The new Led Zeppelin documentary, Becoming Led Zeppelin, is very enjoyable, but it’s like seeing the first hour of Peter Jackson’s epic Lord of The Rings adaptation and then being told that the rest of the epic isn’t available – you feel slightly cheated.
The film carefully and deliberately tells the story of the early years of the one of the most influential bands – I’d put Led Zep in the premier division of rock acts (The Beatles, The Stones, Pink Floyd, maybe Black Sabbath at a push), showing us how Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, John Bonham and Robert Plant came together. In telling the story the film succeeds – the photos and archive footage of the musicians playing at a young age(Bonham got his first kit at ten) is charming.
Some of the footage of the young band is sensational. Plant was gorgeous and exuded physical charisma that made him deeply attractive to young women. You can sense the band’s sexuality, it’s in the music but embodied by a very handsome but slightly remote Plant. The shots of hypnotised young women watching the band are very telling. “When you saw Led Zeppelin play,” famous groupie Pamela Des Barres wrote in her book Let’s Spend the Night Together, “it was all over bar the orgasm.”
The band was Page’s vehicle. By the time Led Zeppelin started, he’d been in the Yardbirds and played hundreds of sessions (both Page and Jones played on the James Bond Goldfinger theme) and Jimmy was very ambitious. He wanted the band to break new ground, sonically, and he succeeded in this. Whole Lotta Love still has a raucous magnetism about it.
Page hated singles. He felt the pressure to put out singles was really bad for bands, and he made sure that Zeppelin avoided them. He shrewdly sold the first album to Atlantic Records, with manager Peter Grant at his side, but the band retained total control of the content, bypassing any record company interference. Everybody was ‘terrified’ of Grant, a huge man with a distinctly overbearing persona when it came to business affairs.
The band toured America with FM radio playing whole sides of their debut album. By the time Led Zeppelin II came out, they were already stars, commanding large fees and intrigue. There are some nice touches. John Paul Jones tells how his father came to see them at Albert Hall with some pride, and Plant laughs at memories of Bonham’s wife, telling the drummer to avoid his mate. ‘He’s nothing but trouble.’
For all this, though, it tells a story that lacks depth. Zeppelin’s songs weren’t exactly profound. ‘If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now, it’s just a spring clean for the May Queen’, sings Plant on Stairway To Heaven. Wow, man. Far out. You probably won’t get a lot of mileage out of the lyrics, even if you tried. But the documentary misses much of the fascinating stuff around the band – the overzealous manager, wielding a baseball bat at bootleggers, the groupies, the private plane hauling them around America with its own built in fireplace.
Then there’s Page’s grotesque taste for underage girls (he had a relationship with a 14 year old called Lori Maddox), the guitarist’s fascination with the occult, the death of Plant’s son Karac in 1977, aged only five, the vast gigs at Knebworth, and the squalid, self-destructive final hours of Bonham, after downing 40 shots of vodka in 24 hours. Bonham was a complex man, and could be violent, but the film doesn’t go there.
For a band as colourful as Led Zeppelin, the documentary is strangely bloodless. We start in the Shires, but we never get to Mordor. Perhaps it’s the start of a trilogy. This is a good start to an epic tale, but I’d love to see the later, darker instalments.
By Miles Salter
Miles Salter is a writer and musician based in York. He fronts the band Miles and The Chain Gang.
With thanks also to https://yorkcalling.co.uk/