In a word it’s…great.
My buddy Bob scored us a pair of tickets for a showing of the just-released Becoming Led Zeppelin documentary past Tuesday at the IMAX in Rockaway (yeah right at the mall there). I didn’t know much about the movie beyond the fact that this was this was the first documentary the band members, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, Robert Plant authorized, that it was a long time coming and we surely need it.
And as I say…it was great.
There was a time when bands like Led Zep (and to be sure, there were/are very few bands like Led Zep) ruled the FM airwaves and were marching Viking-like (don’t get on my ass here with how much or how little Vikings actually marched…you get my point!) the world delivering stunning concerts to sold out crowds. But what’s great about Becoming Led Zeppelin is that we get lots of the band’s pre-Zep days, footage and talk about the various members earlier music careers (drummer John Bonham is represented here in never-heard, rare interview snippets) and a solid history of the UK music scene and how these musicians fit into it and how they broke even higher from it.
And yes, the Zep footage, lots from the band’s personal archives, is amazing, as was the sound in IMAX (thanks again, Bob).
I really did not want this movie to end, and I rarely say that about a movie these days. Even traipsing out to a theater is a big deal, seeing what movie prices are and knowing there are very few movies I feel I have to see on a big screen; generally, the movie-going experience for me personally is not the fun it used to be, and never will be again, for reasons I shan’t tickle across here. But with Becoming Led Zeppelin, I left my house of the holy, managed a misty mountain hop and surely enjoyed a celebration day of a brilliant film that made me remember a time when music meant so much to me.
