I might have called this post Rambling On with Led Zepp, or even Rock History Rolled my Story. This Sony Pictures film has been out on Netflix for a couple of months now, saving me having to travel to neighbouring South East Asian lands to catch it. Though my life has been entwined with this band from the age of 8 or 9, the main story here is of course Led Zeppelin. I have used band members' nicknames interchangeably with their real ones: Percy is singer Robert Plant; Pagey is guitarist Jimmy Page; Bonzo is drummer John Bonham, and bassist John-Paul Jones is himself.
This first ever band-authorised Zeppelin rockumentary opens with a brief string about the end of the Second World War, before burgeoning adulthood swells into becoming via the first album’s opener, Good Times, Bad Times. The band’s elder and founder, Jimmy Page, was born in January 1944 while the war was still raging in Anzio and Leningrad and the atom bomb was nearing its obscene fruition in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Credit to the filmmakers for setting that essential scene with original footage.
Jimmy Page’s is the film’s first long focus, fittingly: as the band’s motivational leader, he’s also the oldest with almost five years on the band’s youngest, Robert Plant. We’ve heard briefly from Zeppelin’s other musical lynchpin, John-Paul Jones by this point. Drummer John Bonham died in December 1980 having given few interviews. Some of those he did do are premiered here with the live reactions of the other three also hearing it for the first time; an intimate, warm touch.
Throughout this documentary you can almost hear filmmakers Allison McGourty and Bernard MacMahon telling the lads it’s their last chance, or stand even, for them each to set the record straight forever. This was mostly filmed several years ago, these guys being elder rock statesman generation even then.
The one who comes through most vividly in this regard is Robert Plant, who is half Romani on his mother’s side. Robert’s eyes in that early childhood picture look much more distinctly Asian than they have through his adulthood. While YouTubers have made much of Plant’s declining looks in recent years, at 75 he’s well past the average UK Romani lifespan of 66-70, which is shorter than that of the non-Romani UK population by up to 15 years. To boot, he’s still recording and performing.
It’s no surprise that the band’s twirling, mic-hurling frontman should want to be truly seen here once and for all. Serious about influences Sonny-Boy Williamson and his local (Birmingham UK) Perry Foster’s Delta Blues Band, he’s sanguine about his parents' negative attitudes toward his aspirations (his father wanted him to become an accountant). Plant moves from cool to cold here: rejected, possibly rejecting. Speaking of the Ramble On lyrics, which he wrote, he confirms that this is the story of his life, to move on.
We feel a steel edge also when he relates the band’s early success in the U.S. “What could you do? You couldn’t go back to Daddy and Mummy then” — such a showman Robert is, adapting through irony even in relating how his parents have given up on him.
He describes how, after leaving home he had only “…a brown suitcase and some penicillin”. He’s being ironic again but also obtuse. Is this phrase jamming with Livin’ Lovin’ Maid from Led Zeppelin II “With a purple umbrella and a fifty-cent hat” – or Paddington Bear? Percy does mention the lone vulnerability of his homelessness until Jimmy brought him to his Pangbourne boathouse.
Robert’s claim that his and Bonzo’s wives succumbed eventually to a celebratory feeling about their husbands’ touring the US five times in seven months feels more to me like grasping at putting the record on a positive course rather than the definitive truth. But he keeps a straight face here at least.
John-Paul Jones recalls hearing Robert sing for the first time: “What you doin’ up there? You’ll hurt yourself, man.” — intentionally or not, this conjures the image of the Icarus figure of Zeppelin’s Swansong record label, flying too close to the sun, his wings melting.
When I interviewed Robert Plant at Liverpool’s Radio City in 1982, he fitted in with my hometown tropes as the perennial raconteur with ready answers (to my questions on the band’s later, fifth album, Houses of the Holy and of course on football; Planty was a big Wolves fan). When I handed him the bootleg of the Knebworth gig to sign, he flipped it over and said, “I know, I’ll sign Pagey’s balls.” Why not?
I had been at that first Knebworth concert: August 4th 1979, as a 15-year-old at my second ever gig. Staying on for the encores meant missing my bus home 160 km away, but that didn't matter. I held on to that bootleg for just 5 years longer, as I’d nothing else to sell to get me on the overland route to India and Nepal on one train and on hitched trucks through Europe, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, Punjab and Nepal. Unlike those on a set year work break, I was following my nomadic nose, my spiritual life and true home: bringing it. Not that I thought of this at the time, but my lifelong inclination toward meditation was taking me in directions mirroring Plant and Page's musical and Romani geography: Page's sitar tuning on Black Mountain Side, the rare Bombay sessions, Kashmir and later as Page & Plant in Marrakech.
