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How Philly’s Get the Led Out Became the World’s Best Led Zeppelin Tribute Band
Get the Led Out does what the real Led Zeppelin could never pull off.
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led zeppelin tribute band get the led out, also known as GTLO
Paul Sinclair (left) and Paul Hammond of the Led Zeppelin tribute band Get the Led Out / Photograph by Lisa Schaffer
It was 1970 when Paul Hammond’s father began playing Led Zeppelin on the family’s reel-to-reel in Montco. Then-five-year-old Hammond wasn’t exactly a fan. “I was so scared of that music,” he says. “It was dark. I was much more comfortable listening to the Beatles, who seemed so … happy.”
Decades later, Hammond, who still lives in Montco, stands in for Jimmy Page in the most successful tribute band there is to Led Zeppelin, a group that hasn’t performed since a 2007 one-night reunion. Get the Led Out, in which Hammond plays guitar alongside singer Paul Sinclair and a lineup of four top session musicians from the Philly area (the two Pauls are the only original members), takes a break from a 50-city tour this month to play a three-night run at Collingswood’s 1,050-seat Scottish Rite Auditorium. And then they’re back in the area for shows at the Keswick in June.
“We play 130 shows a year,” says Hammond, now 58. “And not in small rock clubs — in theaters. It’s fair to say I don’t have to do anything else to live. This is it.”
In the early 2000s, Hammond and Sinclair weren’t exactly selling out theaters. They were working recording-studio jobs while playing a classic rock cover band’s monthly bar gig. Then, in 2003, Sinclair got a call from somebody who wanted to launch a Led Zeppelin tribute. The caller didn’t just want the band to sound the part. He wanted the members to look like Led Zeppelin, too. “Paul pretty much put his foot down when they said he should dye his hair blond to look like Robert Plant,” Hammond says of his dark-haired bandmate. They quickly abandoned the look-alike plan.
What would set Get the Led Out apart, the pair decided, was that their tribute band would perform, note for note, the album versions of Led Zeppelin songs, complete with vocal and guitar overdubs (which Led Zeppelin utilized heavily in the studio) and sound effects, such as the wild theremin-punctuated interlude in “Whole Lotta Love.”
We play 130 shows a year. And not in small rock clubs — in theaters. It’s fair to say I don’t have to do anything else to live. This is it.”
Because Led Zeppelin was a four-piece band, and, well, because its members were likely inebriated much of the time, this was something the iconic original group couldn’t do had they wanted to. Hammond acquired and performs on the same guitar and amp models — down to the year — that Page used. Hammond says the value of one guitar is $25,000. The result is like you’re sitting at home listening to the album, except it’s being performed live. Meticulously. And it all seems to have worked.
“We really didn’t have to pay our dues,” says Hammond. “Nobody else was attempting it, and we were all virtuosos. So it just took off.”
Another reason for Get the Led Out’s success: It’s unlikely you’ll see the same show twice in the same town. Hammond promises that all three nights of the Collingswood leg will be different from each other — and even distinct from the last time the band played there. Sinclair keeps a database of each show in every town to ensure just that. The same will be true for Get the Led Out’s 10th performance at massive Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado later this year.
In retrospect, Hammond confesses, he originally wanted nothing to do with a Led Zeppelin tribute — or any tribute, for that matter. “I just wanted to help out Sinclair,” he says. “But I have to admit: This isn’t exactly a bad gig.”
Published as “Whole Lotta Led” in the April 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.
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