Misty Mountain bop

Where would young males of every generation be without Led Zeppelin? If only as a reference point, a nod to excesses of yore, the British Zeppers have come to stand for something very important about growing up and, er, not growing up.

Let’s just get it out on the table right now: they were the best rock band. Ever.

Now, don’t get your knickers in a twist, all you Beatle fans. The Beatles were the best band, period. Best songs, best grasp of rock, best concepts, best personalities.

But let’s get one thing straight, all you Stones fans: your band is number three. I love the Rolling Stones, especially between 1965 and 1973, but while their lasting charm rests in a seeming inability to evolve like other Cro Magnon rock bands (naiveté being an essential ingredient of rock music), it kind of got boring after a while, especially when the band members were replaced by cyborgs around ‘93.

That leaves Led Zeppelin at the top, propelled by the inspired mesh of Robert Plant’s North Country wails, John Bonham’s powerful tribal drumming, John Paul Jones’ professional epoxy and Jimmy Page’s towering guitar architecture. Proof of this was offered to a new generation of kids with the release of the Led Zeppelin DVD a few years back. Unearthed footage of performances from 1970, 1972 and ’73 showed a sharp, tight, swaggering band, evolving in stage presence and command without giving in yet to the tidal wave of bloated excess.

But before all that, there was Zeppelin’s concert relic from 1976, The Song Remains The Same. Every lad of a certain age has watched this movie, either on bad VHS copy, or at a midnight movie screening, surrounded by clouds of acrid smoke. For me, the memory has never been an especially fond one.

Thanks to this artifact, and a number of badly recorded bootlegs of Zep tours over the years, many had concluded that the band really sucked live. But the recent evidence provided by the Led Zeppelin DVD and the 3-CD album “How the West Was Won” has earned the band a critical reappraisal. Onstage, it appears they really did stomp.

And now, along with surviving Zep members regrouping for a few concert dates, and a remastered “best of” collection (“Mothership”) reminding yet another generation of rockers how it’s supposed to be done, comes the re-release of The Song Remains The Same in a two-disc DVD version. Why should you revisit the Depths of Mordor and ascend yet again upon the Stairway to Heaven? I’m tempted to say, “Because it’s there.” But really, it’s because it’s Led Zeppelin. You have to give this one a fresh peek. If only to revisit your wasted youth.

Let’s start with Disc 2, which has about 40 minutes of extra features, though not the mother lode of fresh concert material we were hoping for. There’s some scratchy old TV footage of Zep being featured on a Tampa, Florida news show, because their ’73 concert was, at the time, the biggest-grossing, largest-audience event in history (surpassing The Beatles at Shea Stadium). Its only value is showing us how Americans looked in the early 1970s. What follows, though, are two never-before-seen live tracks: Over the Hills and Far Away and Celebration Day, both from the same 1973 Madison Square Garden shows that The Song Remains the Same was taken from.

Enjoy in particular Page’s wild country abandon during Celebration Day. Let’s face it: the guy really did have stage presence, before the demons finally descended. Dressed in fringed rock jacket, pants sporting gold stars and platform shoes, he picks his way across the stage like a demented cowboy, working out his frenzied tributes to James Burton and Chet Atkins, all remixed and overdriven through his trademark ’59 Les Paul Standard during the long ride-out. Towards the end of the solo, he bounces his knees in and out like a bowlegged bronco rider or a crazed line dancer. The moment is about as uncut, unaffected and exuberant as old rock ever got.

Other times, say during the Theremin display on the long Dazed and Confused from Disc 1, we get a glimpse of how Page acquired his reputation for demonic inclinations. He passes his hand across the electronic wave generator like a black wizard, sending out otherworldly sound ripples into the crowd and coaxing the stoned audience into submission. Black arts, indeed.

There are two other live tracks included here that were cut out of the original Song Remains the Same movie (Misty Mountain Hop and The Ocean), but they were previously added to the Led Zeppelin DVD, so the net gain is really two live tracks. There’s also some archival news footage about Zeppelin getting robbed on tour of $203,000 (boring the first time around, boring in the extended take) and a radio profile of the band by Rolling Stone writer Cameron Crowe which is visually uninteresting but has some decent insights.

Now, onto the main course. Legal difficulties stopped the distributor from recutting the old Song Remains the Same movie to restore the live cuts, so what you see is pretty much what you remember from the old VHS copy or midnight movie screening, except for the clouds of smoke and the fact that this version is restored and remastered with Dolby 5.1 and Track Stereo sound.

But sadly, the song remains the same. We get live performances of Rock and Roll, The Rain Song, No Quarter, Whole Lotta Love and others interspersed with completely barmy fantasy sequences devised by each band member. There’s “Bonzo” Bonham drag racing his AA Fueler and riding his Harley Davidson, and rubbing out evil businessmen while dressed as a 1930s gangster (and is that him polishing his Bentley during the snoozifying drum solo Moby Dick?); there’s John Paul Jones posing as a weird Mason-like character with three dark-hooded mates, and descending on the country cottage of a fair damsel, only to reveal it’s only his wifey, expecting him home for a late supper. (Kinky role-playing: a vital part of Zeppelin legend.)

Then there’s Plant’s Tolkien-inspired tromp through the forest, where he inspects mushrooms with a look of inexplicable glee on his face; later he rides a steed and releases a falcon, all in one take, and enters a castle where he burns a few guys with torches and trades hair-care secrets with another fair damsel; Jimmy Page’s fantasy involves climbing a high mountain and meeting the weird cloaked guy from “Led Zeppelin IV” at the top, and if you can find any deep meaning in this, you’ve probably taken too many trips to the Misty Mountain.

In short, the fantasy scenes are still completely daft, and keep cutting into otherwise fine concert footage. The backstage bits are clearly meant to show us how larger-than-life the band was (the shots of private jets and vintage car collections alone were probably enough to spark England’s punk rock movement in ’76). Plus, the silly camera tricks (split screens, solarizing, mirror footage of Page playing guitar) are distracting and about as dated as pet rocks and streaking.

True Zep fan will overlook such faults, though, and enjoy the sometimes-inspired performances from all involved (though at several points one wishes to grab Plant by his curly sheep locks, hurl him across the stage and demand that he stops twirling his index finger like a fairy elf whilst singing). Zeppelin’s music ages well for musicians, I think, because it’s fun to learn and fun to play. Anyone who’s tried to nail the riff to Black Dog or Over the Hills and Far Away on guitar knows that faraway look of accomplishment: the sense of scaling something ingeniously crafted by the riff-master himself. (But, as Wayne’s World reminds us, “Stairway to Heaven is NOT permitted.”) And Led Zeppelin’s music ages well for fans, not only because it recalls a period in their lives when they felt they had a completely valid License to Rock, but because these guys were, when you come right down to it, the best friggin’ rock band to ever take the stage.

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The Song Remains the Same is available locally through Warner Home Videos.