Led Zeppelin DVD

 1 disc for the price of 2!

One of the things I’ve done during this global pandemic is finally listening to/watching the endless amount of media I’ve accumulated over the years. Led Zeppelin’s DVD was gifted to me many Christmases ago, but a lack of free time & my wife’s ambivalence to classic rock meant I never got around to watching it til earlier this year.

Besides a widely panned concert film, Led Zeppelin live footage was incredibly hard to come by for decades. Part of it was by design: Their manager Peter Grant considered live recordings detrimental to show attendance, and generally banned it. The other part was a combination of finances and Jimmy Page’s perfectionist tendencies, so the footage sat in vaults until the turn of the century.

But Led Zeppelin did tour a lot in their day, with a schedule that even high profile bands would balk at nowadays. The legend is that they were originally formed so Jimmy Page could fulfill a contractually obligated tour of his old band, The Yardbirds. The weird thing is, I never really understood how Page became responsible that tour. Sure the band signed the contract to tour, but then they broke up. Was the fee for cancelling the venues too much? Music Industry contacts have always been labyrinthine, even more so in the 1960s, but I wonder if Page just felt like this was an opportunity to make some money. His stinginess is legendary, though its important to remember that musicians then (and now) were constantly getting ripped off. It seems like his only indulgences back then were buying a haunted house, and uh… dating a child.

Zeppelin were thrown into the fire from the outset, but with half the band being seasoned session pros, and the other half an uncommonly gifted drummer and a singer with natural stage charisma, they fell together quickly. The old adage goes “Practice Makes Perfect”, and that is even more true of bands, who rely on that sort of unspoken psychic connection to make music sound easy. The quartet ground out a punishing tour schedule for the most of their career, stopping only for injury and death. That kind of nightly performance makes a band really tight, but what happens when these all-too-human musicians are pushed to the breaking point? Led Zep are as good an example as any that time apart is just as important as time together.

Royal Albert Hall, 9 January 1970

Whatever you pay for this 2-disc set, it’s worth it for this barnstorming homecoming set. The band is tight but expansive, fast but grooving, and the sound & film is miraculously pristine, despite some still shot inserts to make up for footage too damaged to repair. Their joy is palpable, and for good reason: The band had something to prove. Despite coming out of the gate with a massive album and garnering legions of adoring fans, critical reactions were pretty negative, especially in their native country. To play the storied Royal Albert Hall to a mass of screaming fans was a big Fuck You to the reviewers who lambasted them as yet another ripoff blues boogie woogie band. Zeppelin had found their people, and proved to the music industry that they could thrive without the support of music magazines.

Danmarks Radio (Gladsaxe Teen Club, Gladsaxe), 17 March 1969

Supershow (Staines Studio, London), 25 March 1969

Tous en Scène (Theatre Olympia, Paris), 19 June 1969

While interesting as a time capsule, these three live TV appearances are strictly for completists: the band is clearly bored, the audience (when there is one) doesn’t seem to know how to react, and all 3 have nearly identical setlists. Each includes “Dazed and Confused”, the band’s centerpiece in the early days. While it was a great way for them to stretch out live, within the artificial confines of a TV studio it comes off as rote, like “ok now its time for Jimmy’s violin bow part, we can take a break”.

Sydney Showground, 27 February 1972 (Splodge edit)

“Immigrant Song” gets a cobbled together music video of live footage spliced together over a soundboard recording. It’s not synced, but its probably as good an example as you will find of that very 60s/70s phenomenon of the daytime concert in a giant stadium before the concept of Stadium Rock was perfected.

The song is the brisk opener for the otherwise pretty sedate III album, notable perhaps for what it doesn’t have: a guitar solo. The live version rectifies this, along with galloping along at an even faster BPM than on disc. I’ve gone back and listened to it several times, as its rare to hear the band play ahead of the beat so much, since they made their name with grooves that were more plodding than swift.

