Disc 1: 1st Source - The Song Remains The Same, The Rover Intro/Sick Again, Nobody's Fault But Mine, Over The Hills And Far Away, Since I've Been Loving You, No Quarter

Disc 2: 1st Source - Ten Years Gone, The Battle Of Evermore, Going To California, Black Country Woman/Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp, Trampled Underfoot, White Summer/Black Mountain Side, Kashmir

Disc 3: 1st Source - Guitar Solo, Achilles Last Stand, Stairway To Heaven, Whole Lotta Love, Rock And Roll, Black Dog

Disc 4: 2nd Source - The Song Remains The Same, The Rover Intro/Sick Again, Nobody's Fault But Mine, Over The Hills And Far Away, Since I've Been Loving You, No Quarter, Ten Years Gone, The Battle Of Evermore

Disc 5: 2nd Source - Going To California, Black Country Woman/Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp, Trampled Underfoot, White Summer/Black Mountain Side, Kashmir, Achilles Last Stand, Stairway To Heaven, Whole Lotta Love, Rock And Roll, Black Dog

A Quiet Before The Storm from The Chronicles Of Led Zeppelin collects two separate audience sources for Zeppelin's first of two shows in Oakland for promoter Bill Graham's A Day On The Green. The 1977 tour would sadly be cut short due to the death of Plant's son making this the second to last performance of the year. The show takes place outdoors at the Alameda County Coliseum in the afternoon and was opened by Judas Priest and Rick Derringer.

The first part of the show has a rather uninspired feel and Plant even apologizes for the sluggish start. Both Page and Plant seem to take the longest to warm up and deliver an uneven performance for the first half of the show. Jimmy's solo during "Over The Hills And Far Away" is bland but starts to play some nice stuff by "Since I've Been Loving You". "No Quarter" features Jones on some interesting blues during his piano spotlight before the common extended solos. "Ten Years Gone" is less successful as Page's late entry for the solo is disastrous and it's amazing that the band were even able to recover from it.

Robert mentions Winterland before the acoustic set and is in strong voice throughout. The acoustic set comes across very well and must have been nice in an outdoor afternoon setting. The second half of the day has some shining moments with strong performances of "Trampled Underfoot", " Kashmir", and "Achilles Last Stand". A brief "Whole Lotta Love" leads into "Rock And Roll" for the first encore while the second encore features a unique "Black Dog", this time with no musical intro. The first show in Oakland is certainly not one of Led Zeppelin's best performances but at least the show improves as the day progresses and still ranks very good.

Source one featured on the first three discs is a very good audience tape lacking some in the bottom end with the occasional change in sound quality that naturally occurs in an outdoor event. "No Quarter" has a small cut at 5:58 but other than that, the tape is virtually complete. The only previous silver release of this source was It's Been Great on IQ. In comparison, IQ is louder and much heavier in the low end. TCOLZ sounds quieter and perhaps a bit thin sounding but is easily corrected by adding a touch of bass. This source could have benefited from some added low end but would go against the label's principle of presenting tapes in their natural form.

The second source was previously issued on Confusion (no label). It is a good to very good audience recording that sounds closer to the stage than source one and also has uneven sound quality in spots due to the outdoor setting. When the tape is clear it is much more enjoyable than source one and has more low end present which leads to some overloading, especially in Jones' bass pedals. The taper presumably wanted to conserve tape and therefore are a lot of cuts between songs leaving quite a few tracks clipped at the start. In addition to "The Song Remains The Same" cutting in during the first verse, there are some scattered musical cuts (i.e. "Since I've Been Loving You", "No Quarter", "White Summer" to name a few) and is completely missing the guitar solo before "Achilles Last Stand".

TCOLZ offers up another worthwhile comprehensive set with A Quiet Before The Storm. With the subtitle The Day On The Green Tapes Volume 1, I am hopeful they will issue Volume 2 with the following day's performance in a nice comprehensive set like this one. This comes packaged in a fatboy jewel case with some very nice photos.