Back to the rockumentary, the three surviving members are all addressing specific points once and forever: Robert and Bonzo high-five everyone; Jimmy acknowledges John-Paul was quite a force to be reckoned with musically; John-Paul respects Bonzo’s right (bass drum) foot and loves it. John Paul Jones is at his most focused and purposive in describing the role of the bassist especially as “fitting right in”, his arms chopping down animatedly. For somebody whose role is defined by just fitting in, John-Paul comes across so expressive facially through his eyes especially. There's also something intimate bordering on shy there, as with those who thrive in the company of one or two others.
At times it looks like the band members are trying to raise more questions than the two-hour film can answer in order to keep us talking about them into perpetuity. Ahmet Ertogun for example – Atlantic Records’ co-founder – is in several of the pictures but is never mentioned, even though Zeppelin dedicated their O2 London reunion gig in December 2007 to his memory.
Of the very few images we may have seen before in this film, that superlative band pic, Pagey holding the viewer in his palm, works its way in on the wings of what I think of as the sex magick section of Whole Lotta Love. Page is careful not to frame it as sexual here, but rather as an “avant-garde” section in order to deter producer Micky Most from releasing the track as a single.
He does revisit, however, the old black magic controversy: “With songs like Dazed and Confused the intensity is building, it’s positively evil.” Page could easily have had that edited out had he wanted to play safe. My assumption is that he wants to stay controversial and talked about. In interviews scattered over the post-Zeppelin years – he rarely gave them during their span – he has come across as a well-meaning new-ager whose foibles couldn’t offend a fly. That said, the facts remain the same: his buying and living in controversial mage Aleister Crowley’s mansion Boleskine House in his youth, while also briefly owning an occult bookshop.
Describing the mixing of the second album with Eddie Kramer at A&R Studios in New York, Page also asserts: “It was often more than two (pairs of) hands on the deck” (my words in parentheses). Still impassioned to represent life’s unexplained elements, Pagey wants to say the least rather than labour the point.
Having famously shown reluctance to celebrate his own birthdays, when Page outlines the progress made during the band’s first year, he takes it from January 9 1969, his own non-mentioned 24th birthday – playing in San Francisco – to their first gig at the Royal Albert Hall on that same date in 1970. We see Jimmy with hand on heart at the end of that gig, clearly touched.
Robert Plant’s handwriting on his early draft of the Ramble On lyrics, is so much that of a dreamer. “America meant everything to me because I was in a place I wanted to be emotionally” — he really needed to be in America’s wider world. The second time he refers to his vulnerability is with reference to his shared songwriting with Pagey – that openness being prerequisite, he attests, for good songwriting.
You might think Robert’s on a quest for the spiritual home: “Is this (Bath Festival) gonna bring it on home?” He’s so magnificently faux-childlike in setting the scene: "I just remember we were in a tent and somebody landed on the moon. I mean, can you imagine just being in America, as a kid, more or less, and just looking up, and you got this thing going on with the music, and you look up and there’s a man on the moon?” This straight-faced storytelling of Percy’s is a Romani gift, as well as a Midlands generational one, and he has set himself up as a storyteller earlier on. The lone band member speaking direct to camera in 1973’s concert film The Song Remains the Same, Plant emerges as the Leonine entertainer here also.
Here’s my own take on that same moon landing, written some years later; I was just five years old when it occurred. This is one of my very first memories of anything:
Moon Landing
I wanted to feel connected; I wanted
to stay up to hear it, live
on the radiogram; my dad sent me to bed.
That square at the top of the stairs’ first flight
(several large steps down from the bedroom,
for a five-year-old), became my own moon landing
in the light that edged in through the window
from up there; there where they had just touched down.
Arm outstretched, I tried to reach it.
Next day, a crescent moon-shard
lay on the sheet of the sky
as though it had fallen there somehow
like a piece of torn-off fingernail.
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“So why should it ever stop?”, asks Robert. Were the context here not limited to Zepp’s first two albums, this would have to be intentionally ironic, courting controversy. We’ve already had Plant reminding us that rambling on is the story of his life, bringing to mind the fact that it has been he who has declined the myriad demands for a Zeppelin reunion.
While McGurty and MacMahon may have coaxed Zeppelin’s front duo to re-engage on perennial controversies, it’s difficult to imagine Pagey and Percy needing much of a push. This is one for the fans to watch, rinse and rewatch.
& & & & &
Thanks for reading! I’d like to feature a few of Lawrence Pettener’s author pages here:
Kwailo Lumpur’s author page here at Malaysian news aggregator Newswav:
https://newswav.com/publisher/kwailo-lumpur-2170. All of my foodie book, Malaysia on Yer Plate is here, plus Malaysia in Yer Mirror.
Poetry reviews at Asian Review of Books:
The Star newspaper, Malaysia:
Mohani Niza’s excellent The Culture Review features around 16 of my interviews and reviews:
This post was produced on Temuan land.
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