Perhaps you’ve felt the vibrations in the comfort of your own home, a resonant thunder from the Hammer of the Gods. There’s a new movie, Becoming Led Zeppelin, loaded with rarely/never seen clips of the mightiest band in rock history, rattling the walls of IMAX theaters.
The film, from director-writer Bernard MacMahon and producer-writer Allison McGourty is, believe it or not, the first ever authorized documentary about Led Zeppelin, one of the biggest recording acts in history. The group did release a legendary concert film, The Song Remains The Same, but much of what makes Becoming Led Zeppelin so special is that first word “becoming.” By focusing just on the early years, this goes super deep, a true gift to hardcore fans as well as anyone interested in seeing how something special clicks together.
Led Zeppelin, by design, rarely gave interviews back in the day, so a lot of the material here will likely be new to you—how guitarist/founder Jimmy Page and bassist/organist/arranger John Paul Jones met as hardworking session musicians in the first half of the 60s, and how singer Robert Plant and drummer John Bonham worked together in gutsy blues bands. The movie’s biggest boast—in addition to footage from the band’s first appearance in Denmark (when they were still fulfilling a concert contract from Page’s previous band The Yardbirds)—is unearthing lost audio interviews from Bonham, who died in 1980. Not even the other members of the group had heard these before.
So if you’ve got a whole lotta love for Zep, be sure to see this movie, or it’ll be a heartbreaker. Below is our interview with the people behind the movie, edited for clarity.
DECIDER: Did the band come to you guys or did you go to them?
BERNARD MACMAHON: We made a four-part film called American Epic about the first blues, country and gospel records. We wanted to make a follow-up film that picked up after World War II through the 50s and 60s. I remembered I read a book about Led Zeppelin when I was 12, a long out-of-print book just called Led Zeppelin, only about their early period. I loved this story because it took you through the music of the 50s and 60s, it showed how Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones were session musicians, and then they became the biggest group in the world.
ALLISON MCGOURTY: We spent seven months researching, looking through any archives that existed, then prepared our script and reached out to the group. People said we were crazy, that they’d never agree to it, because they’ve never done it before. But that’s part of the challenge, isn’t it?
BERNARD MACMAHON: I’m only interested in going up Everest if no one’s ever been there before. It’s so much work making films, why do it if someone’s already been to the top three times?
If the band said “no thanks” would you have done the film anyway?
BERNARD MACMAHON: I wouldn’t make a film where the subjects are alive and they’re not talking. What’s the point of that?
Now, Led Zeppelin is a fourway thing, with four essential components. We gotta get three living members that have always said no to do this film. And then we’ve got a dead member to get in there, and he’s one who has ever done any kind of meaningful, long, well-recorded interview, as far as anyone knows.
But Jimmy Page was a big admirer of American Epic, so that brought us some credibility.
ALLISON MCGOURTY: But Jimmy definitely tested Bernard at first.
BERNARD MACMAHON: Yes, that first meeting, walking through the storyboards, I’d say “and this is when you first heard Robert Plant sing.”
ALLISON MCGOURTY: So he’d stop and ask “and what was the name of the band?”
BERNARD MACMAHON: And I’d have to say “it was Obs-Tweedle”
ALLISON MCGOURTY: Then Jimmy says “very good, carry on.”
I read the story of how you tracked that lost John Bonham interview down through a university in Australia …
BERNARD MACMAHON: That’s only one of three we used, actually. Giving him a proper, full voice was the most important thing. Also, I wanted Robert to be free to tell his story. The rare times Robert says a little bit about Led Zeppelin, he’s always asked to talk for his fallen comrade. It is a burden on him, that he has to speak for John. I wanted to liberate him from having to speculate on what John thought. So the dream was, can we have John talking for himself? You can learn a lot just hearing someone’s voice.
ALLISON MCGOURTY: Then, luckily for us, Deborah Bonham, John’s sister, gave us all these 8mm film reels, with footage of a very young John on his first drum kit as a child.
One gets the impression the other guys had not heard those tapes before.
BERNARD MACMAHON: Robert participated in some of those recordings, but he wouldn’t have heard them when they were ultimately broadcast. They were promoting a tour. So it’s very moving. The whole film is a constant interaction with archives. So there’s the Bonham interviews and also when I show them the footage from the Bath Festival for the first time.
