The production was bigger, with colorful graphics flashing on the huge screens around them, but the music remained rooted in the band’s commitment to jagged rock and blues. “Let’s get moving,” said singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach, wearing a studded black motorcycle jacket and drilling right into the tortured echo and stutter of “Howlin’ for You,” fleshed out with extra players on bass and heaving organ. But the core duo of Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney frequently stripped things back down to just the two of them, ready to bash through the rawest, hungriest riffs and beats of “Your Touch” and other tributes to swampy blues.

This was a phenomenal performance. Auerbach radiated energy and the the audience responded in kind. It was the perfect balance of performance and appreciation. The music was terrific and the visuals were delightful. The many familiar favorites were played with inventiveness and spontaneity. Nothing was stale. The Black Keys had the entire audience on their feet from the first song to the last. All in all this was the most enjoyable concert experience I’ve ever experienced.

The Black Keys returned to Coachella with a neighborly hello and operated essentially as they have many times before at the festival, having worked their way up from an obscure Akron, Ohio duo on the smallest stages to a headliner in 2012.

The production was bigger, with colorful graphics flashing on the huge screens around them, but the music remained rooted in the band’s commitment to jagged rock and blues. “Let’s get moving,” said singer-guitarist Dan Auerbach, wearing a studded black motorcycle jacket and drilling right into the tortured echo and stutter of “Howlin’ for You,” fleshed out with extra players on bass and heaving organ. But the core duo of Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney frequently stripped things back down to just the two of them, ready to bash through the rawest, hungriest riffs and beats of “Your Touch” and other tributes to swampy blues.

This was a phenomenal performance. Auerbach radiated energy and the the audience responded in kind. It was the perfect balance of performance and appreciation. The music was terrific and the visuals were delightful.

This was a phenomenal performance. Auerbach radiated energy and the the audience responded in kind. It was the perfect balance of performance and appreciation. The music was terrific and the visuals were delightful. The many familiar favorites were played with inventiveness and spontaneity. Nothing was stale. The Black Keys had the entire audience on their feet from the first song to the last. All in all this was the most enjoyable concert experience I’ve ever experienced.

The Black Keys returned to Coachella with a neighborly hello and operated essentially as they have many times before at the festival, having worked their way up from an obscure Akron, Ohio duo on the smallest stages to a headliner in 2012.

“I was in a club last night when someone asked me if I wanted to meet Jimmy Page,” the show’s host suddenly offered between calls. “You know, when I think about it, there’s no one I’d rather meet less than someone as disgusting as Jimmy Page.”

Jones bolted up from his game. “Let me just say that Led Slime can’t play their way out of a paper bag and if you plan on seeing them tomorrow night at the Garden, those goons are ripping you off. Now don’t start wasting my time defending Led Slime. If you’re thinking about calling up to do that, stick your head in the toilet and flush.”

Jones, normally a man of quiet reserve, strode furiously across the room. He snapped up a phone and dialed the station. After a short wait, the talk show host picked up the phone.

“What would you like to talk about?”

“Led Zeppelin,” Jones answered cooly in his clipped British accent. The line went dead. Victim of an eight-second delay button, the exchange was never given air time.

It was a familiar battle, as Jones saw it. Although Led Zeppelin has managed to sell more than a million units apiece on all five of its albums and is currently working a U.S. tour that is expected to be the largest grossing undertaking in rock history, the band has been continually kicked, shoved, pummeled and kneed in the groin by critics of all stripes. “I know it’s unnecessary to fight back,” Jones said. True enough: The Zep’s overwhelming popularity speaks for itself. “I just thought I’d defend myself one last time.”

The night after that aborted defense, in the first of three concerts at Madison Square Garden, Led Zeppelin brought a standing-room-only audience to its feet with one of the finest shows of its six-year career. On Page’s unexpected midset impulse, the band launched unrehearsed into a stunning 20-minute version of his tour de force, “Dazed and Confused.” The tension of uncertain success was an evident and electric element in Zeppelin’s performance that evening. “No question about it,” lead singer Robert Plant enthused before returning to the stage for a second encore of “Communication Breakdown,” “the tour has begun.”

It has been a long time since Zeppelin last rock & rolled. After 18 months spent laboring over their new double album, Physical Graffiti, the band has some warming up to do. “It’s unfortunate there’s got to be anybody there,” Plant said. “But we’ve got to feel our way. There’s a lot of energy here this tour. Much more than the last one.” The tour’s official opening night, January 18th at the Minneapolis Sports Center, went surprisingly well considering the circumstances. Only a week before, Jimmy Page broke the tip of his left ring finger when it was caught in a slamming train door. With only one rehearsal to perfect what Page calls his “three-and-a-half-finger technique,” the classic Zeppelin live pieces, “Dazed and Confused” and “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” were indefinitely retired. Codeine tablets and Jack Daniel’s deadened the pain enough for Page to struggle through the band’s demanding three-hour set.

Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin’s manager and president of Swan Song, the group’s record company, found those first few dates strange: “A Led Zeppelin concert without ‘Dazed and Confused’ is something I’ll have to get used to. In a lot of ways that number is the band at its very best. There’s one point in the song where Pagey can take off and do whatever he wants to. There is always the uncertainty of whether it will be five or 35 minutes long.”

Like that other guitar and drums duo from the Rust Belt, the Akron, Ohio, guys brought raw, riffed-out power back to pop’s lexicon. On 2010’s Brothers, they found a perfect balance between juke-joint formalism and modern bangzoom. The result was a few Grammys and so many TV ad placements, The Colbert Report did a sketch about it. El Camino is the Keys’ grandest pop gesture yet, augmenting dark-hearted fuzz blasts with sleekly sexy choruses and Seventies-glam flair. It’s an attempt at staying true to the spirit of that piece-of-shit minivan on the album cover – similar to their first touring vehicle – while reimagining it as a pimpmobile. This is the Black Keys’ third meeting – following 2008’s Attack & Release and one track on Brothers – with Danger Mouse, a.k.a. Brian Burton. Here, the band essentially becomes a trio, with Burton as co-producer/co-writer throughout. His brilliance, as the planet heard on Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy, is blowing details of classic pop up to Jumbotron scale. Listen to the keyboard part that kicks in the door of El Camino’s “Gold on the Ceiling”: a serrated organ growl backed up with a SWAT team of hand claps. It’s Sixties bubblegum garage pop writ large, with T. Rex swagger and a guitar freakout that perfectly mirrors the lyrics, a paranoid rant that makes you shiver while you shimmy.

The single “Lonely Boy” works the same way, launched on a gnarly, looped guitar riff whose last note slides down like a turntable that someone keeps stopping. Then a sugar-crusted keyboard comes in, along with what sounds like a boy-girl chorus, changing the swampy chug into a seductive singalong.