The Led Zeppelin Documentary Attempts to Show the Rock Gods As People
Atop that challenge was the matter of what would actually be in the film, since Zeppelin footage is as hard to find as someone in the Seventies who didn't own a copy of Led Zeppelin IV. As lead singer Robert Plant told the team at a meeting, bringing up their notoriously belligerent manager Peter Grant, 'I don't think this can be told. Peter wouldn't let anybody film us.' According to McGourty, 'Grant would rip the film out of cameras and eject people from their concerts.'
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Nevertheless, MacMahon and McGourty carried on, resulting in Becoming Led Zeppelin, a two-hour doc that opened in select IMAX screens last weekend and will have a more widespread release starting Friday. Over its duration, we see Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page, and bassist John Paul Jones, in newly conducted interviews, reminisce about their childhoods and early musical endeavors, from playing in churches to wailing in hippie-rock bands. And thanks to clips that MacMahon and McGourty eventually hunted down, we're able to hear and see epics like 'How Many More Times' and 'Dazed and Confused' in all their monolithic, blues-drenched, full-length glory.
What you won't see, however, is anything of the band's history past its first two albums: No tales of on-the-road debauchery, no discussions of the making of 'Kashmir' or 'Stairway to Heaven,' no misty-eyed memories of drummer John Bonham's death in 1980. Aside from Plant referring obliquely to 'drugs and a lot of girls' during their 1969 American tour, the only women in the film are clips of wives and girlfriends. Becoming Led Zeppelin focuses on the band members' formative years as kids and musicians, culminating with their triumphant show at London's Royal Albert Hall in 1970. 'If you were doing a movie about the space race, it would be the journey through the Fifties and it would culminate with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the moon and then returning home,' MacMahon says. 'That's the end of the story.'
As dazed or confused as Zep fans may be by that framework, MacMahon says he and McGourty had always planned on Becoming Led Zeppelin to focus on the 'becoming' part. They envisioned a 120-minute work that could be shown in theaters for the maximum immersive sonic experience. MacMahon also thought back to a Zep paperback he owned as a kid that only told the group's tale up through the early Seventies. For him, the saga after the completion of 1969's Led Zeppelin II isn't nearly as compelling as what came before.
'That story didn't interest me,' he says. 'Up to 1970 is the point where everything that happens is unique to them: the combination of these four individuals and the specific things they do and the choices they make and how they become hugely successful. Once that is achieved, the events that follow are often incredibly similar to countless other things that have been successful.'
'Album, tour, album, tour, album tour,' adds McGourty.
MacMahon, on a dual Zoom with his collaborator, nods in agreement. 'This person falls out with this person. Someone becomes a drug addict. Blah, blah, blah. You've just heard it over and over again. But who these people are has never come out. No one knows who they are, personally.'
Such a limited time frame must have also appealed to the band, sparing them from revisiting tragedies like the death of Plant's five-year-old son Karac or having to address any groupie tales. But to press their case, MacMahon and McCourty spent half a year researching the amount of archival footage they could potentially use. Then they compiled those images to create a storyboard — a visual script — in a black leather-bound portfolio that they brought to each band member in meetings.
'They weren't open to it when we met with them,' MacMahon admits. 'But as we were walking through the storyboard, it's as if we were walking through their childhoods.' During a seven-hour sit-down with Page, MacMahon felt a moment of revelation when they arrived at photos of the studio where the newly formed band first jammed on 'Train Kept a-Rollin'' for nearly an hour. 'I remember Jimmy had this sense of joy appearing on his face like he was back there again, and remembering what he thought of them back then,' MacMahon says. 'Those feelings were coming back. I could see him going, 'Oh, you know, this could work.''
MacMahon believes that the band also responded to American Epic, his 2017 series (co-produced by McGourty) about early 20th-century American roots music. 'I think it touched them to be considered as following on from Charley Patton and that film's approach to getting inside the music, its influence and what made it,' MacMahon says. 'We came presenting this story that was similar to the American Epic story, except it was about them.'
Which isn't to say the filmmakers weren't tested. During one early conversation, MacMahon says Page asked them to name the band Plant was in when Page first heard him sing. MacMahon correctly answered 'Obs-Tweedle.' 'And Jimmy said, 'Very good. Carry on.''