We don’t belabor it, but we go a little behind the curtain, to see how the interviews are being conducted.
What you don’t see is the sheer volume of material that we’ve brought. That’s why there’s real candor and tenderness to the interviews. When John Paul Jones is talking about the priest that took him on as choirmaster and organist at the age of 14, he’s looking at photographs that we tracked down of the church. Well, that church had been bulldozed within two years of him being there. For almost 60 years, that church hasn’t existed. It’s bringing back powerful emotions.
That footage of Shirley Bassey singing “Goldfinger” [the recording of which both Page and Jones worked on as session musicians] is very rare. When I played it, with the audio booming in the room, it brought them back.
ALLISON MCGOURTY: It’s like going to a relative’s house and someone bringing out a picture album from a wedding or something. It’s a tactile experience. The whole film is. We were inspired by classic 1930s movies, with spinning headlines and images of tickets. None of those are digital, we found over 6,600 elements—photographs, handbills, tickets and scanned them all in. Then Jimmy brought his diaries, including the book he had when he was a session musician, and his mum’s diaries when she took calls for him. Robert brought the lacquer disc of the first songs he recorded with John, which no one’s ever heard before.
BERNARD MACMAHON: We’ve got photos of John Paul Jones as a child, and of his family, which are nowhere on the internet. And that’s rare for a musician in such a huge, legendary band.
That’s part of the allure of Led Zeppelin, was that they were always so mysterious. That they emerged from runes or something. But that reluctance to do interviews in the past certainly makes it difficult to make a movie like this.
ALLISON MCGOURTY: It certainly made it fun, our detective work.
Another reason I think the movie has been successful is that we include full songs. When we were pitching this, people said “nobody wants a music film with full songs” but we didn’t listen to them. Now it’s more like a concert experience, with people clapping and cheering after the songs. And most of us, of course, never got a chance to see Led Zeppelin in concert.
BERNARD MACMAHON: When you see, at last, Led Zeppelin on stage for the first time in this movie, people break out into applause. And the reason is because you’ve seen their childhoods with intimacy and tenderness. You care about these boys and who they become. Then this unbelievably powerful sound bursts out the cinema speakers and you can hear all their influences.
The film does a great job of explaining what American music meant to all of them, especially Robert Plant. Which was a common thing for post-war Britain. Does that still exist today?
BERNARD MACMAHON: Well, we haven’t been in Britain much for the last 10 years, other than shooting this film. But it’s interesting, you have the term Anglophile, for people who love Britain, and Francophile, for people who love France, but there’s no real equivalent term for people who love America, is there? But we are in that group. That’s what led us to make American Epic.
Robert says in the film that “coming to America was my dream for every reason.”
ALLISON MCGOURTY: I grew up listening to the kind of music that Robert was listening to, because of my parents. I’ve always loved America and dreamed of coming here. You see the black and white world of England at the beginning that bursts into color when they get to America.
BERNARD MACMAHON: Led Zeppelin represents a second group coming to America, at a later time after the assassinations and the crackdown on the youth at universities. It’s after the demise of The Beatles. It’s funny, I’ve been with this music for five years now, and I’ve not heard one scintilla of The Beatles. It wasn’t a part of the mixture of their bouillabaisse. And in that they were incredibly rare. I think that’s part of why they broke through so big. For 10 years The Beatles were the biggest thing and here was something completely new.
This movie, Becoming Led Zeppelin, goes into great detail because it ends just as they are on top, with the release of Led Zeppelin II. But this means we don’t get to “Stairway to Heaven,” we don’t get to “Kashmir.” That’s the sequel?
BERNARD MACMAHON: We think very carefully about these things. Nothing is done lightly. We’ll be percolating to think “can that story be told brilliantly? Will a 13-year-old kid get something from that next chapter? Will it be instructional for their life?” That’s what we care about.
ALLISON MCGOURTY: But we do have something very different up our sleeves for next which we … will talk about as soon as we can.
Jordan Hoffman is a writer and critic in New York City. His work also appears in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and the Times of Israel. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and tweets at @JHoffman about Phish and Star Trek.