LedZepNews has published the Day on the Green Files in full, allowing fans to read more than 300 pages of legal filings about the backstage violence at the 1977 festival as well as a collection of previously unseen US government records relating to a campaign to ban Led Zeppelin from the US over the following year.

We obtained the lawsuit filings from the Superior Court of California where they had been stored on microfilm in an Alameda courthouse for more than 40 years.

The US government records are a collection of State Department cables stored as part of the Central Foreign Policy File, within the Department of State Central Files, held on microfilm at the National Archives.

The files reveal that Led Zeppelin signed contracts to continue working until at least 1991, identify the previously secret group of people who employed the band from 1976 onwards and outline how the band used surveillance and confidentiality agreements in an attempt to silence three men assaulted backstage.

Read the full lawsuit documents here:

Led Zeppelin Day on the Gre… by James Cook

Read the full State Departnment cables here:

Led Zeppelin visa ban State… by James Cook

How we obtained the documents

LedZepNews obtained the legal files by hiring a California court runner to physically visit the Alameda courthouse over multiple days to look up the case in the courthouse’s microfilm records, print hundreds of pages and then scan them in.

Eight pages of the legal filings were previously published on the Royal Orleans forum in 2020 by the user manhattan72, giving us the information we needed to order everything stored in the courthouse.

We discovered the State Department files through the National Archives’ Access to Archival Databases site, which listed the title and dates of the cables but didn’t show their contents. Using information from the database, we ordered copies of the original cables. The files were screened for restricted information by National Archives staff before being made available to LedZepNews.

What we didn’t manage to obtain

The Day on the Green Files is a six-month reporting project that began in January 2024 when we began seeking surviving records about the Day on the Green 1977 backstage violence.

We were successful in obtaining the legal records regarding the $2 million civil lawsuit filed by the three employees of Bill Graham who were assaulted, but LedZepNews has been unable to locate any police records relating to the arrest on July 25, 1977 of John Bonham, Peter Grant, Richard Cole and John Bindon.

The City of Oakland Police initially identified a potential microfilm record in January that could have been the police file on Day on the Green 1977. But after months of radio silence from the police and messages from LedZepNews to the City of Oakland Police Commission, our records request was closed with the message: “This record no longer exists.”

Alameda County Sheriff’s Office did not retain any documents relating to the incident either. LedZepNews has also filed a records request with the San Francisco Police Department.