May 13, 1973. Mobile Municipal Auditorium. Led Zeppelin. “The house lights went down, and they came out and kicked off ‘Rock and Roll,’ and my heart rate accelerated like I’ve never known from any music before or since. It was extraordinary.”

That’s George Eberlein, a high school kid from the Eastern Shore at the time. He was far from alone. Now he’s one of a giant cluster of Mobile-area fans whose memories of that evening often remain vivid despite the passage of a half-century. With the anniversary of the date approaching, a few of those fans were happy to share their recollections.

When Eberlein says “any music before or since,” he’s talking about a lot. By the time that show came around, he was well on his way to a career as a guitarist on the Mobile scene.

“I’ve always been a guitar player from the time I was 6 years old,” he said. “And when Led Zeppelin I came out, a friend of my parents gave me the album. And there was actually an incredible book of sheet music for the album. It was way, way ahead of its time. Very accurate. I was able to work with all the tunes on Led Zeppelin I when I was in the eighth and ninth grade.”

Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Bonham and John Paul Jones had released five albums by the time they hit Mobile and were, many fans would say, at the height of their powers.

“The interesting thing about the concert was it was on a Sunday and it was started at 6 o’clock in the evening,” Eberlein said. “When the concert started it was still bright daylight outside. When they killed the house lights, you could see it was daylight out in the parking lot.”

(At the 45:30 mark, after the last notes of “No Quarter” die away, Robert Plant says: “Thank you. Good evening! It seems so early, really, to do a concert, you know? ‘Cause we only got out of bed about 2:30. So I’ve just finished me bacon and egg and here we are. This might — What’s the name of this place?” It sounds as if he might be teasing, and he goes on to pronounce Mobile correctly.)

Eberlein said tickets were $5 and the show was sold out for a crowd of 11,000 – which would mean that the Municipal Auditorium, now known as the Mobile Civic Center, would have been absolutely slam-packed. It’s usually described as a 10,000-seat venue, and the capacity can be less depending on the staging of a given event. But 11,000 doesn’t seem impossible, given the band and the era. Attendance of close to 11,000 also was claimed for an Elvis concert that year.

“I was in high school. I went with my high school girlfriend, and we went with my best friend and his girlfriend,” he said. “We went over there, it was general admission, we were probably, maybe 20 yards back from the center of the stage, sitting down on the concrete floor.”

“It was just 75 days before ‘The Song Remains the Same’ concert film was filmed, and so the stage set and a lot of the arrangements and everything that night were exactly like that,” Eberlein said. “No intermission. It was three hours straight through. The intermission was Bonzo’s drum solo in ‘Moby Dick.’”

“I wanted to hear any and all,” he said. “I wanted to hear ‘Heartbreaker’ and ‘The Lemon Song,’ from the second album, ‘Good Times Bad Times’ from the first, of course ‘Stairway.’ Some of the really memorable songs were ‘No Quarter’ and ‘The Rain Song.’ This is shown in ‘The Song Remains the Same.’ ‘No Quarter’ starts off with this real pretty Rhodes piano intro, and they had this dry ice fog that just covered the floor of the stage and went floating off the edge of it. It was just really, really beautiful. They did everything I wanted to hear. And I remember it to this day, vividly. It made a huge, huge impact. It was just such a spectacle, and the performance and sound was so good.”

Not everybody agreed. AL.com’s Matt Wake recently pulled together a chronology of every time Zeppelin or its members appeared in Alabama. He found that in May 1973 both the Tuscaloosa News and the Mobile Register ran snotty, dismissive reviews. The Mobile reviewer said the first 90 minutes were dull, the show was nicer to look at than to listen to, and that it didn’t warrant three hours of attention so he left a half hour early due to “extreme sonic indigestion.”

Eberlein said that he read that review recently and was surprised at the nastiness of it. But Led Zeppelin were never critical darlings, he said. And happily, he’s found a more positive memento in recent months.

For years most of the show was available as a well-regarded bootleg titled “Mobile Dick,” a play on “Moby Dick.” In late 2022, Eberlein came across a remastered version on YouTube that really brought it all back home.

“Yeah, it was as good as I remembered,” he said. “I feel really blessed that I was able to see that.”

When Eberlein shared the bootleg on Facebook in late 2022, a lot of folks chimed in to say they were there. Many of them were, like Eberlein, kids from Daphne, Spanish Fort and Fairhope who’d come to Mobile for the event.

‘Spanish Plaza was just packed with hippies’

“Here’s a song about what happens in England if you go walking in the park and you have a packet of cigarette papers in your pocket, and something to put in the cigarette papers, and things don’t go quite so well as they should.”

