[On 16th-19th January, 2019, Homegrown is throwing a first-of-its-kind music festival in Mumbai designed to celebrate the city’s vast and diverse music culture. Dive deep into a wide variety of dynamic workshops, exhibitions, curated tours, panels, pop-ups, performances and parties that promise to be inclusive of all kinds of tastes and people.
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In 1972 Led Zeppelin were on cloud nine and beyond. Robert Plant’s orgasmic-like vocals and Jimmy Page’s legendary guitar work had recently blasted their way into the stratosphere of Rock n’ Roll immortality with the late 1971 release of Led Zepp IV - probably the most popular album associated with the British Band.
During that very year the band’s iconic frontmen and manager Richard Cole stopped by India for the second or third time (record varies due to Jimmy’s and Plant’s impromptu stop in India after Singapore officials refused to let them inside the country due to their wild, long hair) with the idea of creating a recording studio in India.
Although this dream never came into fruition due to the maniacal custom laws of India in the 70s’, it lead to an October night in Bombay which remains an epic stamp in music history. Forty to fifty years from now nobody will remember the mediocre lip singing of Justin Bieber’s Bombay concert, but the short lived live performance of Jimmy and Plant in a Colaba gin joint still reigns king in a handful of music lovers’ minds.
Sadly, the night these two left their room at The Taj and wound up jamming at Slip Disc, a Colaba discotheque, was poorly documented. For decades the mystery surrounding this spontaneous gig has tortured fans across the globe, who’ve yearned to vicariously relive the night Jimmy and Plant rocked the socks off South Bombay.
Up until recently there was only a single photographic trace of this performance, and according to the very talented blogger Vinayak Razdan, it was “a scan uploaded by musician Madhu Dhas featuring Richard Cole, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and another Indian musician named Xerxes Gobhai (bassist for The Human Bondage).” Yet faded memories from those present at this gala of a gig faintly remember a photographer clicking shots that night.
A true Zepp fan who is a regular contributor on the official Led Zepp forum under the name PlanetPage went in complete sleuth mode and managed to tie a spider’s web of minor truths together, which ultimately pointed to the long gone youth publication, The Junior Statesman (1967-1976). Thankfully this fan’s efforts were not in vain, as he fleshed out former employees of the publication and eventually purchased the rights to these photos that were thought to have been lost in the dusty recesses of time or a figment of hippie imagination. Enjoy this blast from the past!
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