Becoming Led Zeppelin

2/8/2025

I grew up in an home where folk music reigned, and a bit like with those folks at the Newport Folk Festival who recoiled in disgust at Bob Dylan’s shift from acoustic to electric, my parents wouldn’t give this band house room in their collection. Therefore, save for the odd rendition of “Whole Lotta Love” or “Stairway to Heaven” I knew precious little about this band when I watched this documentary. It starts by introducing us to each of the members, and rather poignantly uses an interview with the late John Bonham as all four take us through their own musical influences before they met and make musical history. There’s some serious archive research gone into this film providing an astonishing array of material from not just those who inspired these men but of some of their own early appea

2/16/2025

In the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, four gifted British musicians took center stage as the biggest rock band in the world – Led Zeppelin. Born in 1968 out of their predecessors, the Yardbirds, the quartet of lead singer Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page, bassist John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham took the US and UK by storm with their unique fusion of hard rock tinged with blues, folk and supernatural influences. The band subsequently became the first group to unseat the Beatles from the top of the music charts – quite a feat, even if the Beatles were on the verge of breaking up at the time – and released a string of blockbuster LPs that eschewed the typical “singles” approach previously employed by other artists, a shift perfectly timed to cater to the emerging “album rock”