I recently saw the documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin. Throughout it there were montages of ticket stubs, concert posters, and the like, to illustrate how much the band toured – and every time I glimpsed something that mentioned “Vancouver” it made me laugh. Not because I saw any of those shows – although I think half of my high school was at one or both of the Led Zeppelin shows here in 1975 – but because I was half-hoping there would be a mention of one of Vancouver’s greatest urban legends: Led Zeppelin’s lunchtime concert.

This is the story. Led Zeppelin were booked to play here in spring 1970. Allegedly, upon arriving in this fair city, they decided that they felt like playing live right away – or, according to another version of the story, they felt they needed a bit more practice before that night’s concert. They told their tour staff that they wanted to play an unannounced show at a local high school at lunchtime. The staff got in touch with someone who arranged for the show to take place in the auditorium at Eric Hamber high school. The show was free, and it was supposed to be private – no media, no news coverage – but one of the students who got to see the show snuck in a camera and took a few shots of the band in action. One of those photos appeared in the school yearbook that spring.

I had never heard this story until a few years ago. In 1970 I was still in elementary school in North Vancouver, so if this concert had happened I wouldn’t have known about it at all. Also, North Vancouver students didn’t have a lot of interaction with Vancouver students. When I was in high school in North Vancouver, we only saw Vancouver high school students (unless we knew them personally from somewhere else) when they were kicking our asses in regional sports meets, quizzes, drama festivals, and the like. Our main impression of Vancouver high schools was that they had a lot of money and were a lot more interesting than our schools. When we heard about high school elective courses in Vancouver that we would have liked to have taken, and asked for them, we were always told, “Vancouver can afford to offer those. We can’t.”

When I came across an online mention of this alleged Led Zeppelin show, I asked an informant (a.k.a. my husband), who was a student at another Vancouver high school during that time, if there was any gossip at his school about this show. He said there wasn’t. However, there are some facts that make the story of this show not completely implausible.

• • Live bands regularly played at high schools in the area during this time, at dances and other events. And these weren’t inexperienced bands of awkward high school kids; these were professional bands. Heart played at a dance at my high school and they were incredible, long before anyone knew who they were.
  • Lunchtime concerts were indeed a regular thing at Vancouver high schools. (This was a revelation to me, because at my high school we only got live bands at after-school dances in the evening.) My husband remembers seeing Valdy and Bim at lunchtime shows at his school.
  • Eric Hamber high school is on the west side of Vancouver, which is the more affluent part of the city. A school on the west side would have the equipment and resources to put on a show like this.
  • Led Zeppelin played in Vancouver in 1968 and 1969 (twice). So they and their staff would have been familiar with the local music scene, and would have known the people in that scene that could make things happen.
  • When Led Zeppelin was on tour, its members regularly did musical things outside of its scheduled concerts. As Becoming Led Zeppelin points out, most of the band’s second album was recorded in bits and pieces on the road. Indeed, after the end of one of Led Zeppelin’s 1969 Vancouver gigs, Robert Plant went to a now-gone  studio on West Broadway, where he recorded the harmonica solo for “Bring It On Home”. So the band playing an unplanned daytime concert wouldn’t have been out of character for them.
  • There are people who claim to have been there at the show. OK, there are also people who claim to have seen UFOs, Yetis, and the like, but just because it sounds improbable doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
  • The musicians in the yearbook photo look an awful lot like Led Zeppelin, including their clothing, which can be verified as clothing they wore on stage in 1970 from other photos of that tour. The lighting and the stage also look like what you would see at high school concerts from that era.

The reality is that…..

• • • some of the Eric Hamber yearbook staff have admitted that they put the photo in the yearbook as a joke, although the photo was from an actual Led Zeppelin concert in Vancouver; and,
    • obsessive Led Zeppelin trackers have verified that both Plant and Page were in the UK on the date of the supposed lunchtime concert.  There is an extensive discussion of this on the Led Zeppelin fan forum.

Still, this show could have happened. That’s what makes this story so interesting. And that’s what going to make me laugh every time I’m reminded of this fabulous urban legend.