Footnotes

Provenance:
From the private collection of Harvey Goldsmith

Ahmet Ertegun was the President of Atlantic Records when he had a freak accident at a Rolling Stones concert. He was a huge inspiration to Harvey Goldsmith and he has referred to him as his USA mentor. Knowing the pairs close friendship, Harvey was instructed by Ahmet's widow immediately following the memorial service for him in New York, that he would have loved for Harvey to produce a tribute concert for him in the UK. While at the post memorial lunch at The Tavern On The Green restaurant in Central Park, Harvey started to discuss the idea with his table that included; Eric Clapton, Robbie Robertson, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. The concert would stage all the huge UK names signed by Ahmet to Atlantic. Immediately Eric said that he would put Cream back together. At this point Harvey knew that he had a show and that it was going to happen. However the band members of Led Zeppelin, who all attended the service and lunch kept decidedly quiet. They had not performed together since their last tour in 1980, and it did not seem that they planned to do so again. It was in the following weeks that Harvey, knowing how instrumental the band were to Atlantic's success and that they had to be involved, pursued them. After sending a personal letter to each individually, he got the call to meet with Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and their managers. He was bowled over when they agreed to play, but with one stipulation; they said they would only perform if they could play a whole concert, not the 30 minute slot the other acts had signed up to. This was too good to be true and was an immediate 'Done' from Harvey. On the day the concert was announced the promotion website attracted 253 million hits, the most amount of hits in any one day, in the world at that time. When the event finally went on sale, an astounding 25 million people attempted to get one of the 16,000 tickets issued.