January 20, 1969
Wheaton, MD US
Wheaton Youth Center
Setlist:
Notes:
This date is officially unconfirmed and no proof has yet surfaced.
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Press: Lore has it that only 55 people showed up for the Wheaton Youth Center show, quite possibly the smallest audience to see Led Zeppelin outside of Jimmy Page's living room. Local filmmaker Jeff Krulik is confident it actually took place, having made contact with the man who organized the concert: Barry Richards, who at the time was a DJ on Gaithersburg radio station WHMC and now lives on the West Coast. "It's unbelievable," said Jeff. "And the fact that it was a Monday night, January 20th, the night of Richard Nixon's inauguration."
"There's people who grew up in Wheaton, across the street, who went to every show, who don't remember it". Jeff, who with John Heyn made the cult classic "Heavy Metal Parking Lot" (the documentary consists of fans outside the Capital Centre before a 1986 Judas Priest concert), has become obsessed with Zep's first concert in the Washington area. It's an outgrowth of a project on the area teen center scene in the late '60s and early '70s.
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Wheaton Show
There's no big mystery about this show, other than how many people saw it. The place where it happened was called the Wheaton Youth Center, which basically was an indoor basketball court with a performance stage at one end and some other rooms with vending machines and maybe a TV and jukebox in there, there were pool tables and maybe ping pong also. At the time the DJ Barry Richards was booking shows for touring national/international acts at various small venues around the DC Metro area, among them the Wheaton Youth Center, which probably could hold a few hundred at most. Among the bands that Richards booked were the Small Faces (Rod Stewart era), Iggy Pop, The Grin (Nils Lofgren), Tyrannosaurus Rex, and so forth. Basically most of these groups were the post-Woodstock wave of hard rock groups, many of whom were on the road to the big time, but hadn't made it there yet and were playing anywhere they could trying to get a foothold with the big time USA audiences.
I wish I'd seen a lot of these shows but I was 13/14 years old when they happened & a lot of parents (such as mine) in those days didn't let kids that age traipse off to rock shows, even if they were just down the street.