The guitar player was a London session man, whose gigs included elevator muzak sessions that sickened him; he worked on the song “Goldfinger” with the bass player, who also did the arrangements on “To Sir With Love.” The singer was a wandering troubadour of sorts, kicked out of his house in the Midlands by parents who insisted on a career as an accountant; he was even considered a bad influence by the girlfriend of the drummer, who occasionally played with him despite her warnings.
Such inauspicious beginnings were immediately forgotten the first time the foursome jammed in a London basement. That’s where Led Zeppelin was born. While the band – Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, Robert Plant and John Bonham – never altered the cultural landscape the way The Beatles, The Who or the Rolling Stones did in the 1960s, within months of that first session in 1968 they quickly came to dominate and even define rock music for the next decade.
The documentary “Becoming Led Zeppelin” charts the individual stories from their childhood up until that explosive first jam and then the band’s early days through their second album, which would be the first of seven consecutive records to top the charts. Page, Plant and Jones sat for extensive interviews and then director Bernard MacMahon and writer/producer Allison McGourty dug up rare interviews with Bonham, who died in 1980.
MacMahon and McGourty, who previously made “American Epic” about the earliest recordings of roots music, recently spoke by video about this film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Where did this idea come from?
MacMahon: When I was 12, I read this little paperback about them that went up to 1974. I didn’t even know their music then but it was this story of these four kids trying to find a route to make a living in the music business. Two were in the Midlands, who couldn’t get a look in London because it was so snobbish in London, and two session musicians. And then they meet up but no one in Britain wants to sign them or book them. They go to America to get a deal but then they get eviscerated in the press. I found this story inspirational, like a quest, where you’ve got these four equal characters that are all essential to this thing working.
Q. Given how huge the band was, were you surprised that there had never been a Zeppelin documentary before?
MacMahon: I think there was no intention whatsoever of Led Zeppelin to do a film ever. They loathed doing TV and having to cut songs down to three minutes and they hated the awful sound quality of those recordings. And when they started, Rolling Stone and other newspapers in America eviscerated them. It was this huge slap in the face where the most respected and influential counterculture paper is literally giving the worst review you’ve ever read.
And so they decided they’d been building an audience without the press, without TV, so let’s keep it mysterious – you won’t be able to read about us and you won’t see us on TV so all you’ll have are these records and the live shows.
Q. Was it difficult getting them on board?
McGourty: We spent seven months researching, looking for any piece of archive that existed of them, which wasn’t a lot. Then we wrote a script and then we storyboarded how we saw the story and the story arc.
MacMahon: Everyone was telling us, “You’re absolutely insane. They’re never going to say yes.” But Jimmy Page was a huge fan of “American Epic” so he sat down to meet with us.
McGourty: And we had a seven-hour meeting where Bernard took him through the storyboard almost frame by frame. Occasionally Jimmy would throw in a little test.
MacMahon: At one point, I said something happened in late May and he said, I thought it was June. And he’d arrived with these plastic bags from a supermarket.
McGourty: We thought he’d brought sandwiches.
MacMahon: They had all the diaries he’d kept going back to the early sixties of all the studio work he’d done, and he poured them onto the table. But at the end, he said getting the others won’t be as easy. But we sent “American Epic” to John Paul Jones’ manager and the first story in it is about the Carter family and it turned out he’d made a pilgrimage to Macy Springs where they were from. And then Robert was a huge “American Epic” fan, too. And so we got invited backstage in Scotland.
McGourty: He asked us, “What are you doing next?”
MacMahon: We said, We want to do a film about Led Zeppelin. He looked nonplussed. But he invited us to come to Sheffield and then to Los Angeles. And he just says a very polite hello to us and then talks to 200 people. But at the end, he walks over and says, “Are we going to do this thing? Meet me in Birmingham.” So we fly back to Britain and then wonderfully, he walks through the door with John Bonham’s widow Pat, who came with all these photographs.
And when they all turned up for the interviews, they brought photographs and recordings and things I’d never seen before.
Q. Were you wary about making viewers wait 40 minutes until we get to the forming of the band?
It used to be longer and we trimmed it down, but if you cut it down any further, you don’t care about them individually. It’s absolutely fundamental that you follow the journey because the music that you are hearing is a result entirely of what those guys did up until they walked into that room. The elements of Zeppelin were fully formed before then and they recorded their first album within weeks of that first meeting.
Q. The band lost several lawsuits for not properly crediting the work of blues musicians. Did you think you should have pushed them more on that?
Plant says he lifted Willie Dixon’s lyrics for “Whole Lotta Love” and this is the first time I’ve ever seen them acknowledge that. And he talks about Sonny Boy Williamson being in his bloodstream so the acknowledgment of their influences is the strongest I’ve ever seen in anything about them – they really acknowledge those things that were important to them and give them credit.
Q. There’s a moment where you use the news of late 1968 to put context to the band’s formation but what’s striking is that the Beatles, Stones and Who always felt very much part of the cultural landscape, while Zeppelin became rock gods but didn’t influence people in the same way. Did they see themselves as part of or apart from the culture?
Mac Mahon: Because they communicate so little, they don’t contextualize themselves at all and the music just stands as this timeless thing. I also noticed that one reason they broke through is they literally have no Beatles influence in them and that’s very rare, especially when The Beatles were so ubiquitous. And Zeppelin started right when the Beatles were splitting up and the world was ready for something different. And I put those news clips in because governments had turned ferociously on the hippies and were starting to shoot them and toss them into paddy wagons and there’s all this violence in 1968. And Zeppelin’s music isn’t sweet. It’s aggressive, so it’s actually mirroring the times.
Q. You let the songs play out fully, which many films don’t. Why do that?
McGourty: We use the songs as a narrative device, to propel the story forward. When we show kids sticking their fingers in their ears at the first concert and no one gets it, we play “Communication Breakdown.” When they go to America for their record deal, we play “Your Time Is Gonna Come.” And when they start traveling across America, you hear “Ramble On.”
McMahon: And the audio is all pure with no compression, as it was intended to be heard in 1969.
The language of the music film has traditionally been dictated by budget – licensing music is expensive and talk is cheap. Almost every major studio said, no one’s going to watch a film with full songs. But if you’re giving the two hours of Led Zeppelin you better bloody show the music and let it stand. Otherwise, why make a film about these guys?