The record Jimmy Page said captured Led Zeppelin’s best live moments

It goes without saying that 1972 was a mammoth year for British stadium rock. The three biggest bands on the planet were all at their creative and live peaks as The Rolling Stones fired off one last classic entry of the golden album run with Exile on Main St, and The Who were setting the world alight with their powerpop juggernaut attack supporting the previous year’s Who’s Next.

Giving the two a run for their money, though, were Led Zeppelin, strutting across the rock world amid a dazzling run of mythic LPs and establishing an enduring rock archetype with each member’s respective essentiality, from frontman Roger Plant’s charismatic bellow to guitarist Jimmy Page’s magic fretwork.

In between Led Zeppelin’s untitled fourth album and Houses of the Holy, the band headed to North America for an eight-date mini-tour during the summer of 1972. Stopping by California’s Long Beach and Los Angeles Forum, the two sets recorded were notable not just for the band playing at their pomp, but for the high-quality recordings captured directly through the in-venue soundboard.

While other shows from the tour had seen life on unofficial bootlegs such as Burn Like a Candle, the two California shows documented by long-time producer and engineer Eddie Kramer remained buried in the Led Zeppelin vaults for years, quietly building a myth around itself among hardcore fans.

Released in 2003, the triple live CD set How the West Was Won finally gave the fans what they’d been thirsting for for decades. Ostensibly presenting chunks of both shows in one cohesive tracklist, Page meticulously undertook exhaustive mixing sessions from both nights for many of the tracks at London’s Island Studios, and even lifted a Mellotron piece from their 1973 Southampton University show for ‘Stairway to Heaven’.

“I think what we did on [the CD release] How the West was Won—that 1972 gig—is pretty much a testament of how good it was,” Page said. “It would have been nice to have had a little more visual recordings, but there you go. That’s the conundrum of Led Zeppelin!”

Never adorning their iconic album covers and offering little in the way of Top of the Pops or even the day’s The Old Grey Whistle Test, Zeppelin’s lack of film material is consistent with the band’s semi-enigmatic shroud of the era. But How the West was Won‘s essential live capture is credited to just how good the band were back in those dizzying days.

“It wasn’t in our thoughts to try and outdo The Song Remains the Same…” engineer Kevin Shirley remarked, adding, “The reason those performances still stand up now is because Jimmy really was a genius. He could create tempests, summon storms. He really was the master of light and shade. And the musicians around him allowed him to flesh out that vision. Especially John Bonham, without whom Jimmy and Zeppelin would never have been able to do what he did.”

Later reuniting for the acclaimed 2007 O2 Arena show for the Celebration Day film, Zeppelin showed they possessed the magic to wield an unforgettable show, but can confidently count How the West was Won as the exact moment when the group placed themselves in rock’s storied chronicles.