How ‘Becoming Led Zeppelin’ Became One of the Modern Era’s Great Rock Docs: Lots of Cooperation, Zero Interference and a Director Who Cared Most About the Music
There hasn’t been any shortage of music documentaries on big screens lately, but most are presented as special events that come in and out for one or two nights on a weekend, without settling in for a regular run.
The Sony Classics release “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” though, has defied expectations of what a modern rock doc can do in cinemas, on its way to finding the favor of fans as a home video hit, too. Its success is, well, highly becoming.
Director Bernard MacMahon sat down with Variety to talk about the long process of making and then finding a buyer for the film, admitting there were plenty of companies that turned it down. The objections were plentiful, as he recalls it, when he and producer Allison McGourty were touring executive suites. But maybe most curious of all, to those who didn’t get the film, is that it doesn’t follow a traditional “VH1 Behind the Music” rise, fall and embattled rebirth narrative. “Becoming Led Zeppelin” is a rise-and-rise story, climaxing with the recording of “Led Zeppelin II.” If someone wanted to make a movie about how things got bigger and more out of control later on, they were welcome to it, but MacMahon knew how Zeppelin changed the music world at their outset was more than enough to fill two gratifying hours. And sending music lovers out of the world’s theaters happy and humming (to the extent that anyone can hum “Bron-Yr-Aur”) is a byproduct of the decision to focus on a celebratory but still revelatory origin story
The signs were good in February when the doc grossed $2.6 million in its first weekend, playing a limited run on Imax screens — the best number ever for an Imax music film — before crossing over to regular cinemas. By the first week of April, the film had grossed $10 million domestically and more than $12 million worldwide, rare territory for a documentary. Now, fans everywhere are re-streaming the home release and trying to tweak their speakers to make it sound as good as it did in state-of-the-art theaters… though MacMahon stresses that he only wanted to make the film sound as good as the original pressing of “Led Zeppelin II” did roaring out of mere stereo speakers.
Where did the idea to do a movie focused on the rise of Led Zeppelin come from?
Way back, my mom was an antique dealer, and when I had just turned 12, one of her boxes had this paperback book in it called “Led Zeppelin” (“The Led Zeppelin Biography,” by Ritchie Yorke, published in 1976). It was quite beat-up then, but it was published in in the mid-‘70s, covering the early part of their career — the first (long-form) thing that had been written about them. I didn’t have any idea who they were, but I found the story completely fascinating and inspiring.
When children have something they want to do, there can be something that inspires that that might be useful; it could be paintings, could be anything. And what the story was about to me was these kids that had this passion for music and somehow they managed to protect that light against all the odds, while constantly fueling it. And I just was very inspired by the fact that they didn’t appear to waste a minute, whether it was Jimmy Page or John Paul Jones as teenagers getting into the session world, working like demons, checking out what the recording engineers are doing, trying to figure out how this thing worked. All of them were constantly doing that, pushing themselves out there. Then when they finally all meet in the rehearsal room, they recognize, with all the stuff they’ve already done, that this this is a special thing. And it felt to me that the story was like one of those Jason and the Argonauts or Odyssey or Arthur stories, where you suddenly call all the skills of these strangers together. With all of your knowledge and focus, you’ve got to be open to collaboration, to working with other people
So I found the story super inspiring, even though I hadn’t heard the music. When my mum saw me reading it a second time, she pointed out that there was this guy that used to buy antiques from us; he would always be trying to buy my mother’s fireplace, and he’d be asking me how I was doing at school and stuff like that. We didn’t know who he was until my dad saw him sort of ditching into the silver Rolls Royce he parked around the corner … it was Peter Grant (Zeppelin’s manager), coming into our house. So I had this connection with the story. I think a few weeks after reading it a couple of times, I went and started to explore the music. And I was listening to it knowing what had gone into the music. A year or so on, I remember thinking that the perception of this band is not the perception that I have. I was hearing that the drummer was into these African American soul and jazz rhythms, as was the bass player, and it was this very interesting fusion of people. And I thought, this is, in some ways, a misunderstood group.
With this film coming out, I discovered that that little book I read went out of print very shortly after it came out, and it’s been completely forgotten. And all the things that have been written about them were all written quite some time after the demise of the group, written looking back, where this was from a perspective near the beginning, looking forward. And in cinema, for the most part, those are the exciting stories — the things that are looking forward.
So when we finished our “American Epic” films [an acclaimed three-part documentary about recording techniques for rural artists in the early 20th century], I spoke to my producer, Allison, who came to really kind of drive it. I said, “I think this is the next story I’d like to do.” So it really came from the heart. It was something I genuinely had this affection for, and it’d been meaningful for me as a kid. These guys had never done a (documentary) film. And apart from a quote here or there that Jimmy might do when some albums are being reissued, they never talk about this. And so I thought, this is a story that’s never been done.
