Jason Bonham sat down with Terrie Carr of WDHA-FM 105.5 and shared his experience of performing with his band Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening.
“I always find it’s a pinch-yourself moment because I look at it as I started this purely as a therapeutic way to get the Led out of me,” the rocker admitted. “After playing with the real McCoy, the real deal, in 2007 [at London’s O2 arena], I remember when it stopped, it was a huge, ‘Now what?’ … Because I just spent six weeks with the [surviving Led Zeppelin] guys every day [in preparation for the London show]. Every day we were together, hanging out, telling stories. They would tell me things that I didn’t know — now I’m a grown-up — they would tell me all these different things. So, suddenly you feel part of it.”
Bonham continued: “And my mom said, ‘Are you gonna be okay when it stops?’ I’m, like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve got this.’ Because you’ve been given the keys to the kingdom, and you sat in the throne of the greatest rock and roll band in the world. So when it stopped, it was hard, I must say.”
“And then when the idea came, ‘Why don’t you do a band, a tribute thing,’ I’m, like, ‘Are you kidding me? I’ve just played with [the original guys]. I don’t wanna tarnish that.’ So it became more therapeutic. And I realized it’s about the fans,” he added. “The reason why we’re still doing it, after I got over the my stories and me — ‘it’s about me and my dad’ — it’s not. It’s about our love for dad, me and everyone, because we all have stories of what he meant to us. I lost my dad; you lost your drummer. So that’s the only reason — the love and the passion that we do it and still do it. Because there’s a lot of other things that I like to do.”
Jason launched Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening two years after participating in Led Zeppelin’s one-off performance at the 2007 tribute concert for Ahmet Ertegun at London’s O2 Arena. The live show was later released in 2012.
Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening was originally formed in 2009 to honor Bonham’s father, who passed away in 1980 at the age of 32.”It was meant to be part of my way of expressing my love for music and expressing myself with a tip of the hat to my father,” Jason told Mixdown in an interview. “Soon after doing the 28 shows that we did with an orchestra, everyone said, ‘You’re not going to stop now, are you? You haven’t been here, you haven’t played there…’ And so I said, ‘As long as you guys want me to do it, I’ll do it.’ It’s really fan-based. It’s not us and them; it’s about love for Led Zeppelin, and that’s how it’s grown, as a very honest, natural, fan-based show. You guys all knew him as Bonzo; I knew him as dad, and there’s a great interaction.”
JBLZE continues their shows with a show tonight in Broward County, Florida, and the last show of the year to take place tomorrow in Tampa, Florida.