With the band's blessing, the director and writer interviewed more than 100 Zep associates, from pals from their youth to engineer Glyn Johns. In the end, they would up using those conversations primarily as fact-checking tools and not incorporating them into the film. 'People waited this long to hear the group tell their story,' McGourty says. 'They've never done it before. So let them tell it.' To jog the band members' memories during those interviews, the two would show them vintage photographs of buildings from their youth or blast a piece of music especially loud.
But as they were warned, film or TV footage of Zep during that period was hardly plentiful. The filmmakers eventually came upon three unheard interviews with the press-shy Bonham from the early Seventies and were given access to his father's home movies of young John by way of Bonham's sister. When they heard about the existence of illicitly shot footage of Led Zeppelin's 1969 show in Bath, McGourty flew from L.A. to the U.K., to what she calls 'this mysterious little medieval village where they filmed the windmill in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.' There, the owner of the footage agreed to let them use it, but with preconditions. 'I had to send a car for him so he could accompany it all the way to our London facilitator to transfer it,' she says. 'He didn't want to let it out of his possession.'
MacMahon and McGourty say they had editorial control over the contents of the film, and Page attended a screening of a rough cut at the Venice Film Festival in 2021. Later, Plant attended another screening in London and turned to McGourty and said, 'That was my life.' Since Plant's family apparently didn't know that his parents had kicked him out of the house when he chose to pursue music, their reaction, McGourty says, 'was very moving.'
So, will there be a sequel that ventures into Led Zeppelin's later years? The filmmakers are cagey. 'I haven't even given it a second thought,' says MacMahon. 'This is the film we wanted to make. It was like climbing Everest. All I know is a sequel would be an enormous amount of work. I don't contemplate that lightly.'
Although it's not a biopic, Becoming Led Zeppelin could also serve to introduce a generation born this century to more rock gods of old, the way Bohemian Rhapsody, Elvis, and now A Complete Unknown already have. MacMahon says that wasn't the plan, yet he can envision such a scenario.
'The moment the kids go into that cinema and hear that music coming out the speakers, some of them are definitely going to be thinking, 'I wonder if I could do that,'' he says. 'It's kind of a clarion call. You can do this. You just need three other buddies and one other bloke keeping everyone away. You don't need 100 samples and fucking 10,000 lawyers having to give your songwriting credits to 15 engineers.
'And,' he adds, 'who wouldn't want to wear those clothes? That shit looks cool.'
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Boston Globe
2 days ago
- Boston Globe
Terry Reid, rock singer known as ‘Superlungs,' dies at 75
In his prime, in the late 1960s and the '70s, Mr. Reid's powerful vocal stylings were compared favorably to the likes of Rod Stewart and Bad Company's Paul Rodgers. Graham Nash, who produced Mr. Reid's 1976 album, 'Seed of a Memory,' once described his talent as 'phenomenal.' Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin called him 'probably the best singer of that period.' Advertisement After he released his debut album, 'Bang, Bang You're Terry Reid,' in 1968, when he was just 18, Franklin said, 'There are only three things happening in England: the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Terry Reid.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Mr. Reid never had a major hit song or album, although a few of his albums eventually came to be regarded as minor masterpieces — particularly 'River' (1973), with its blend of blues, jazz, folk, R&B, and Brazilian music. Although it climbed no higher than No. 172 on the Billboard 200, the British rock magazine Mojo later described 'River' as 'one of the most lazily magnificent records of that or any other year.' His song 'Without Expression,' which he wrote at 14 and included on his first album, was later covered by John Mellencamp, REO Speedwagon, and other artists. Jack White of the White Stripes recorded Mr. Reid's 1969 song 'Rich Kid Blues' in 2008 with his band the Raconteurs. Advertisement Even so, Mr. Reid's career was too often framed by what he didn't do. His shot at rock immortality came in late 1968, when guitar sorcerer Jimmy Page, late of the Yardbirds, was putting together his next venture, which was originally called the New Yardbirds and would evolve into Led Zeppelin. He was well aware of Mr. Reid's gift — a voice that could swing from a raspy croon to a flamethrower blues howl — since Mr. Reid had opened for the Yardbirds, and he and the band shared a manager, the intimidating ex-wrestler Peter Grant. 'Jim called me up and said, 'You'd really be good as the singer,'' Mr. Reid said in a 2016 interview with Mojo. But there were complications, starting with his contract to produce solo work for pop impresario Mickie Most, who had minted hits for the Animals, Donovan, and others. And then there were the Rolling Stones. Mr. Reid had made a handshake agreement with guitarist Keith Richards to accompany the Stones on their 1969 tour. 