Documentary films, by their very nature, need to be visual. But how do you make a movie about past events where very little contemporaneous footage was shot? The title of ‘Becoming Led Zeppelin’ tells you much about what to expect — how one of hard rock’s most legendary groups was formed. But the film’s technical execution is the reason to see it on the big screen while you can.
Very early in Zeppelin’s career, founding member Jimmy Page and manager Peter Grant decided that minimizing the group’s public exposure actually gave them a mysterious and powerful atmosphere. Bassist, keyboardist, and musical arranger John Paul Jones was quoted by Barney Hoskyns in "Led Zeppelin: The Oral History of the World's Greatest Rock Band" as saying, that Grant’s idea for the band “to be everywhere — and then nowhere. Just at the point where everyone was going to get fed up with seeing us, we were gone!” Grant, who looked like a cross between a West End gangster and a sumo wrestler, also had a reputation for physically pummeling bootleggers and destroying their output, which while no doubt helped the band’s coffers, meant that finding audio, and especially film of their performances was quite difficult in the 1970s, beyond the band’s 1976 concert movie, "The Song Remains the Same."
In their very early days, Led Zeppelin made a handful of live TV appearances, but as Page told Brad Tolinski of "Guitar World" in 2003, “it came to a point where we decided that there was no point in promoting the band on TV. The way they presented us was crap and the sound was an absolute disaster. In those days, TV viewers had the benefit of only a single two-inch speaker! And Zeppelin were not designed to come through a two-inch speaker.”
"Becoming Led Zeppelin" makes the most of these rare TV appearances, plus the band’s appearance tearing up “Dazed and Confused” in a 1970 movie anthology of live performances called "Supershow," and their BBC-filmed January 1970 appearance at London’s Royal Albert Hall. If you have Led Zeppelin’s 2004 DVD compilation of their live concerts, you’ve seen all of these clips before — but seeing them crisply upscaled on a 50-foot high IMAX screen was a treat for any fan. (The week before seeing "Becoming Led Zeppelin" in IMAX in Dallas I watched Eric Clapton’s 1992 "Unplugged" concert on a much smaller screen in a Forth Worth cinema before its release on the Paramount+ streaming platform this month. While the Clapton performance had excellent remixed sound, its picture quality was something akin to watching a VHS videotape on a 20-foot high screen. It made seeing the decades older footage in "Becoming Led Zeppelin" looking so sharp on a much bigger IMAX screen all the more impressive.)
We’re putting the band back together
But getting Page to sign on to begin the process wasn’t easy. Documentary director Bernard MacMahon, and his producer, Allison McGourty, spent hours being grilled by the Zeppelin mastermind in 2017 when they first approached him with the idea of a documentary. As Robin Denselow of the Guardian noted at the beginning of the month, “After seven hours ‘with a break for afternoon tea’, Page said: ‘I’m in – but you have to get the others on board.’”
It helped that MacMahon and McGourty had already produced a blues-related documentary assembled from even less original historical source material than Zep’s salad days:
John Paul Jones…said he was “not interested in a documentary”. So MacMahon sent him a copy of ‘American Epic,’ the duo’s documentary series about the impact of the first-ever recordings of blues, country, cajun and Mexican musicians back in the 1920s, which Robert Redford, who narrated it, called “America’s greatest untold story”. MacMahon asked Jones to “watch 15 minutes, and if you don’t want to talk to us after that, you won’t hear from us again and that will be the end of the film”. Jones rang back, they had a four-hour chat, and he too was in.
So that left Plant, who seemed the least likely to talk – partly because he was enjoying a successful, varied career and because Zeppelin had ended tragically, with the death of Bonham in 1980. But he was a fan of ‘American Epic,’ as he told MacMahon and McGourty when they met him at a concert in Scotland. After two more meetings, he agreed to talk back in Birmingham.
In addition to footage of band influences such as Lonnie Donnigan, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Little Richard, the producers of "Becoming Led Zeppelin" flesh out the band’s scant TV appearances and professionally filmed early live concerts with a variety of techniques. The performance footage that appears in "Becoming Led Zeppelin" is both the actual songs that were performed on camera in 1968 and ‘69, but that material was also reedited by the documentarians to accompany other Zeppelin songs. Contact sheets of rapid-fire 35mm black and white still photos are digitally animated together to add motion. Animated maps show their tour routes, á la Indiana Jones setting out in a DC-3 or a Pan Am flying boat on his next adventure. Fan-shot super-8 movies from their live shows are also deployed.
