There’s pummeling hard rock, yes, and then there’s the nuclear-grade explosion of Shirley Bassey performing the theme to “Goldfinger” — a whole separate beast. In one of pop music’s oddest confluences, future Led Zeppelin members Jimmy Page and bassist John Paul Jones sat in on that 1964 recording session, years before the band came together. The two musicians remember Bassey’s command with smiles on their faces in the new documentary “Becoming Led Zeppelin,” still blown away.
It’s a charming moment in a profile that could have used more of them. In retrospect, it makes sense that backing Bassey would prove formative: So much of Led Zeppelin was about power, poise and drama (or melodrama, if you think of the first album’s overwrought “Babe I’m Going to Leave You”). And putting those elements together into a controlled, disciplined package is what the group would do better than any other before it — and most others since.
Unfortunately, that same level of control has resulted in a timid, far-from-revelatory film, authorized by the three surviving Zeppelin vets and graced by their presence in new interviews that give off the faint scent of impatience: Can we get on with it? Drummer John Bonham, who died in 1980, is represented by recently unearthed audio, also stubbornly uninsightful.
Why are these guys so boring? It’s a mystery that won’t be probed by director Bernard MacMahon and co-writer Allison McGourty, who tick off the usual gigs and recording anecdotes on the rise to fame with a then-this-happened dutifulness. (Performance footage is fun but “Becoming Led Zeppelin” may in fact have more fudged overdubs than “The Song Remains the Same.”) Meanwhile, if ever a project called out for some historical context and a few talking heads to speak to Led Zeppelin’s revolutionary hugeness — something that could be lost on today’s audiences — it’s this one. But no other voices have been allowed, a mistake.
Instead, an intriguing portrait emerges of Page as shrewd Svengali, flying to New York City in 1968 with a completed, self-financed album under his arm to negotiate with Atlantic Records potentate Ahmet Ertegun personally, along with muscle Peter Grant. No singles, the riff-wrangler insisted. Take it or leave it. Oh, for a feature-length documentary on just this business trip alone: “Selling Led Zeppelin.”
Only a hardened viewer with no sense of fun (or ears) will find this music a drag. Almost every track of the band’s first two full-lengths is a miracle and you can hear the rules of metal being forged in songs like “Communication Breakdown” and “Whole Lotta Love.” (Seeing the film in deafening Imax is certainly the way to go.) But as any superfan will tell you, “Becoming Led Zeppelin” ends when things are just about to get interesting: a pivot to acoustic folk, a plunge into drug abuse and bad decisions — and even more terrific music. None of that danger comes through here.
‘Becoming Led Zeppelin’
MPA rating: PG-13 (for some drug references and smoking)
Running time: 2:01
How to watch: Now in theaters
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