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| Michael White and The White – Led Zeppelin lives on |
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| Led Zeppelin lives on |
Oct 21 2011– Tonight saw the return of Michael White to Toronto with the Led Zeppelin discography series. White is a veteran of the rock scene and did stints as one of the original singers of Motley Crue and sang for German metal band Accept. It has been said that White has played for over 2.5 million people in his long career. Lore also has it that Michael invented the concept of a tribute band way back in the 70’s and impressed Robert Plant so much that Plant helped White get a record deal in the early 80’s. I have seen Michael White many times over the last decade and wondered when he would come back to play the full Zeppelin discography again. His shows a few years ago at the original Healey’s bar was spectacular as every night Michael and his band would play 2 full albums (or 1 double album).
White used to have a website with a lot of info on his band, his history and his tour dates but that has disappeared for some reason. Although The White have played a few times since those Healey’s dates (both the old and the new location of Jeff Healey’s bar), the last couple of years had The White playing with bands from various high schools in the area in an orchestral Zeppelin show (we saw shows at The Danforth Music Hall and the CNE).
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| Robert Plant as performed by Michael White |
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| Sound Academy Oct 21 2011 |
Tonight’s show featured Zeppelin 1 in it’s entirety. We did notice that Michael had 2 new members with him – a new bassist and a new guitarist, that I assume replaced the guys we were familiar with the past decade (Warren Brubaker on Bass and Christian Burton on Guitar). This was very disappointing to us because we were huge fans of Burton whose on stage resemblance to Jimmy Page (both in looks and playing) were mind blowing. Nonetheless the line up is what it is and the band played through Zeppelin 1 in pretty good form.
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| Led Zeppelin tribute with Violins for Kashmir |
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| Brian Wall as John Henry Bonham – Moby Dick |
After an intermission they came back and blasted through the typical Led Zeppelin hits like Whole Lotta Love, Moby Dick (in which drummer Brian Wall replicates John Bonham’s solo in a mind blowing manner), No Quarter, Kashmir, and Stairway to Heaven (accompanied by a 3 person violin ensamble nicknamed The Symphony of Rock). The second half of the show was very strong and really proved why when it comes to Zeppelin tribute bands there are no substitutes to the originator. In the past year we have seen Robert Plant himself (who is so far removed from Led Zeppelin these days that we almost prefer to see good tribute bands), and a couple of tribute bands (the most memorable being Mothership, newcomers to the scene from Ottawa) but I state again, nobody does it better than Mike.
Verdict: Go see Michael White and The White – they will be rocking the Sound Academy in January 2012 with Zeppelin 2. See you there!
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| Michael White |
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| TMAK aka Terry and Michael White after the gig |
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| Jimmy Page style violin bow Guitar Solo |
We had a blast. The White does a fantastic job performing our fav Zeppelin tunes!! Keep it up boys… John W
If Jimmy Page were there, I'm sure he would have filed charges against the guitarist for the brutal assault on Black Mountain Side. It was horrible. And he looked and sounded hopelessly lost during the violin bow section of Dazed and Confused. He treated the theremin merely as a random sound effect generator. There wasn't any attempt made to reproduce Page's playing of it.
The second half was immensely better than the first half and mostly salvaged what would have been a disappointing performance. Stairway was quite good, including the solo. The highlight of the night, for me, was Michael's harmonica intro into Bring It On Home, followed by the rocking riff that followed. Guitar fills were left out of pretty much everything unfortunately. Overall, I would have to say Mothership put on the more refined and polished show, both in reproducing the Zep sound and definitely stage presence. I'm still looking forward to the next show. I'm expecting LZ2 to be more in The White's “straight ahead rock” wheelhouse than LZ1, which is more blues oriented.
SM