Becoming Led Zeppelin (2025)
A fairly conventional 'authorized' rock-doc (with lots of archival footage and talking-head shots of Plant, Page & Jones), which covers the years up to 1970 (ie. the first two albums). It focuses entirely on the music, many influences, pre-band careers and early band dynamics rather than any sex, drugs and notoriety of stardom that would mostly come later. Not that these guys were ever going to touch on that. Nor anything about the infamous copyright infringement lawsuits of even later years. And just a little about their infamously frightful, protective, but thug-like manager, whom Page, somewhat at a celebratory loss, compares to a 'mafia don.' Otherwise, everything is relentlessly upbeat.
I'm not sure I needed to see this in a theatre, with what turned out to be a smallish audience of other boomers, but why not - it's a mostly very enjoyable film, even a fascinating one at times. Growing up on Punk I was, in theory, ideologically predisposed to despising them back in the late '70s, a time when Cream magazine ran features like 'Led Zep vs. The Clash.' But still, I always found that the records of both bands coexisted quite easily in my teenage collection. And I still listen to Zeppelin all these decades later.
As much as I knew all the music it surprised me just how little I knew from a biographical viewpoint. If you didn't know beforehand it becomes pretty clear that Zeppelin was Page's baby from the get go. l mean, he laboriously planned-out
everything. Page knew exactly what he was doing and how to accomplish it, creating a sound like no other. Something heavy & timeless, a kind of cosmic sludge, which still managed to incorporate the entire history of rock, blues & R&B up to that point.
Both he and Jones had already well established careers in their late teens, in the mid-'60s, as London session musicians and arrangers, both performing on some pretty famous records together (like 'Goldfinger') and separately, for the likes of The Who, The Kinks and Lulu. There's a great moment in the film when Page pulls out a tiny, dogeared notebook that seemingly has a notation for every single paying gig he ever did pre-Zeppelin.
But I thought there'd be more about his time in The Yardbirds, though he recounts lovingly the story of the guitar given to him by Jeff Beck, while solemnly, if not a little ridiculously, comparing it to 'the sword of Excalibur.' I mean, these guys, especially Page, really took themselves seriously. And maybe as a consequence, when success arrived it came very quickly. Even before they had a record deal with Atlantic the first album had already been recorded, a condition of signing being that the band would always have complete creative control. And by the end of the decade they were already selling more records than the Beatles.
