By Edie Everette / Herald Forum
Before we left for the theater to see the new documentary, “Becoming Led Zepplin,” I slipped a small, yellow-lined notepad into my shoulder bag. I was determined to take notes for an essay, but that didn’t happen because throughout the film I sat mesmerized with my jaw agape and could not move.
Luckily, I had polished off my popcorn during the previews.
Early in the documentary, black and white footage of a 1969 performance by Zepplin at the Gladsaxe Teen Club in Denmark feels palpable, as if you could chew on it. So fresh it plays like rock-and-roll jazz-blues, all driving and improvisational. The sounds that Jimmy Page gets out of the guitar that Yardbirds member Jeff Beck gave him, and that Page painted, are unbelievable. This performance on the big screen, along with the musicianship and youth of bassist John Paul Jones (his hair is so clean!) and drummer John Bonham are worth the movie ticket alone.
This band was a huge part of the soundtrack of my junior high and high school years. My boyfriend back then looked like singer Robert Plant; at least his hair did, plus his single mother was British. Our “clique” was the coolest in school, and we all hung out together in our time of sex, drugs and rock and roll. If sex was a band, it would be Led Zepplin; all that moaning pouring out of Plant’s lips in a chiseled marble face framed by locks of gold.
Zepplin’s music fit the lives of my schoolmates and I like a custom velvet suit. On weekend nights, we girls sneaked out of whomever’s house we were staying at to either walk or take a cab to Bill Bevan’s basement where we met the boys and all sat around playing records, kissing, drinking beer and ignoring the cat feces behind the doors. In other words, it was an odoriferous heaven on earth because no adults could find us.
Culturally, Led Zepplin was at the cutting edge of the glam bands that influenced us next. Jimmy Page’s supple fashions and Plant’s necklaces and wide open, midriff shirts with puffy little sleeves paved the road for David Bowie, Queen and the New York Dolls get-ups which soon had our boyfriends wearing eyeliner and shirts bearing images of sunsets and flowers.
In 1975 our junior high school group of friends went to see Led Zepplin at the Seattle Center Coliseum. Our boys Donald, John and Greg had snuck into the venue earlier in the day to hide in one of the bathrooms until the show began so they didn’t have to pay for tickets. Watching Page play the guitar that night set me up as a lifetime fan of his musicianship, along with an admiration for his Cheshire Cat smile.
Filmmaker Bernard MacMahon says in an interview that he made this documentary about the band’s beginnings because more people can relate to struggling for a dream versus being in the rarefied air that Led Zepplin made it to. He also said that he created it for young people in order that they may see how it is possible, amidst naysayers, to make it in their respective fields.
Watching the documentary in a theater sitting in cushy chairs with raised footrests and an amazing sound system took me, now a boring older lady, back to those incredible juicy days of my life when we were free and blissfully unknowing.
There were no cell phones or 24-hour news channels; only the sloping lawns of neighborhood parks, cheap weed, kegger parties, bi-centennial scarves, our beautiful bodies, and music.
Edie Everette is a writer and news junkie who lives in Index.
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