Robert Plant’s introduction to “Misty Mountain Hop” comes about 20 minutes into the bootleg, and by that point Brenda Barron Brantley, one of those Eastern Shore kids, was having a memorable day.

“My father, he knew a manager at the auditorium and he’d always get us these great seats to the Rolling Stones and Sly and the Family Stone, and just all these fantastic seats,” said Brantley. “I can’t believe my dad let me go, at 15, to a Led Zeppelin concert. I couldn’t even drive. I went with my sister who was 19 and three guys from South Alabama. They were hippies, had long, long hair.”

A school friend drove Brantley over, and she connected with her sister in downtown Mobile, in what sounds like quite a scene. “We hung out all day in Spanish Plaza with hundreds of other people,” she said. “I mean, Spanish Plaza was just packed with hippies. I mean, it was fun. And when we got in finally, we went in and listened to the concert and I smoked pot for the first time. … I was fine until ‘Stairway to Heaven’ came on and all the smoke came. We had never seen smoke, a fog machine. The fog started rolling in and I just got this awful feeling in my stomach, it was just rolling with the fog. It was during ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and it was so vivid to me that the fog was coming in, the smoke was coming in, it was surreal. It was like you were in heaven. And I was loaded as I could be. Everyone in the concert, they were just passing stuff around, and you didn’t suppose to pass it up. It would have been rude.

“I remember going out in the hall and sitting under the stairwell just trying to grasp everything for a little while,” she said. “When I went to the bathroom, I just sat under the stairwell trying to get my head together. But it was a lot of fun. That’s all I can remember of it. But I remember us all just hanging out, and it was packed, all hanging out at Spanish Plaza. Because that was the place to be. Back then you didn’t hang out in Bienville Square, because you’d get mugged. Downtown was pretty rough back then. You did not go downtown at all.

“I didn’t smoke a lot of pot after that. I think I learned my lesson,” she said. She went on to become an elementary school teacher and retired after 31 years in Spanish Fort. In recent years, one of her sons gave her a CD of the bootleg, which she treasures. She also has fond memories of other shows back in the day, when Mobile’s dome drew a lot of top-tier acts and was just a bus ride away.

“My sister was, I would say, a hippie,” Brantley said. “I liked Led Zeppelin, but I was more of a Rolling Stones fan. Every time they’d come to Mobile, I’d go. I loved the Rolling Stones. My father, he would get us the best seats. The guy would put ‘em back for us. He’d always get us all these seats. Sly and the Family Stone, we were up at the stage, standing against the stage, he got us front-row seats at that one. He used to get us these fabulous seats to every concert. I mean, Alice Cooper, Jethro Tull, I could go on and on. If it was a good band, I’d say ‘Dad could you get these tickets?’”

“If my daddy only knew what my sister got me into,” Brantley said. “He’d be at work, my mom would be at work, and we’d go walk up the hill, it was about a mile to the bus stop, we’d get on the bus and head up to Mobile.”

‘We were that age, it was that generation’

Brantley wasn’t the only one sneaking out. Kathryn Ard Kingan said she was 18 and married when she saw Zeppelin, but by then she was a veteran of big shows at the Municipal Auditorium.

“My first concert ever was Steppenwolf,” she said. “We just had great shows come to Mobile. We were that age, it was that generation, music meant a lot to us.”

“For Steppenwolf, my parents used to square dance every Friday night,” she said. “So the minute they were out the door, my girlfriend came by [with] her older sister and picked me up, we came to Mobile, watched that show, and I had to be home before my parents got home. There really was nothing to do in Baldwin County back in the day.

“Well, I say that,” she added. “We had a venue in Fairhope called The Elbow Room. We would go to dances there every Friday and Saturday night. They had bands from all around here, but I think the highlight of The Elbow Room was the night B.J. Thomas actually performed at The Elbow Room. That was the biggest name that ever came to Fairhope that I’m aware of. So when we really wanted to see good bands, we had to come to Mobile, and we got there whichever way we could. Big sister, brothers, whoever could give us a ride across the Causeway and pay that quarter through the tunnel. Now that, I remember.”

She’d gotten married just out of high school. The Zeppelin show came around the next year. She and her husband both liked the band, so it was “one of those shows you didn’t want to miss.”

“My husband wanted to see the show and he bought an extra ticket for his little sister, who had never been to a concert,” Kingan said. The sister was 16. “What a first concert.”

Kingan said she doesn’t remember a lot of specifics from the show but knows she came away thinking it was “absolutely” everything she’d hoped it would be.

As many great experiences as she had, she did have one lingering disappointment from the era: Circumstances made her miss a 1972 Rolling Stones show. “I did not get to fulfill that concert dream until a couple of years ago in New Orleans,” she said. “Oh, it was awesome.”

