It’s August 1968, and in a poky room beneath London’s Gerrard Street, Jimmy Page is rehearsing his new band. A 24-year-old guitar-for-hire who’d made uncredited appearances on epochal hits by The Who, The Rolling Stones and Van Morrison’s band Them, Page quit a lucrative gig at the Muzak Corporation in 1966 to join The Yardbirds. That band promptly imploded, but Page’s instincts were sound. Soon, he’d corralled a new Yardbirds (they’d soon ditch that name in favour of “Led Zeppelin”) with fellow session musician John Paul Jones and two unknowns from the Black Country, Robert Plant and John Bonham.
In that Gerrard Street basement, they launch into Cincinnati bluesman Tiny Bradshaw’s “Train Kept A-Rollin’’ and the world is pretty much never the same again. Within weeks of that first rehearsal, they’re touring Scandinavia; by Boxing Day they’re playing the US; and less than a year later they’re collecting gold discs for their debut album, which eventually sells a staggering 10 million copies. By 1980 – after seven more smash-hit studio albums, globetrotting tours that shatter all records, legendary on-the-road escapades heavy on the sex and the drugs, and the tragic death of drummer Bonham – it’s all over. Led Zeppelin have left the building, ceding the stage to endless imitators who’ll ape their moves but never approach their magic.
But it’s this first chapter that fascinates Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty, the filmmakers behind the new documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin. “We wanted to demystify that ‘Viking’ image of Led Zeppelin as these marauders laying waste to villages,” MacMahon says. “Forget all the myths – the private jets, the drugs, the stuff bands like Mötley Crüe and Warrant thought Led Zeppelin was about. This is the beginning – the least-known part of the Led Zeppelin story, one shrouded in mystery.”
MacMahon and McGourty’s efforts in demystification are aided by the notoriously reticent surviving members of Led Zeppelin themselves, who gave long, in-depth interviews and, McGourty says, “brought in personal artefacts they’d never shared before”, including Plant’s handwritten lyrics to the song “Ramble On”, and a previously unheard demo by Plant and Bonham’s pre-Zeppelin project Band of Joy. The band members’ willingness to cooperate was driven largely by their admiration for the filmmakers’ previous project, the acclaimed documentary series American Epic, which chronicled blues pioneers like Charley Patton and Blind Willie Johnson, who were close to Zeppelin’s hearts.
The resulting film unearths Zeppelin’s roots and offers intimate portraits of these venerated stars. We meet John Paul Jones as a teenage church organist under the spell of what he describes as “a very cool priest”, before he picks up the bass guitar. His vaudeville-performer father disdains it as a “novelty instrument”, urging him to pick up the saxophone instead. The young Bonham is a gregarious family man whose parents support whatever he does, as long as he provides for his wife and kids – though his wife Pat often warns him, “Don’t you dare play with that Planty!” The group’s embryonic frontman, meanwhile, is “this sensitive guy whose parents wanted him to become a chartered accountant, and chucked him out of the house when he wouldn’t,” says the British-Irish MacMahon, who grew up in south London. After catching Little Richard on TV, Plant is smitten with rock’n’roll. “The syringe was in the arm forever,” he says in the movie. “I was prepared to be a mod, a rocker, a beatnik – whatever, as long as I could sing.”
Page is the guiding force throughout. We see him in his schooldays, playing skiffle on the BBC. We see him ascending the ranks of the pop industry, playing alongside Jones as Shirley Bassey records the Bond theme “Goldfinger”. It’s Page who senses potential beyond their workaday pop milieu and decides he doesn’t “want to make singles any more”. Jones is sceptical at first. “Jonesy didn’t even really listen to rock music,” says MacMahon. “His interests were classical music, jazz, soul. He was one of the most in-demand session musicians and arrangers in Britain, working for Cat Stevens, Dusty Springfield and more. But his wife Maureen said, ‘Call Jimmy about joining the new Yardbirds.’ That band hadn’t had a hit in years, and Jonesy’s making a fortune arranging pop records. But Maureen knew. Maureen knew that Jimmy knew what was coming next.”
Indeed. The beat groups and the psychedelic era had already left the pop industry in which Page had cut his teeth looking creaky. Now, empowered by advances in multitrack recording and amplification technology that would enable groups to play arenas and even stadiums and still be heard, Page was ready to grasp his future. “Zeppelin dealt in dynamics, that was their language,” says MacMahon. “Jimmy envisioned they’d be playing huge spaces one day.”
