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‘Becoming Led Zeppelin’ Is an Exhilarating, Hard-Rocking Documentary of the Band’s First 18 Months
'Becoming Led Zeppelin' is an explosive and exciting (if rose-colored) documentary of the band's origin story and meteoric rise to fame.
Zeppelin would become the most dominant rock band on the planet for the next decade, with a blaze of classic songs, great albums and galvanizing tours until excess, tragedy and substance abuse brought them down, culminating with drummer John Bonham’s death from alcohol poisoning in 1980 at the age of just 32. Yet director Bernard MacMahon and his team have made the most of what they have, combining it with period photos, newsreels of contemporaneous events and footage of audiences at concerts and festivals of the era; perhaps most revelatory, they unearthed a previously unaired audio interview with Bonham, who almost never spoke to the press. It’s unfortunate, because that opening number was a perfect metaphor for Zeppelin in 1969: supercharging classic rock ingredients into something totally new, and the band’s explosive version of the song — which conjures visions of a train barreling down the track at full speed — evokes the way they were tearing through the world at the time.
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