'I said, 'Yeah, I'd love to give it a shot,'' Mr. Reid recalled telling Page in a 2007 interview with The Independent of Britain. ''But I've just got to pop off for a minute to do this Stones tour and I don't want to be the one to tell Keith I'm not going.' ' 'Oh, no, we've got to do it now,' Mr. Reid recalled Page telling him. The supergroup Cream, featuring Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Jack Bruce, 'had broken up and everybody in London was trying to put one of those groups together, so it's a big scramble who's first.' Advertisement Instead, Mr. Reid suggested two members of a group called Band of Joy — Plant, blessed with a similarly searing voice, and berserker drummer John Bonham. 'I contributed half the band,' Mr. Reid later said. 'That's enough on my part.' Terrance James Reid was born Nov. 13, 1949, in St. Neots, a town in Cambridgeshire, England, the only child of Walter Reid, a car salesman, and Grace (Barker) Reid. He grew up in the nearby village of Bluntisham and attended St. Ivo Academy in St. Ives. He started his first band, the Redbeats, at 13. Two years later he left school and joined Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers, which got a blast of exposure opening for the Rolling Stones on their 1966 British tour. One gig, at the Royal Albert Hall, was 'all screaming girls,' Mr. Reid told Mojo. 'It was scary. You couldn't hear anything, your ears were shut down.' The Jaywalkers broke up soon after, and Mr. Reid embarked on a solo career. His knack for sidestepping history continued. On the Stones' 1969 tour, Mr. Reid chose not to play the final gig — the chaotic, violence-marred Altamont Speedway Free Festival, which left one fan dead. 'I had a bad feeling about Altamont and said so to Keith,' he later recalled. Around that time, opportunity knocked again when guitarist Ritchie Blackmore invited him to become the lead vocalist for the heavy metal progenitors Deep Purple, replacing Rod Evans. Again Mr. Reid slammed the door, ceding the job to Ian Gillan. Advertisement 'They were going into a real hard-rock thing that I wasn't so into,' he later told Mojo. Mr. Reid spent years tangled in litigation with Most. He eventually wriggled free and relocated to the United States, where he signed with Atlantic Records. When the label's star-making president, Ahmet Ertegun, first heard 'The River,' he told Mr. Reid, 'You've given me a jazz album,' Mr. Reid recalled to Mojo. 'Which it was, in the sense that David Crosby's 'If I Could Only Remember My Name' or Van Morrison's 'Astral Weeks' were jazz.' His solo career wound down in the 1980s, although he did session work for the likes of Jackson Browne, Don Henley, and Bonnie Raitt. His comeback album, 'The Driver,' released in 1991, featured a star-studded cast, including Joe Walsh, Enya, and Stewart Copeland, best known as the drummer with the Police. He released his final studio album, 'The Other Side of the River,' in 2016. In addition to his wife, Mr. Reid is survived by two daughters from an earlier relationship, Kelly and Holly Reid; and two stepdaughters, Erin Grady Barbagelata and Chelsea King. Following Mr. Reid's death, Plant, who remained a friend, paid tribute to him on social media: 'Such charisma. His voice, his range … his songs capturing that carefree era … Superlungs indeed.' 'He catapulted me into an intense new world he chose to decline,' Plant added. For his part, Mr. Reid, who was burdened for life with questions about his near miss with Led Zeppelin, was not so sure that he would have been a Plant-scale supernova in some alternative universe. 'Who's to say what would have happened if Jim and me had got a band?' he said in an interview with The Independent. 'It might have been a bloody failure.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in
New York Times
2 days ago
- New York Times
Terry Reid, Rock Singer Known as ‘Superlungs,' Dies at 75
Terry Reid, a British vocal alchemist and songwriter whose powerful voice earned him the nickname Superlungs — and who, despite turning down the chance to become the lead singer of Led Zeppelin, came to be celebrated as a singer's singer by luminaries like Aretha Franklin, died on Aug. 4 in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 75. His wife, Annette Grady, said he died in a hospital from complications of cancer. He had experienced a variety of health problems and canceled scheduled performances in July. In his prime, in the late 1960s and the '70s, Mr. Reid's powerful vocal stylings were compared favorably to the likes of Rod Stewart and Bad Company's Paul Rodgers. Graham Nash, who produced Mr. Reid's 1976 album, 'Seed of a Memory,' once described his talent as 'phenomenal.' Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin called him 'probably the best singer of that period.' After he released his debut album, 'Bang, Bang You're Terry Reid,' in 1968, when he was just 18, Ms. Franklin said, 'There are only three things happening in England: the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Terry Reid.' Mr. Reid never had a major hit song or album, although a few of his albums eventually came to be regarded as minor masterpieces — particularly 'River' (1973), with its blend of blues, jazz, folk, R&B and Brazilian music. Although it climbed no higher than No. 172 on the Billboard 200, the British rock magazine Mojo later described 'River' as 'one of the most lazily magnificent records of that or any other year.' His song 'Without Expression,' which he wrote at 14 and included on his first album, was later covered by John Mellencamp, REO Speedwagon and other artists. Jack White of the White Stripes recorded Mr. Reid's 1969 song 'Rich Kid Blues' in 2008 with his band the Raconteurs. Even so, Mr. Reid's career was too often framed by what he didn't do. His shot at rock immortality came in late 1968, when the guitar sorcerer Jimmy Page, late of the Yardbirds, was putting together his next venture, which was originally called the New Yardbirds and would evolve into Led Zeppelin. He was well aware of Mr. Reid's gift — a voice that could swing from a raspy croon to a flamethrower blues howl — since Mr. Reid had opened for the Yardbirds, and he and the band shared a manager, the intimidating ex-wrestler Peter Grant. 'Jim called me up and said, 'You'd really be good as the singer,'' Mr. Reid said in a 2016 interview with Mojo. But there were complications, starting with his contract to produce solo work for the pop impresario Mickie Most, who had minted hits for the Animals, Donovan and others. And then there were the Rolling Stones. Mr. Reid had made a handshake agreement with the guitarist Keith Richards to accompany the Stones on their 1969 tour. 'I said, 'Yeah, I'd love to give it a shot,'' Mr. Reid recalled telling Mr. Page in a 2007 interview with The Independent of Britain. ''But I've just got to pop off for a minute to do this Stones tour and I don't want to be the one to tell Keith I'm not going.'' 'Oh no, we've got to do it now,' Mr. Reid recalled Mr. Page telling him. The supergroup Cream, featuring Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, 'had broken up and everybody in London was trying to put one of those groups together, so it's a big scramble who's first.' Instead, Mr. Reid suggested two members of a group called Band of Joy — the singer Robert Plant, blessed with a similarly searing voice, and the berserker drummer John Bonham. 'I contributed half the band,' Mr. Reid later said. 'That's enough on my part.' Terrance James Reid was born on Nov. 13, 1949, in St. Neots, a town in Cambridgeshire, England, the only child of Walter Reid, a car salesman, and Grace (Barker) Reid. He grew up in the nearby village of Bluntisham and attended St. Ivo Academy in St. Ives. He started his first band, the Redbeats, at 13. Two years later he left school and joined Peter Jay and the Jaywalkers, which got a blast of exposure opening for the Rolling Stones on their 1966 British tour. One gig, at the Royal Albert Hall, was 'all screaming girls,' Mr. Reid told Mojo. 'It was scary. You couldn't hear anything, your ears were shut down.' The Jaywalkers broke up soon after, and Mr. Reid embarked on a solo career. His knack for sidestepping history continued. On the Stones' 1969 tour, Mr. Reid chose not to play the final gig — the chaotic, violence-marred Altamont Speedway Free Festival, which left one fan dead. 'I had a bad feeling about Altamont and said so to Keith,' he later recalled. Around that time, opportunity knocked again when the guitarist Ritchie Blackmore invited him to become the lead vocalist for the heavy metal progenitors Deep Purple, replacing Rod Evans. Again Mr. Reid slammed the door, ceding the job to Ian Gillan. 'They were going into a real hard-rock thing that I wasn't so into,' he later told Mojo. Mr. Reid spent years tangled in litigation with Mr. Most. He eventually wriggled free and relocated to the United States, where he signed with Atlantic Records. When the label's star-making president, Ahmet Ertegun, first heard 'The River,' he told Mr. Reid, 'You've given me a jazz album,' Mr. Reid recalled to Mojo. 'Which it was, in the sense that David Crosby's 'If I Could Only Remember My Name' or Van Morrison's 'Astral Weeks' were jazz.' His solo career wound down in the 1980s, although he did session work for the likes of Jackson Browne, Don Henley and Bonnie Raitt. His comeback album, 'The Driver,' released in 1991, featured a star-studded cast, including Joe Walsh, Enya and Stewart Copeland, best known as the drummer with the Police. He released his final studio album, 'The Other Side of the River,' in 2016. In addition to his wife, Mr. Reid is survived by two daughters from an earlier relationship, Kelly and Holly Reid; and two stepdaughters, Erin Grady Barbagelata and Chelsea King. Following Mr. Reid's death, Mr. Plant, who remained a friend, paid tribute to him on social media: 'Such charisma. His voice, his range … his songs capturing that carefree era … Superlungs indeed.' 'He catapulted me into an intense new world he chose to decline,' Mr. Plant added. For his part, Mr. Reid, who was burdened for life with questions about his near miss with Led Zeppelin, was not so sure that he would have been a Plant-scale supernova in some alternative universe. 'Who's to say what would have happened if Jim and me had got a band?' he said in an interview with The Independent. 'It might have been a bloody failure.'
