FOUR BLOCKS IN THE SNOW

Source #1: Discs 1/2/3

Source #2: Discs 4/5/6

Disc 1: Introduction, Rock And Roll, Sick Again, Over The Hills And Far Away, In My Time Of Dying, The Song Remains The Same, The Rain Song, Kashmir, No Quarter

Disc 2: Trampled Underfoot, Moby Dick, Dazed And Confused

Disc 3: Stairway To Heaven, Whole Lotta Love, Black Dog, Heartbreaker

Disc 4: Introduction, Rock And Roll, Sick Again, Over The Hills And Far Away, In My Time Of Dying, The Song Remains The Same, The Rain Song, Kashmir

Disc 5: No Quarter, Trampled Underfoot, Moby Dick

Disc 6: Dazed And Confused, Stairway To Heaven, Whole Lotta Love, Black Dog, Heartbreaker

Four Blocks In The Snow is another 6CD set from The Chronicles Of Led Zeppelin this time collecting two different audience sources for the February 12, 1975 show at Madison Square Garden. Again, like they did with We're Playing Our Balls Out, TCOLZ did not mix the sources and left them separate in their unaltered form.

Source one is the tape most commonly issued before and has been released repeatedly by a number of different labels. The original Tarantura released this as The Jumpleg and was copied on 10th US Tour by Whole Lotta Live. Last Stand Disc issued this twice, both under the title MSG 1975. TDOLZ also released this twice, first in a limited box set and later in a gatefold cardboard sleeve both titled Can't Take Your Evil Ways and both claiming to be uncut. Tarantura 2000's title Ladies and Gents also claimed to be uncut but was missing time found on other titles. The sound quality from this tape is nice and clear with a very good balance and one of the best sounding from the first leg of the tour. The tape captures a very nice atmosphere, free of up close crowd noise.

Led Zeppelin had a very rough start to the 75 tour. Plant's vocals were in bad shape due to the flu and Page had broken a finger. The American tour started on January 18th so this show is about three and a half weeks in. By this time Jimmy's finger had healed and Robert was improving, although not completely up to par but was gaining more control over his vocal. This is an interesting show played during a snow storm and the title comes from Plant's comments "We came four blocks in the snow to get here..."

For "No Quarter", John Paul Jones hadn't yet incorporated the change to acoustic piano and he goes a little over the top at the end of Page's solo where Jimmy has to reel him back in for the final verse. There is a sound change at 9:45 in "Moby Dick" where there appears to be a cut right where Bonham switches over from sticks to hands. This is said to be an uncut source so I compared this against source two. Source two has no apparent cut at this point in the song and both tapes matched up almost identically. What's even stranger is the fact that Empress Valley's soundboard version, Flying Circus, sounds like it has a cut in the exact same place but their content seems to match also. So if in fact there is a cut/edit at this point it is really minute but does seem rather unlikely that all three sources would have the same edit.

"Dazed And Confused" is the longest version so far from the tour and contains a piece from "Walter's Walk" starting at 22:44 lasting less than a minute. "Whole Lotta Love" is the first encore featuring an abbreviated version that runs nonstop with "Black Dog" and the second encore, "Heartbreaker" contains a jam on "That's Alright, Mama" during the break in the middle.

When comparing TCOLZ to TDOLZ I found that Four Blocks In The Snow has a longer introduction and runs at the correct speed where Can't Take Your Evil Ways runs slightly faster. TDOLZ also emphasized the highs a bit too much giving Four Blocks the advantage where they use no equalization.

Source two comes from another very good sounding tape that is a bit bottom heavy causing low end distortion throughout the recording that gets really overbearing during the end of "Kashmir". This comes from the same noisy tapers that recorded the opening night in New York on 2/3/75 (and also the 9/3/71 show at MSG and the 6/15/72 show at Nassau Coliseum) but luckily most of the comments are left to between songs allowing most of the performance to shine through better. There is a cut at 0:35 in "Sick Again", 6:59 in "The Rain Song", 1:14 and 3:18 in "Moby Dick" while "Dazed And Confused" has a drop out at 24:32.

This source was first released by Electric Magic in 2001 as That's All Right New York and hasn't been released since. EMC used the first source to complete some gaps and fix some problems and also has the common "metallic sound" featured on a lot of Electric Magic/Celebration titles that was frowned upon by collectors. TCOLZ doesn"t contain any harsh mastering and the overall volume was left at a reasonable level making this a better alternative for this source.