This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate

Singers Robert Plant and Alison Krauss will perform Friday night at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. Five decades ago, Plant and his old band, Led Zeppelin, played a legendary show at Schenectady's Aerodrome. In this photo, Plant and Krauss are shown  backstage at the 10th Americana Music Association honors and awards at the Ryman Auditorium on Oct. 13, 2011 in Nashville, Tennessee.

Singers Robert Plant and Alison Krauss will perform Friday night at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. Five decades ago, Plant and his old band, Led Zeppelin, played a legendary show at Schenectady's Aerodrome.

Singers Robert Plant, right, and Alison Krauss will perform Friday night at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. Five decades ago, Plant, Jimmy Page, left and the rest of Led Zeppelin played a legendary show at Schenectady's Aerodrome. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)

In an undated photograph, people dance floor at the Aerodrome, Schenectady.

SCHENECTADY — Thousands of people will crowd into the Saratoga Performing Arts Center to see former Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant and bluegrass singer Alison Krauss Friday night.

If you've spent any time talking rock around Schenectady, you might be under the impression a SPAC-size crowd once crammed into the long-gone Aerodrome on Aug. 20, 1969, to see Led Zeppelin play a show that's grown more and more legendary over the decades.

Those lucky enough to actually score tickets to the show saw Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham as the band hit the road to promote their second album.

Jim Furlong, owner of Last Vestige Music Shop on Quail Street in Albany, in 1999 recalled paying $4.25 for a ticket to see the band present material from the about-to-be released "Led Zeppelin II.''

"I remember Robert Plant smiling and saying, 'It's so nice to be in sunny Schenectady,'" Furlong told the Times Union in an article about the slew of acts that played the Aerodrome and other Capital Region venues in 1969. "A year or two later, Zeppelin were filling Madison Square Garden.''

Led Zeppelin's official website lists some of the songs — including classics "Dazed and Confused" and "Communication Breakdown" — played during their night on the Aerodrome stage.

The Who and Janis Joplin also hit area stages in 1969.

When acts came through the region that year, there was a good chance they played the Aerodrome, a former bowling alley on State Street.

That summer, the Aerodrome welcomed many acts that would become legends: Jeff Beck twice, B.B. King, Pacific Gas & Electric, The Chicago Transit Authority and the Velvet Underground, who played just six days after Led Zeppelin.

Promoters paid Led Zeppelin $8,000 per appearance. 

By 1973, the Aerodrome was gone, leveled to make way for other development.

Led Zeppelin broke up after the death of Bonham in 1980 and, other than a 2007 show in London, its surviving members have resisted a formal reunion. Plant and Page played together at least one more time in the region, performing a number of Led Zeppelin songs during a July 1998 show at what was then the Pepsi Arena in Albany.

Plant and Krauss are touring together to support their second collaboration, "Raise the Roof," which was released last year. Their first pairing, "Raising Sand," was a smash in 2007.

Want to know more about the Aerodrome? Here's an Aug. 29, 1999, Times Union article on the venue by staff writer Dennis Yusko:

Aerodrome hosts rock's future headliners Led Zeppelin, The Who and a 'Wild' Janis Joplin put region on musical map

It was the weekend of Aug. 16-18, 1969, and Kevin Bartlett was having the time of his life — in Schenectady, not at Woodstock. The Buddy Miles Express was funking it up in the Aerodrome, the Capital Region's premier late-1960s hangout, and 16-year-old Bartlett was, as usual, in charge of the arena's one-of-a-kind psychedelic light show.

"It might have been a better show than Woodstock,'' said Bartlett, now 46, a music producer in the town of Woodstock. ``I don't feel like I missed anything.''

During 1968 and 1969, some of the biggest rock 'n' roll acts of the era played in the Capital Region. Many of them, like Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin and The Who, were on the brink of the big time.

A good percentage of the big-name rock shows took place at the Aerodrome, a converted bowling alley at 1584 State Street in Schenectady. It was the Capital Region's closest thing to the Fillmore East.

Although the legal capacity of the club was 1,300, the acts attracted at least double that.

In the summer of 1969, the Aerodrome welcomed many acts that would become legends: Led Zeppelin and Jeff Beck twice, B.B. King, Pacific Gas & Electric, The Chicago Transit Authority and the Velvet Underground.

Promoters paid Led Zeppelin $8,000 per appearance. Jim Furlong, owner of Last Vestige Music Shop on Quail Street in Albany, remembers paying $4.25 for a ticket to see the band present material from the about-to-be released ``Led Zeppelin II.''

"I remember Robert Plant smiling and saying, `It's so nice to be in sunny Schenectady,' '' Furlong said. ``A year or two later, Zeppelin were filling Madison Square Garden.''

On the night after the Fourth of July, bluesmaster B.B. King told an Aerodrome audience: ``If you like the blues, we can do something for ya. ... If you don't, you can get drunk and it won't matter anyway.''

The Aerodrome went after one-album bands with potential. On May 4, 1968, the club hosted The Hassles, featuring a kid from Long Island named Billy Joel. (Joel referred to the Aerodrome between songs recently at the Pepsi Arena.)

