Led Zeppelin

Like an eternal phoenix, Led Zeppelin rise again from their own ashes. At the cinema, no less. Because, even 41 years on, The Song Remains The Same. And it still sounds incendiary today, just as it did back then. Even literally: the final shot of the concert film, back in Italian theaters in a remastered version for just three dates (March 25, 26 and 27, 2024), shows a gong in flames behind Bonzo's drum kit, right before the closing credits. Then again, the hard rock pioneers' concerts in early 1973 really were incendiary. A band in a state of grace, capable of hypnotizing and sweeping along the masses. The Madison Square Garden show depicted in the film was the final leg of a US tour that had taken in more than 30 cities, breaking attendance records previously held by the Beatles. Three consecutive sold-out shows, on July 27, 28 and 29, 1973. A tour in support of "Houses Of The Holy", the Zeppelin's fifth studio album, which was riding a wave of unbridled enthusiasm and delirium: the previous date, at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco, had drawn 50,000 people into an unrestrained whirl of euphoria and excess (including one guy completely naked and painted green, save for his pubic area, which was colored red).

In New York, however, Jimmy Page and company wanted to make history, even cinematic history, capturing on film their epic on-stage performances, where they played legendary tracks like "Rock And Roll", "Black Dog", "Stairway To Heaven", "Heartbreaker", "Whole Lotta Love" and many others, which live again in this 1976 rockumentary credited to two directors. Indeed, because good old Joe Massot, the young filmmaker initially chosen to shoot it by Peter Grant, the band's longtime manager, failed to satisfy Page and the others. "He'd rather neglected to film the concerts properly. There were no shots of 'Whole Lotta Love' — everyone was too out of it," Grant would later recall. So several songs were re-recorded from scratch and mimed at Shepperton Studios in Surrey for the new director, Peter Clifton, who rebuilt the Madison Square Garden stage. But Massot's blunders didn't end there: the director, who had already filmed the band live at the 1970 Bath Festival, had badly miscalculated how much film stock would be needed to shoot the shows. As a result, Led Zeppelin ended up with far too little footage to put together the film. Hence the decision to add in some extra scenes of the band members' private lives and various eccentricities. And legend has it that the tapes had to be retrieved directly from Massot's house, where he'd hidden them, and the director's camera was taken away as collateral (!). The choice of two directors also caused some almost comically awkward problems: bassist John Paul Jones, who had in the meantime shaved his head, was forced to wear a wig replicating the haircut he'd had at the original show, while in some sequences John Bonham appears at least ten kilos heavier, given the two years that had passed in between.

But these are hardly the only eccentricities in a film that oozes all the most naive, pioneering spirit of the Seventies. That includes the notorious extra scenes: video sequences retracing the band members' "private hallucinations" and esoteric fantasies. Starting with the surreal sequence of Robert Plant at Raglan Castle in Wales, cast as a knight astride a white horse, armed with a broadsword and charging off to rescue a damsel in distress. Not to mention the scenes where John Paul Jones reads fairy tales to his children or transforms into a black knight in a fog-shrouded graveyard, or where "Bonzo" plays at being a gangster, tearing around in hot rods and on motorbikes, or Jimmy Page searches for the hermit depicted on the cover of "IV".

There's no shortage of other curious moments either, like the manager's tirade against a local promoter over unauthorized merchandising, or the scene in the Madison Square Garden garage as the band leaves the venue, which would later be recreated in an episode of the TV series "Vinyl".

Beyond its more naive aspects, though, the film shows the full power of a perfect rock machine: Led Zeppelin in their magic year of 1973. Magnetic, electrifying, pyrotechnic performances (in every sense of the word). With a relentless rhythm section (John Paul Jones on bass, John Bonham on drums), the epic guitar work - yes, including the double-necked one - of his majesty Jimmy Page grinding out riff after riff, and the fervent, angelic vocals of an unstoppable Robert Plant onstage, shirt open and bell-bottom jeans, playing the archetypal rock frontman. It's a taut show right from the opening notes of the intro "Rock'n'Roll" and the title track "The Song Remains The Same", and it leaves you breathless, between stunning voice-guitar duels ("The Ocean"), hypnotic performances (the eternal "Stairway To Heaven" is a jaw-dropper in its imaginative power, with Page on the double-necked Gibson, but there's also a "No Quarter" dominated by an inspired Jones on keyboards), moments of throbbing intensity (a positively harrowing "Since I've Been Loving You"), displays of sheer power (Bonham's astonishing drum solo on "Moby Dick"), and moments of devastating rock pathos, like when the violin bow shatters to pieces during "Dazed And Confused" as Page duets with Plant's primal wail. Until finally "Whole Lotta Love" arrives to close the liturgy, in a version even harder and more nerve-wracking, sending Madison Square Garden into a frenzy, complete with fire and flames at the close.

Power, magic and madness, then: the cornerstone ingredients of an entire decade, whose traces of excess also seep through here, if only imagined - who knows what could have happened aboard that Boeing 720 (nicknamed "The Starship"), the band's private plane, equipped with a bar and bedrooms, which legend has it was also well-stocked with coke and other accessories. "That tour was a truly absurd thing," recalled singer-songwriter Roy Harper, who opened those American Zeppelin shows. "Sometimes some pretty inappropriate things happened backstage, really vicious stuff." And vicious it remains, even after more than forty years: the firepower of "The Song Remains The Same", whose soundtrack was personally supervised by the band members.

Worth seeing on the big screen too, but always worth listening to.

Titolo originale: The Song Remains the Same

Directed by: Peter Clifton and Joe Massot

Distribution: Nexo Digital

Running time: 138'

Country/Year: USA, 1976

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