The last concert Led Zeppelin ever performed — as a complete, original four-piece lineup — was at the Day on the Green festival in Oakland, California on July 24, 1977. They did not know it was their last concert. Nobody in the audience knew it was the last concert. The decision that made it the last concert had not yet been made — was not made until three years later, in the immediate aftermath of John Bonham’s death on September 25, 1980 — and the specific quality of not knowing that something is ending while it is ending is the quality that makes the Oakland concert the most melancholic document in the band’s recorded history.
What happened after the Oakland concert — in the specific period between the last song and the dissolution of the band three years later — has been documented extensively. The death of Robert Plant’s son Karac, at age five, from a stomach infection on July 26, 1977 — two days after the Oakland show — ended the North American tour immediately and produced in Plant a grief that the remaining members of the band could neither share in the same way nor adequately respond to. He has said in interviews across the following decades that the period following Karac’s death was the only period in his life during which music felt genuinely irrelevant — not insufficient but irrelevant, beside the point in a way that its previous irrelevance during difficult periods had never been.
The band did not perform publicly for almost two years. When they returned with In Through the Out Door in 1979 and a brief European tour in 1980, the specific configuration of what they were was different — not audibly different to most listeners, but different in the way that things are different when someone has been through something that cannot be undone and has come back to the work carrying it.
The five songs Plant has identified as the ones from the Oakland concert he finds most difficult to discuss are distributed across the setlist of that night — which is documented in bootleg recordings of varying quality — and his difficulty in discussing them is not about the performances, which he has said were among the finest of the tour. It is about the knowledge that exists now, retrospectively, about what the two days following the concert contained.
No Quarter. Ten Years Gone. The Song Remains the Same. Stairway to Heaven. Whole Lotta Love. These are the five that Plant has been specifically asked about in interviews that address the Oakland concert and that have produced responses of a specific kind — not refusal exactly, but the specific brevity of someone who has decided that what they have to say about the subject is not proportionate to the subject itself.
He has said Ten Years Gone — written originally about a lost love, performed throughout the 1975 and 1977 tours with a sustained beauty that the studio recording only partially captures — is the song from Oakland he finds most impossible. He has not explained this. The explanation that presents itself to anyone who knows the circumstances is that a song about loss performed two days before the worst loss of his life has acquired a weight that performance cannot carry without acknowledging what the weight is.
He has not returned to Oakland in any interview with the specific detail the question deserves. He may not. Some things about the best years of a person’s life are too close to the worst years to be discussed without the two becoming one story, and one story is not always what either the speaker or the listener is ready for.