Plant was behind the wheel of a car, navigating the hilly countryside when his vehicle went over a cliff. Led Zeppelin were less than five months removed from some of the greatest performances they’d ever staged at London’s Earls Court arena, and had scattered to the wind in order to avoid England’s more severe tax laws. On August 5, 1975, Plant and his family were vacationing in the Greek Island of Rhodes. Here’s the story of how it all went down. As it turned out, their presumptive moment of triumph was marked by bad vibes, lingering illnesses, heavy drug use, messy performances, violence, and even riots, that all ended in a tragedy that nearly derailed the group entirely. The British group’s run through America that year was supposed to mark their return as the biggest rock band on the planet, after a future rendered uncertain by a catastrophic car accident that involved singer Robert Plant the year before. At our best we could just wipe the floor with the lot of them.” For almost ten years that statement was almost indisputably true, until suddenly it wasn’t.Įxactly 40 years ago, in the Spring and Summer of 1977, Led Zeppelin embarked on what would be their final tour through the country that made them superstars. “The most important thing was always the stage show… at our worst we were still better than most. “The records were just a starting point,” bassist John Paul Jones once explained. But for as crucial as their recorded output was, it was on the road that they really burnished their standings as the wildest, most sonically adventurous band in a decade overflowing with groups who made names for themselves by redefining the very definition of the word debauchery.Įven for as wild as the stories about mud sharks and racing motorcycles up and down the halls of hotels are, it was onstage where the real fireworks happened.
Their genre-defining records set the template for brutal, blues-based rock that thousands, maybe even millions of bands have tried to adopt in their wake. Throughout the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Led Zeppelin earned a reputation for being the biggest, and heaviest band in rock and roll.
#LED ZEPLIN MOVIE#
Anyway, it is what it is, a bloated, over-pretentious movie by the biggest band in the world at the time with only some good musical moments.Listen To This Eddie is a bi-weekly column that examines the important people and events in the classic rock canon and how they continue to impact the world of popular music. Strange also for the movie to be released three years after the concerts themselves, especially as by that time they'd made two further albums, including my favourite the double album "Physical Graffiti".
Regarding the music itself, some of it was okay, but I just wanted the never-ending versions of "Dazed and Confused" and "Moby Dick" to just, well, end. As I understand it, the group wasn't entirely happy with their own performances and you can certainly hear Plant for one running his voice in on the early numbers, purposely avoiding the high notes until he's well into the gig. Otherwise there was an obvious mis-match between the actual concert footage itself and studio close-ups filmed later on a sound stage (Jones's changing outfits are a giveaway), with elsewhere lots of flashy camera tricks conjured up to no doubt jazz up proceedings. Make of these what you will, I personally struggled with them, with none of the four pulling off a "Ringo" between them. The individual segments are pretty weird too, usually inserted into the middle of one of the expanded songs, and see bassist Jones chase his wife through a dark forest on horseback wearing a fright mask, singer Plant act out a mediaeval play-let, guitarist Page climb up a never-ending hill to meet a white-shrouded ancient version of himself and drummer Bonham's more down-to-earth depictions of himself downing pints, tending his farm or racing a dragster.
There they deliver a heavyweight set of barely ten songs some stretched to almost interminable limits with extended soloing which if you're a committed fan, you'll no doubt love, but if a casual acquaintance like me, find simply interminable.
#LED ZEPLIN SERIES#
It starts off oddly with the group's "don't mess with me" manager Peter Grant getting to play out his own imagined scenario, re-enacting a gangland shoot-out of a bunch of ghoulish individuals before we see the group themselves en-route to their Madison Square Garden concert series in New York. I'm no dyed-in-the-wool Zep fan, but I've been listening to them a bit lately and decided to watch this concert film with its unusual added features of both fly-on-the-wall footage and highly stylised fantasy sequences, the latter focusing on the individual group members' own flights of fancy.
0 kommentar(er)