Los Angeles Times
4 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
Gone too soon, an unsettled life finds focus in ‘It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley'
Short, pained lives marked by achievement and promise and then abruptly gone leave a restless afterglow. Youth is supposed to fade away, not become one's permanent state. And regarding the late musician Jeff Buckley — a roiling romantic with piercing good looks whose singing could rattle bones and raise hairs — that loss in 1997, at the age of 30 from drowning, burns anew with every revisiting of his sparse legacy of recorded material. Lives are more complicated than what your busted heart may want to read from a voice that conjured heaven and the abyss. So one of the appealing takeaways from the biodoc 'It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley' is a repudiating of the typical narrative of inescapable fate, instead pursuing the richness of a gifted artist's ups and downs. Director Amy Berg would rather us see Buckley as he was in the world instead of some conveniently doom-laden figure. The result is loving, spirited and honest: an opportunity for us to get to know the talented, turbulent Buckley through the people who genuinely knew him and cared about him. But also, in clips, copious writings and snatches of voice recordings, we meet someone empathetic yet evasive, ambitious yet self-critical, a son and his own man, especially when sudden stardom proved to be the wrong prism through which to find answers. With archival material often superimposed over a faint, scratchy-film background, we feel the sensitivity and chaos of Buckley's single-mom upbringing in Anaheim, the devastating distance of his absentee dad, folk-poet icon Tim Buckley (you'll never forget the matchbook Jeff saved), and the creative blossoming that happened in New York's East Village. There, his long-standing influences, from Nina Simone and Edith Piaf to Led Zeppelin and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, coalesced into a post-grunge emotionalism anchored by those unbelievable pipes. Even after Buckley's record-label discovery leads to the usual music-doc trappings — tour montages, media coverage, performance morsels — Berg wisely keeps the contours of his interior life in the foreground, intimately related by key figures, most prominently Buckley's mother, Mary Guibert, romantic confidantes such as artist Rebecca Moore and musician Joan Wasser, and bandmates like Michael Tighe. Berg keeps these interviewees close to her camera, too, so we can appreciate their memories as personal gifts, still raw after so many years. Fans might yearn for more granular unpacking of the music, but it somehow doesn't feel like an oversight when so much ink on it already exists and so little else has been colored in. The same goes for the blessed absence of boilerplate A-list praise. The global acclaim for his sole album, 1994's 'Grace,' which includes his all-timer rendition of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah,' certainly put admiring superstars (Dylan, Bowie, McCartney) in Buckley's path, including one of his idols, Robert Plant. But Berg stays true to a viewpoint rooted in Buckley's conflicting feelings about the pressures and absurdities of fame, and why it ultimately drove him to Memphis to seek the solace to start a second album that was never completed. The last chapter is thoughtfully handled. Berg makes sure that we understand that his loved ones view his death as an accident, not a suicide, and the movie's details are convincing. That doesn't make the circumstances any less heartbreaking, of course. As warmer spotlights go, 'It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley' may never fully expunge what maddens and mystifies about the untimely end of troubled souls. But it candidly dimensionalizes a one-album wonder, virtually ensuring the kind of relistening likely to deepen those echoes.
