1970: Rock band "Led Zeppelin" poses for a portrait in 1970. (L-R) John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, ... [+]
You can rightly argue who the greatest rock band of all time is. You’d probably be right if you went with either The Beatles or Led Zeppelin. However, one thing that cannot be debated is what band best defined rock stardom. There is no arguing that no one ever captured the essence of rock stardom better than Zeppelin. There is an incredible mythology that surrounds the quartet of Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham.
There has never been anything comparable in music. Case in point, when the three surviving members reunited in 2007 for one show with Bonham’s son Jason, 20 million people from 50 countries applied for one of the 18,000 tickets. Twenty million! No disrespect to Taylor Swift, who I like, but Zeppelin makes “The Eras” tour, the biggest tour of all time, look like a club run.
So much of the reason for the phenomenal impact Zeppelin continue to have is mystique. In the band’s mid-Seventies prime, when they were as big as The Beatles, a decade earlier, they rarely did interviews. They didn’t need to. And when Bonham passed in 1980, and they broke up three weeks later, they never looked back. In 45 years they played two reunion shows – Live Aid in 1985 and the 2007 tribute to Atlantic Records head Ahmet Ertegun.
Having interviewed or met all three living members, one of the things I admire so much about them is they do not live in the past. It’s rare they’ve ever stepped back in time. So, for filmmakers Bernard MacMahon and Allison McGourty to get all of them to participate in a magnificent new documentary, Becoming Led Zeppelin, is a great accomplishment.
I spoke to them about how they pulled this off.
Steve Baltin: The film is so wonderful. I grew up on Zeppelin. Like I said, I got to meet all three living members. There was one part early on, where Plant was talking about, “Oh, this is me.” I was cracking up because I have interviewed him, and I had to work my ass off for it. He was wonderful. But I definitely had to work to get him to open up? How much of a ringer did he put you guys through?
Allison McGourty: We’d done a lot of homework beforehand. We spent seven months in Santa Monica researching, making a timeline, writing a script and preparing a storyboard.
Bernard MacMahon: We reached out. We had people for the better part of a year saying you're absolutely insane. They're never going to agree. They've never done a film, but I knew it was a good story. It came out of, we've done these films, American Epic. It was four films we did. They were narrated by Robert Redford, and they're on the first blues country gospel records, Cajun, "Native American Records," made in the 1920s and '30s. So, it's essentially the DNA of American music, recorded music. And it's all unseen film footage. So, we'd done these movies and we wanted a film that would pick up from the next era, which is post-World War II and take us through the Sixties. I said to Alison I read this book when I was 12, it was just called Led Zeppelin. I discovered later, it was like the first ever biography written about them. A little paperback book. It's a very straightforward telling of these four guys trying to make their way through the music business from childhood, and then this chance meeting on Gerard Street. And then this thing happening in this room and them setting out on this mission, like this Arthurian thing really, to try and break through. No one in Britain wants to know, no booking a gig, they couldn't get arrested, so they go to America to get a gig and they come out there and start breaking through with everything Jimmy's learned with The Yardbirds on the underground scene. The press eviscerates them, but they march on and by the end of the year, 1970, they've actually knocked the Beatles off the top spot. They come back to this hero's welcome in Britain. So, the whole story had this feeling of quests I loved as a kid, like Jason and the Argonauts or The Odyssey, these quest books. This was one of those. Because I found that story really inspiring as a 12-year-old. I read it a couple of times and I found it very moving. Then I subsequently started to try and track down and listen to their music. But when I read that book at 12, I didn't know a note of their music. So, I knew the story was terrific, because I loved it without knowing what the songs sounded like. I subsequently discovered that most people that think they're into Zeppelin have never heard of this book and it went out of print in the Seventies. The guy that runs one of the big Led Zeppelin fanzines said that book, which I haven't read since I was 12, by the way, but the story stayed with me said that book contains a lot of key information that's since been lost out of the Zeppelin lexicon. And these tabloid books that have appeared subsequently are missing that key information that's in there. So, for me, it was very much this personal story of these people, who they were, and then why this thing works. I said this, we put this together, then we got a meeting with them, and we found, fortunately, Robert and Jimmy were fans of American Epic, like really into it. So, you have that kindred thing then, and we're presenting this to them. But these, these were hardcore meetings, like with Jimmy…
McGourty: It was seven hours, the first meeting with him. We flew from LA to London, got a room at a hotel, and we took him through the storyboard. Over afternoon tea that took like seven hours.
MacMahon: It's a hundred-page storyboard, only images, not a single word of text deliberately printing on it, so everything's been committed to my memory, every name, every place. You go to see people, my view is you've got to be a serious authority on that subject.
McGourty: You get one chance, one chance only.
MacMahon: Plus, I wouldn't want to make a film unless I thought I was up there in terms of knowledge on this. I'd say this is the point where you see Robert Plant singing for the first time. He said, “What was the name of that group that Robert was in?” I'd be like “Obs-Tweedle.”
McGourty: “Very good. Carry on.” And then we'd go on and then there'd be more tests like dates.
MacMahon: Yeah. So, one point I said, and so in June you did this, and he'd arrived at the meeting with these shopping bags filled, I thought he brought sandwiches or something. One point I said so yeah this in June you do such and such he goes let me check that date and he goes to the shopping bags and pours them out on the table and the shopping bags contain all his diaries going back to the early Sixties. Then with Robert we reached out to Robert.
McGourty: That was a bit harder because Robert so the first place we met Robert was in Perth, Scotland his he was on tour with Justin Adams.
MacMahon: We met him first in Perth, Scotland. Then we were invited backstage. He was saying how much he loved American Epic. Then after a while, he said, “So what are you planning next?” We said, “Funny, you mentioned that, we're thinking of doing Led Zeppelin.” He sort of looked a bit non-plussed and I think I had in my bag some piece of paperwork that indicated was we were getting close or we'd found where Gerard Street rehearsals had been, which has always been a great source of mystery in Led Zeppelin historians, exactly which building that place was. The meeting ended and he was very friendly, then he left and he stuck his head around the door like that and sort of said, “I'm interested, come and meet me in Sheffield.”
McGourty: So, a week later we went to the gig in Sheffield and there were a lot more people in the green room at that concert, so we didn't really get a chance to talk to him, but he did say at the end, come and see me in Los Angeles at the Orpheum, where he was going to be performing. So, we went home to LA and went to the gig at the Orpheum, and in the green room after that meeting, there were at least 200 people in the room.
MacMahon: He came and said incredibly friendly hello to us, and then as he does at these things, he went and literally talked to every single group of people for almost two hours.
McGourty: Yeah, it was really nerve wracking. And at the end of it, there was just us on one side of the room and him and his manager, Nicola, and the other is leaning against the wall.
MacMahon: Then he walked over towards us and went, “Are we going to do this thing? “Ge goes, meet me in Birmingham. England. So, we flew back to Birmingham, met him, and he arrived with Pat Bonham. And when we saw Pat Bonham, that was the first time we thought, “Okay, this looks like it might happen.”
Baltin: As someone who grew up on Zeppelin, that footage of them listening to the interview with John was mind blowing. Did that come from Pat?
MacMahon: That actually came from his sister Deborah Bonham. She's inherited it from them. That was a result of a huge amount of work, trying to track down interviews with him talking in good quality. We were relentless because when we met Robert, he goes, “But you mentioned everyone is going to be talking. How are you going to have John? I've never heard anything with him talking more than a few words.” We said, “Look we managed to find all this stuff with American Epic and that was an era before there was talking pictures.” We just had this belief that we could find something and it took a lot.