UK record labels didn’t share his vision, however. So the group’s fearsome manager, Peter Grant – whom Page likened to “a Mafia Don” and whose behaviour in years to come would earn him a shadowy reputation – flew to the US and secured a deal with Atlantic Records that promised the guitarist complete creative control. Page then gathered the band at Pangbourne, his plush boathouse on the Thames, and – armed with a guitar hand-painted with psychedelic filigree, a gift from erstwhile Yardbirds bandmate Jeff Beck – crafted the music that would compose their self-titled debut.
At this point, Becoming Led Zeppelin goes into overdrive. Alongside the revealing interviews with Page, Plant and Jones – and unheard archival material featuring Bonham – MacMahon and McGourty present a treasure trove of vintage Zeppelin footage. This was no easy task. “They didn’t really do interviews then,” says MacMahon, “and they did hardly any television. Other big music acts of the time did countless TV appearances, countless photo shoots. There’s so little of that of Zeppelin.”
“Researching the footage took a lot of detective work,” adds McGourty, “visiting tiny English villages whose residents somehow had footage of Zeppelin at the 1969 Bath festival hidden in their attic.” The quest turned up some absolute gold, in particular a performance of “Dazed and Confused” in its entirety that offers a ringside seat for all Page’s guitar pyrotechnics. “We chose the songs like we were scoring a musical, to help the narrative along,” he explains. “So for the early shows in Europe, when the audience don’t know what they’re seeing and the kids have their fingers in their ears, we have ‘Communication Breakdown’. When Jimmy flies to the US to sign with Atlantic, we use ‘Your Time Is Gonna Come’. Later, when they’re touring America, we use ‘Ramble On’.”
It’s on those 1969 US tours that Zeppelin truly catch fire. Early shows supporting New York psych-rockers Vanilla Fudge are poorly attended, but Page, the group’s experienced road warrior, tells his band to play like they’re in a tiny club, and blow away the punters who have attended. By the time they reach San Francisco’s legendary hippy mecca The Fillmore, however, they’re absolutely in the zone. The group’s memories of these tours are radiant, if light on detail. “We were 20 years old, there’s drugs and lots of girls,” grins Plant in the movie.
The US conquered, Zeppelin returned to the UK for a triumphant homecoming tour, culminating in a sold-out appearance at the Royal Albert Hall, with many family members in attendance. “Jonesy’s father was there,” says MacMahon, “and he recognised the validity of what his son was doing. John Paul welled up with joy, recalling that.” A month later, the group took receipt of those gold discs, the same day the Apollo 11 astronauts – the first men to fly to the moon – splashed down safely to Earth. The world was changing at fearsome pace – the advent of Zeppelin was just one thrilling index of how.
More success followed, and arguably greater music. But things also got darker for the group, as touring intensified, pressure increased and their lives grew more and more surreal. Page fell under the spell of heroin, developed an interest in the occult and pursued a year-long relationship with underage groupie Lori Maddox. A serious car accident saw Plant record vocals for 1976’s Presence from a wheelchair, while his five-year-old son, Karac, died suddenly of a stomach virus the following year. And in October 1980, during rehearsals for a forthcoming tour and after consuming around 40 shots of vodka, John Bonham choked on his own vomit and died.
MacMahon and McGourty say they have no interest in telling these later chapters in the saga. “The Led Zeppelin story ends in tragedy,” says McGourty, “and it’s difficult for Robert to talk about it. He lost John, his best friend – why would he want to revisit that? But we took them back to the good times, to the beginning: when it started, when it was a joy.”
“The Royal Albert Hall show, this triumphant homecoming, is Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, Edmund Hillary raising the flag atop Everest,” adds MacMahon. “There were other lunar missions, other trips up the mountain, but they’re not as interesting. It’s just the same thing, repeated. And with Zeppelin, the story becomes a cycle of another album, another tour, and various darker forces coming in. After you become the biggest band in the world, your experiences tend to mirror a lot of other groups; your trials and tribulations become universal, and more boring. Our film, though, is about these specific people, how they did what they did, how they got to this point. They’ve never told this story before, until now.”
‘Becoming Led Zeppelin’ is in cinemas now
