Here's a review of one of the Crowes/Page shows (the second LA one) from Launch (www.launch.com). It was the evening of the second-to-last "Twofer Tuesday" during the millennium's final Rocktober that Jimmy Page and the Black Crowes revived the old FM warhorse "Get The Led Out." It was almost as if one of those radio intros containing the first two power chords of six or seven instantly recognizable Zep rockers was coming to life--the ones cut together by some coked-out '70s-radio holdout, designed to reel in the burnt-out blue collar slaves and mistreated receptionists for the drive home. This one-time-only combination of Demonmaster and Southern Fried Brethren would feed the hungry for only four concerts filled to the brim with Led Zeppelin favorites, a couple of Crowes numbers, and some odds 'n' ends. The Greek Theatre was packed with a crowd 95% over age 30, people who no longer have any musical entertainment besides endless rehashes on VH1's Behind The Music. They don't need Creed and can't handle Reznor's insecurities--they have kids of their own for crissakes--and they're too tired once they get off work to head out to the local pisshole to hear one of a dozen tribute bands stumble through an hour of rote Led Zep covers. Hell, even Great White sold a bunch of records doing an all-Zeppelin covers album. So here is something that resembles the "real thing" in a vague way that can still sort of be recognized. That Led Zeppelin's music is so enduring speaks volumes about the chemistry that the four original band members had amongst themselves, that impossible-to-describe blend of ingredients that makes some bands infinitely better than all others. This special something wasn't on display at this concert--how could it be? Which isn't to knock the Crowes--they're great. That said, this unending need for the power chords from Valhalla also is an undeniable testimony to the riffmaster Jimmy Page. Each guitar intro sends a million fists into the air. It's the live equivalent to the TV game show Name That Tune: "I can name that Zep song in two chords, Jimmy." To their credit, these guys played long and hard and dug pretty deep into the Zeppelin catalog. They also seemed to have thought through this and picked selections that would by and large benefit from the cumbersome three-guitar lineup rather than be bogged down by it. Page, an admitted devotee of Les Paul, was a wizard of the guitar overdub; his guitar layerings and orchestrations were unparalleled. In this context, many of the songs came to life. Simple things like the octave-divided intro of "Nobody's Fault But Mine" and the rave-up middle of "The Lemon Song" nearly duplicated the original recordings. In other instances, to avoid clutter, the three just played identical unisons (as in "Out On The Tiles" from the show's encore), resulting in an impossibly big sound. With this arsenal of crunch potential, the seven players kept it on 10--er, I mean 11--pretty much the whole set. There were some cool surprises from the lighter side of the Zep catalog, particularly the B-side "Hey Hey What Can I Do," which was rarely, if ever, performed by the original band. (Hats off to new Crowes guitarist Audley Freed for the mandolin part. With the bass and keys playing alongside the mandolin, one realized it often takes three musicians to duplicate Zep secret weapon John Paul Jones). Keyboardist Eddie Harsch soaked up some spotlight playing the psychedelic church organ intro to "Your Time's Gonna Come," a song Zeppelin never performed live. Avoiding Zeppelin's two most popular FM albums (Houses Of The Holy and the untitled fourth) entirely, the band dug pretty deep into the lengthier selections from Physical Graffiti, such as "Sick Again," "Ten Years Gone," and the folk standard "In My Time Of Dying." If there was a letdown to the concert, it could have been that the material stuck so close to the recorded arrangements. Presumably, the three-guitar lineup didn't lend itself to the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-dragon-embroidered-satin-pants credo of the original power trio, which would fly into improvisations at the drop of a Jack Daniel's bottle. Other highlights included "What Is And What Should Never Be," also performed to perfection, and the crowd-pleasing mindless noise of Echoplex manipulation and theremin tomfoolery during the middle section of the obligatory encore/ closer "Whole Lotta Love." Page can still rip it up, as evidenced by a nearly berserk guitar spazz-out in the middle of the set-closer "Heartbreaker." Tip of the hat to Sven Pipien's bass work in that one, but then again, he was great all night. Non-Zep fare included a Jimmie Rodgers song I didn't recognize, the Crowes' hit arrangement of Otis Redding's "Hard To Handle" (complete with botched lyrics--how many times has Chris Robinson sang this thing?), and an amazingly scorching version of "No Speak No Slave," one of the Crowes' most cookin' songs. The evening's biggest surprise came in the form of "Shapes Of Things." The Yardbirds chestnut actually came from that band's Jeff Beck era, and the Page/ Crowes played the heavy, half-time Jeff Beck Group arrangement of it. The middle section featured Page doing Beck's original Yardbirds solo (which Motorhead's Lemmy says was the best 10 seconds of electric guitar ever recorded, and I tend to agree), and then played a second solo duplicating the Beck Group middle section. This meant nothing to most, but to guitar freaks this could have been the evening's revelation. It made me want to hear the 'Birds' "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago," on which Page actually played. A buddy of mine reported that at the show the previous evening they played Fleetwood Mac's "Oh Well," which had a three-guitar arrangement to begin with--I would have loved to have heard that. Everyone wondered how Chris Robinson would sound manhandling Robert Plant's histrionics, and he did pretty well. Some of the high notes got pretty creaky toward the end, but truth be known, Plant used to miss a lot of the same notes in concert. To Robinson's credit, he adapted the songs by and large to his own style, which for the most part worked. A friend of mine who manages a record store in Greenwich Village, which I guess makes him some sort of authority (at least up there with "rock critic"), says that rock music is almost at the point jazz has been for the past 15 years or so. There is absolutely nothing new left to do, so everyone that plays this stuff just does tributes, rewrites, and rearrangements of what has gone before. It's pretty much true. But what the hell, give us old farts some entertainment we understand.