Madison Square Garden, 27–29 July 1973

By 1973, the years on the road were starting to wear on the band. These four songs are from the same concerts that produced the legendarily panned The Song Remains the Same live album and concert film. Objectively, it’s bad. As a record of where the band was at this stage in the game, it’s remarkably accurate. Despite raking in millions and essentially creating the myth of 70s Rock Star Excess, they were annoyed with each other and the road. John Paul Jones wanted to quit, Robert Plant and John Bonham were homesick, and Jimmy Page was beginning his spiral into heroin addiction. Not to mention their iron-fisted manager, intense even in normal situations, was dealing with the (still unsolved) theft of nearly $200,000 in cash from a hotel safe deposit box. The band was near the height of their power, but no one was happy.

What strikes me the most about The Song Remains the Same footage is how small the band is within the cavernous venue. At the time, Madison Square Garden could hold 20,000 concertgoers, yet the band appears to be on a miniscule stage compared to the giant multi-tiered structures that eventually became the norm. Concert technology would eventually catch up, though for a while anyone past the first dozen rows was seeing tiny figures playing the music.

Earls Court, 24–25 May 1975

The band took 1974 off, and by 1975 the world of arena rock resembled what most people remember: a giant, rumbling, well-oiled machine criss-crossing the country. The break had re-energized the band, but with nothing left to prove as the biggest band in the world, their swagger was missing the haywire energy of their early days. They were kings, they knew it, and their five night stand in the UK’s biggest arena went off without a hitch, complete with a custom light show and, in one of the first instances of a now-common practice, a giant screen behind the band showing the action to punters in the nosebleeds.

Zeppelin may have been big, but the rest of the music world was catching up. Big expensive arena shows, pioneered by acts like Pink Floyd and The Who, were becoming an arms race for the loudest, most explosive event. Led Zeppelin didn’t need to struggle to keep up, but the band (especially Page) was concerned at the distance it put them from the audience. They had earlier attempted to rectify this with a small club tour, which proved impossible as thousands of fans mobbed the small venues. It was clear that the band was on a rarefied level, and there was no turning back.

If not for the death of John Bonham, this may have been what Led Zeppelin would have been like: a big stage show, competent performances, but none of the push and pull jamming that typified the bands early days. It’s hard to stretch a song out when you’re dealing with lighting cues, which look cool but leave many bands feeling trapped in the machine they created.

Knebworth, 4 August 1979

How big is too big? By 1979 Led Zeppelin was a wreck: Jimmy Page and John Bonham were knee-deep in their respective addictions, Robert Plant was still mourning the death of his young son, and to call John Paul Jones detached would be an understatement. Additionally, the advent of punk made dinosaur rockers like Led Zeppelin an artistic, if not so much popularly, dead-end.

Despite not having played together in two years, and not on English soil for four, the offer to play the Knebworth festival was too good to pass up. A huge demand for tickets extended the single show to two, and despite a lengthy rehearsal schedule, they only got two brief warmup shows in before hitting the giant field in front of their largest audience ever.

The band, especially Robert Plant, were frank in the assessment of the show. It was a disaster. The band, dressed like extras in Miami Vice, hobble through the hits, visibly shaken and drenched in sweat. Plant tries in vain to connect with the huge crowd, an emaciated Page acts like he’s in a completely different world, Bonham manages to keep it together only through his innate gifts, and Jones disappears into the shadows as often as he can.

The album they were ostensibly there to promote, In Through the Out Door, was just as detached as their performance. Mostly handled by Jones and Plant, it was a keyboard heavy excursion in excess that desperately needed Page’s, or even a strong producer’s, guidance. Unfortunately Page was absent more than not, nearing the apex of his heroin addiction and unreliable as Jones and Plant attempted to assemble the album.

The Rest

The rest of the DVD is a smattering of promo clips and truncated live performances, but honestly after the Knebworth stuff I was done. The success that Led Zeppelin chased, and ultimately succeeded in getting, turned out to be a golden cage they couldn’t escape. The magic of those early performances is evident, but a punishing tour schedule, personal tragedies, and addictions ultimately turned them into a shell of their former selves. They’ve reunited several times, resulting in disasters in the 80s and a competent showing for what became their final show. It wasn’t just that missing a drummer like Bonham disrupted the band’s chemistry, it’s that they were completely different people from when they started in the late 60s, and you can’t really bring that magic back once it’s gone.