set, which saw Jason behind the drums in place of his late father, was released in 2012 as “Celebration Day”.
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 wanted it to be we are just playing music. It had to be personal with stories to tell people what Dad was like at home. It’s nice to know that so many people love hearing that music played in a live environment.”
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.