These techniques are supplemented with large slabs of recently shot interviews with the three surviving members, and somewhat in the fashion of how the late John Lennon “appeared” in the 1995 Beatles Anthology TV miniseries, the audio from three early 1970s radio interviews with drummer John Bonham allow him to discuss the group as well in "Becoming Led Zeppelin." In his article on the documentary, the Guardian’s Denselow noted that “Bonham plays a crucial role in the film [MacMahon says,] ‘because he acts as a narrator. His interviews were recorded just after things had happened. Jimmy said in some ways he’s the star of the film because he’s in the moment.’”
Avoiding the grouses of the holy
Because of the band’s hunger for fame, they toured aggressively during their early days, making the second half of their career and its implosion seem all the more tragic in retrospect. So while “Being Led Zeppelin” might have been a far more salacious documentary, it probably will never happen, as it would be filled with topics that Page has never gone on the record discussing. In 2014, ‘GQ’ named Page one of its “Men of the Year,” and asked the Zep-obsessive writer Chuck Klosterman to interview Page for an accompanying article. When Klosterman tried to carefully broach these topics with Page, he was immediately shot down by Page as if he was flying a Messerschmitt over the English Channel, in an article appropriately titled, “Jimmy Page and the Grouses of the Holy”:
You once said, “I can't speak for the others, but for me drugs were an integral part of the whole thing, right from the beginning, right to the end.” This makes me wonder—are there specific tracks that would not exist if not for your experiments with drugs?
I'm not commenting on that. Let's not talk about any of that.So you don't want to comment on anything about Zeppelin's relationship with drugs?
I couldn't comment on that, just like I wouldn't comment on the relationship between Zeppelin's audience and drugs. But of course you wouldn't ask me that. You wouldn't ask me what the climate was like at the time. The climate in the 1970s was different than it is now. Now it's a drinking culture. It wasn't so much like that then.Did you ever need to go to rehab?
No.But you supposedly had a serious heroin problem, so how did you quit?
How do you know I had a heroin problem? You don't know what I had or what I didn't have. All I will say is this: My responsibilities to the music did not change. I didn't drop out or quit working. I was there, just as much as anyone else was.So does it bother you that the conventional wisdom is that your alleged heroin addiction impacted your ability to produce In Through the Out Door? The way that story is always presented is that John Paul Jones and Robert Plant took over the completion of that album [recorded in 1978] because you were heavily involved with drugs.
If anyone wants to say that, the first thing you have to ask them is, “Were you there at the time?” The second thing to take on board is the fact that I am the producer of In Through the Out Door. That's what I did. It's right there in black and white. If there were controversy over this, if John Paul Jones or Robert Plant had done what you're implying, wouldn't they have wanted to be listed as the producers of the album? So let's just forget all that.Okay, I get what you're saying. But there are just certain things about your life that remain unclear, and—
I'll tell you what: When I'm good and ready, I will write an autobiography.Didn't you once claim you would write an autobiography only if it wasn't published until after you were dead?
Well, that's the way to do it, isn't it? Because everyone is going to die, so you gotta make sure that you don't. When I'm good and ready, I will talk about what I want to talk about.
In sharp contrast, all three surviving members are cheerful and eager to talk in "Becoming Led Zeppelin" – but only of the early days, and only about the music and putting the band together.
Because while Zeppelin came to define rock and roll excess during their imperial phase in the mid to late 1970s, many of their worst traits were there right from the start. But no mud sharks or red snappers were harmed in the making of this documentary. No groupies, of legal age or otherwise appear. (For those who want the dirt in the most salacious form possible, Stephen Davis’ breakthrough 1985 book "The Hammer of the Gods" was recently released in the Kindle format.)
The focus is on the music and of four young men, two upper-middle-class Londoners and two working-class Brummies bonding together in a quest for stardom. The massive extremes of the 1970s — the private plane, the substance abuse, culminating in Page’s dissipated appearance and wildly unsteady playing from 1977 until the early ‘80s, and of course Bonham’s death by pulmonary aspiration at age 32 go entirely unmentioned. The only time Jimmy Page broaches even the slightest hint of an interest in the occult in the documentary is when he mentions a 1968 palm reading in Los Angeles that – spoiler alert – foreshadows the Yardbirds breaking up. (Thus necessitating “The New Yardbirds” to fulfill one last contractual tour of the Netherlands in 1968.)
If you’ve got even a mild interest in the group, "Becoming Led Zeppelin" is definitely a must-see on the big screen, before it arrives on the streaming platforms in the spring or summer.
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