She never stopped: As a Saenger Theatre volunteer, she said, she still gets to enjoy plenty of live music.

The song apparently remains the same for Bill Pollard, who shared his thoughts by email:

“’73 was the year I graduated from DHS, so this concert was ‘special’ in that way, in addition to it being LED FRIGGIN’ ZEPPELIN IN MOBILE, AL!! I went with my HS sweetie/first wife/mother of my two older children/first ex-wife … I mostly remember the huge mirrors surrounding the band on the stage, and how they’d vibrate and shimmer along with Bonzo’s pounding! I also remember a vague sense of disappointment at first, as they didn’t sound exactly like or as ‘full’ as they did on my LPs and 8-tracks. Robert Plant sounded tired or something to me also, as he seemed a bit hoarse all through the concert. Jimmy Page tore it up, as always and I vividly remember him breaking out the bow and the puffs of rosin dust as he smacked his guitar, with the hairs on the bow tearing loose and waving about in shreds.

“I also remember (due to my ignorance of the structure of the band) my surprise at JPJ’s playing the mellotron and other instruments … I absolutely zoned out on ‘Moby Dick’ because of the seemingly endless 15 minute Bonzo solo, but didn’t remember that until today when I pulled up some of the recordings of the concert online. I was actually clean and sober at that time as the result of a spiritual experience in November of ‘71, but the pervasive cloud of low-hanging, pungent smoke may have interfered with my ability to remember, not to mention it having been FIFTY FRIGGIN’ YEARS AGO!!! LOL!

“I don’t know how accurate my recollection is,” added Pollard, “but it seems like that same year, or soon after, I saw Jethro Tull and ELO at the Auditorium ….what a great time to be alive to experience all that!!!”

(Note: This checks out. According to online tour listings, Jethro Tull hit Mobile in September 1973 and Electric Light Orchestra appeared at the Municipal Auditorium in November as an opener for Wishbone Ash. Lee Moore, the reviewer who panned the Zeppelin show, was kind to all three acts, supportive of the quirky upstart ELO and singling Jethro Tull out as “consistently brilliant.”)

(Note: Oh, heck, let’s just wallow in this for a minute. According to a quick scan of old Mobile Register reports and ads, other acts that hit the Municipal Auditorium in 1973 included Black Oak Arkansas with Brownsville Station; Freddie Hart; the J. Geils Band with Foghat; The Carpenters; Elton John; 3 Dog Night with T. Rex; Edgar Winter with Canned Heat; Elvis Presley; Ike & Tina Turner; Savoy Brown with Blue Oyster Cult, Manfred Mann & the Earth Band, Cactus and Wet Willie; Buck Owens with Waylon Jennings; Alice Cooper with Flo & Eddie; The Lawrence Welk Show; a Sonny James country show with the Statler Brothers, Barbara Mandrell and Tom T. Hall; The James Gang; Neil Young; Grand Funk Railroad; The Temptations; and Merle Haggard. Also: By the end of the year, the auditorium’s manager was under federal indictment, charged with “the alleged blackmailing of a number of bands that have appeared at the auditorium in recent years,” a scandal that was to have heavy ramifications for the city’s political structure.)

“I lost count of how many times the Allman Brothers played here, along with Alice Cooper and Wet Willie,” wrote Pollard. “The first ‘live concert’ I ever attended was at Hartwell Field and it was billed as ‘Wet Willie and Friends.’ My BIL, David Mann (RIP) and his band Farm (I think it was, at that time) of Johnny’s Smokehouse fame played, as well as the Boogie Brothers who consisted of the remnants of Savoy Brown. I used to have the poster in my bedroom, but it disappeared when I moved out of Mom and Dad’s in 1975.”

Whew.

Jennifer Tibbett Predmore, who was living in Mobile at the time, was another who said she recalls more of an impression than sharp details of the night – but as with the others, the impression is a cherished one.

“Honestly, that was so long ago that my memories are kind of hazy (just like the air in the auditorium that night.)” she wrote, adding a smiley emoji. “I was just a young teenager but Led Zeppelin was my favorite band and I had a huge crush on Robert Plant. We used to spend hours hanging out and listening to their albums and when we heard they were coming to Mobile we talked my friend’s older sister into taking us.

“It was a great concert and they played all my favorites. I was mesmerized. Jimmy Page did some amazing long guitar solos and Robert Plant was doing his signature moves is about all the detail I can remember but to this day it is probably my most favorite concert ever. My daughter who is 27 is a big fan too and was incredulous and jealous that I got to see them in person.

“Sorry I can’t remember more detail but it was half a century ago,” she added, doubtless speaking for many of the 11,000 or so witnesses. “And suddenly I feel really old. Lol.”