Beyond the acts that played there, the Aerodrome was known for its sound and light shows.

``In terms of lights and music, the place was 10, 15 years ahead of its time,'' said Frank Popolizio. He started at the Aerodrome as a bartender and is now co-owner of Drome Sound, a music store that opened on the periphery of the concert venue.

The Aerodrome was owned by Nat Rubin, a New York City dress manufacturer, and Jack Herman, a Rochester attorney, who formed a partnership with Terrance Clifford-Hooper, a former clothes designer from England. What they had in mind was a new concept -- a ``psychedelic nightclub.''

Besides featuring a 97-speaker sound system that the local media compared to the Houston Astrodome's in total wattage, the Aerodrome came equipped with $30,000 worth of projectors, strobe lights and colored spot lights.

On that first night, Jan. 25, 1968, the Aerodrome featured The Box Tops, who appeared on Dick Clark's ``American Bandstand'' with the hits ``The Letter'' and ``Neon Rainbow.''

A photo caption in The Knickerbocker News described the scene this way: ``It's wild, it's far out, it's phychedelic (sic) and it's here!'' Nearly 900 people witnessed ``a discotheque of light and sound; lighting that ran the gamut from pulsating kaleidoscopes of design, to wavy, distorted Chaplinesque effects and colorful abstract free-form patterns projected on the 160-foot back wall,'' according to The Knickerbocker News.

"We were all becoming hippies,'' said Bartlett, who attended the opening show.

But the Aerodrome wasn't the only center for live music in the Capital Region.

No one knew the Capital Region radio scene better than ``Boom-Boom'' Branigan, who from 1961 to 1975 emerged as the voice and personality of the area through WPTR, a 50,000-watt giant at 1540 on the AM dial.

WPTR appealed mostly to teenagers in a competitive market.

"But I liked going out and doing it live,'' said Branigan.

During the middle part of the decade, Branigan noticed neighborhood movie houses were losing audiences to television. So he initiated a new concept: He brought musical acts into movie houses, eating establishments and other locations.

``We'd brought the Dick Clark Show, Chubby Checker, and Chuck Berry to RPI'' Fieldhouse during the early 1960s, said Branigan, who claimed a certain pride in attracting the black performers of the day.

``People would sit down then at the Palace Theatre and Rafael's Restaurant of Latham for Jackie Wilson, Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding,'' Branigan said.

A couple of times, Branigan got in trouble with the large crowds at the Palace when performers failed to show up.

On Nov. 10, 1969, Sly and the Family Stone arrived three hours late for their gig. When the band did show, they immediately returned to their limo. ``I had to be escorted out of The Palace by police officers,'' said Branigan.

Branigan recalled that in 1967, the dance floor of the Circle Inn in Latham collapsed under the weight of the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, and thousands of dancers.

Other places where music thrived included Rudy's Uptown Club on State Street, Albany; The Swiss Inn of Guilderland; Baxter's of Mechanicville; the Rocky Palmer's Castle Club on Strong Street in Schenectady; Joe King's Excelsior House on Snyder's Lake, outside of Troy; The Showboat of West Lebanon; and folk bastion Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs.

Local bands in demand included The Valentino's, Buddy Randell and the Knickerbockers, The Misfits, Bobby Dix and the Sundowners, Snake, The Grey Things, Baggy Knees, Yesterday's Tomorrow, The Cleaners, Malta Ridge, Apricot N' Brandy, The Neutones, The Rogues, West Front Street and The 1969 Sunny Hill Farm Garage Band.

Days after Woodstock, Janis Joplin made one of her three appearances in the Capital Region between 1968 and 1969 at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center.

Joplin had a documented Capital Region drinking history. Both Bartlett and Popolizio share fond memories of late, drunken nights with the scratchy-voiced singer.

``She was wild; I gotta tell ya something, when they tell you she was wild, she was wild,'' said Popolizio, who said he took her to the Woodlawn Tavern, two blocks from the Aerodrome because ``Janis didn't want to sign any autographs.

``Three, four weeks later, she sent me a picture and autograph by mail,'' Popolizio recalled.

The Aerodrome's days were numbered. In the less than five years that the Aerodrome pumped out first-class music, the music industry had changed so much that the club could not afford the acts people had grown to love.

Frequent raids from the state liquor authority during the club's Sunday shows, which usually allowed underage teenagers, certainly hastened the Aerodrome's closing, Furlong said.

``Schenectady in the late '60s was closed-minded,'' Furlong said. ``They didn't like the whole culture that was going on -- the psychedelic light shows, the long hair, the pot smoking in the back room.''

Popolizio said it was more simple that than: one of the owners -- Rubin -- became critically ill.

Whatever closed it, the Aerodrome made the Capital Region hip, if only for a few years.

Mike Goodwin has been a stock broker, garbage man, and a house painter. He has been a journalist since 1995 and the Times Union has been his home since 2002. As a city desk editor, he's on the front lines of newsgathering for the Capital Region's newspaper. Think you have an interesting story? Contact him at mgoodwin@timesunion.com or 518-454-5465.