In May, an auction listing claiming to be a rare, unheard soundboard tape of Led Zeppelin’s May 7, 1973 performance in Jacksonville, Florida emerged in the UK.
British auction house Ewbank’s in Surrey, was selling a cassette tape labelled with “Led Zeppelin – Jacksonville” as well as two CDs it claimed contained soundboard audio of the performance.
The CDs contained 14 tracks from the show, the auction house said. “Vendor was crew on the tour,” the lot’s description explained.
Photographs of the cassette tape show it is a Teledyne Herald C-120 tape, with each side containing a maximum of 60 minutes of audio. A three-minute sample of the audio obtained by LedZepNews confirms the tape is an unheard soundboard recording.
“Before we came to America, we decided to do a new programme and we didn’t know how long it was going to be and we found out that it’s nearly three hours long. So this is very unfortunate because it doesn’t leave us a lot of time to boogie,” Plant says in the sample as he introduces the song “Misty Mountain Hop”.
“Anyway, this is a track off our fourth album. It’s about what happens when you’re walking in the park and you pick up the wrong cigarette,” he says before the song begins.
Later in the sample, Plant sings “Have you ever been south of Monterey,” a line from the Beach Boys song “California Saga” that was released in January 1973.
The auction listing was spotted by a number of Led Zeppelin collectors. LedZepNews, along with other members of the Led Zeppelin fan community including LedZepFilm, agreed to pool our funds in the hope of purchasing the recording to release it online.
The group of Led Zeppelin fans including LedZepNews and LedZepFilm placed a maximum bid through the Ewbank’s website on the morning of the May 22 auction, receiving an email confirmation at 10.29am that it had been received ahead of the end of commission bids at 10.30am and the start of the auction at 11am.
The email confirmed that we had placed a commission bid, meaning bidding would take place automatically on our behalf up to our maximum bid level.
When the auction took place later that morning, the tape and CDs sold for a hammer price of £420 which resulted in a total price £546 including buyer’s fees, below the maximum bid we had placed earlier in the morning and had confirmed via email.
However, the auction house said our consortium of bidders was not the winning bidder. Instead, it claimed that our bid had not been received.
“I cannot see this bid currently,” an employee of the auction house wrote in an email sent on May 23, the day after the auction. “I will need to investigate with IT why I am not seeing this bid,” they added.
“I am unclear currently has [sic] to why this bid did not reach us which I need to investigate,” the auction house wrote in a second email that day. “I am sorry for the inconvenience or disappointment on this but unfortunately the Lot was sold elsewhere contractually.”
The auction house continues to insist that the sale to a different bidder for a lower price is final.
The contents of the tape have again vanished into obscurity, meaning it continues to be hoarded and Led Zeppelin fans are unable to enjoy the concert recording.
LedZepNews and LedZepFilm are publicly documenting the emergence and disappearance of the tape and calling on the Led Zeppelin community to help us find the buyer in the hope that we can find a way to release the tape’s contents online.
Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Ewbank’s said an “unintentional error” resulted in our maximum bid becoming lost ahead of the auction.
“Unfortunately, there was mix of technical and human error regarding this bid at the time of the sale,” they said.
“The bid was placed at 10:29:06 BST (54 seconds before the commission / advance bids close). Regretfully the clerk operated live bidding console too early at 10:29:01 (31 minutes before the sale start, and this may have caused the failure of a commission bid placed in last minute of commission bidding before the switch to live bidding to be registered, which is also why we could not see the bid),” they claimed.
“It is not in our interests to intentionally not take bids and this was an entirely isolated issue. This was a training issue with learnings taken from it both for staff and for the introduction of warnings in the software,” they added. “We had a contracted sale with the buyer which we legally had to proceed with, so our options for further redress were limited.”
“While the error was regretful, we are all human beings who are fallible and can make honest mistakes, this issue is not something that has occurred before or since. Overall, our customer experiences are very positive, we are a family run business in a competition with large multinational companies, and we always seek to do the best for our clients,” they continued.
Frustratingly, it seems the auction house closed its commission bidding system early and switched to live bidding just five seconds before our maximum bid was placed and confirmed.
The emails sent by the auction house regarding the lost bid on May 23 were sent “prior to our investigation of what occurred in this instance,” the spokesperson added.
Reviews of Ewbank’s posted online suggest this isn’t the first time the auction house failed to properly register a winning bid.
A Google review posted online earlier this year by Ewa Gawlik-Pindel claimed: “I bid the item, won it, received the confirmation and when arrived to collect it I was informed that I did NOT win it and was refused to issue the item. Very unprofessional and disappointing.”
In its response to that review, the auction house claimed that the missing bid occurred due to a “technical issue” and an “error result”. “This lot was not invoiced to you and you were not sent an invoice by us and we did not send you a confirmation,” the auction house wrote.
Nine years ago, a Google review posted by Jonathan Hellyer also claimed that a winning bid had been lost by the auction house.
“I used Ewbanks live to leave bids which were confirmed by the auction house via email,” Hellyer wrote. “Due to an error at the auction these confirmed bids were ignored by the auctioneer and the lots sold for less than what I had confirmed I would pay meaning the vendor didn’t achieve the best price and I wasted half a day viewing a sale.”
In its response to that review, the auction house again blamed “a technical error with the website” and claimed “a permanent fix has been put in place”.
A spokesperson for the auction house called these “unverified reviews” that regard “unrelated issues” to the Jacksonville tape auction. They pointed to the firm’s total of 196 Google reviews which currently result in an average review score of 4.2 out of five stars.
Anyone with information to share on the Jacksonville 1973 recording can contact LedZepNews by emailing ledzepnews@gmail.com
Jimmy opened his led wallet and paid for it with lawyer threats