- The Garden Tapes - a study of sources of the live material and the edits for release on this film.
- The Song Remains the Same at IMDb
| The Song Remains the Same | |
|---|---|
| File:TheSongRemainstheSameDVDcover.jpg | |
| Directed by | Peter Clifton Joe Massot |
| Produced by | Peter Grant |
| Starring | John Bonham John Paul Jones Jimmy Page Robert Plant |
| Cinematography | Ernest Day |
| Edited by | Humphrey Dixon |
| Music by | Led Zeppelin |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
Release dates | October 20, 1976 (UK) |
Running time | 137 min. |
| Language | English |
The Song Remains the Same is a concert film by the English rock band Led Zeppelin. The recording of the film took place during three nights of concerts at New York's Madison Square Garden in 1973, during the band's Houses of the Holy tour. The film premiered on October 21, 1976 at Cinema I in New York. The video of the film was released on October 25, 1990, and the DVD was released on December 31, 1999.
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Since late 1969, Led Zeppelin had been planning on filming one of their live performances for a projected movie documenting the band. The group's manager, Peter Grant, believed that they would be better served by the big screen than by television, because he regarded the sound quality of the latter as inadequate. The first attempt was the filming (by Peter Whitehead and Stanley Dorfman) of Led Zeppelin's Royal Albert Hall performance on January 9, 1970, but the lighting was judged to be mediocre, and the film was shelved (this footage was later remastered and featured on the 2003 release Led Zeppelin DVD). Another attempt was organised for the outdoor Bath Festival on June 28, 1970, but only a little footage was filmed, and was similarly deemed unsatisfactory.
On the morning of July 20 1973, Jimmy Page and Peter Grant made contact with Joe Massot, who had previously directed George Harrison's Wonderwall. Massot was already known to Grant as he and his wife had moved into a house in Berkshire in 1970, where they made friends with their neighbour Jimmy Page and his girlfriend Charlotte. Grant had previously turned down offers by Massot to make a film of the band, but with the huge success of Led Zeppelin's 1973 tour of the United States, Grant changed his mind and offered him the job of director. Massot agreed and assembled a crew in time for Led Zeppelin's last leg of the tour starting on July 23, 1973 in Baltimore. He subsequently filmed the group's three concert performances at Madison Square Garden on the nights of July 27, 28, and 29, 1973. The film was entirely financed by the band and shot on 35mm with a 24-track quadraphonic sound recording. The live footage in the US alone cost $85,000.
Unhappy with the progress of the film, Grant had Massot removed from the project and Australian director Peter Clifton was hired in his place. Clifton, in an effort to complete some close-ups and distance footage of the band members, assembled Led Zeppelin at Shepperton Studios in August 1974, with a mock-up of the Madison Square Garden stage. The bulk of the live sequence seen in the film however was from the 1973 concerts. A plan to shoot additional footage on the band's Autumn 1975 U.S. tour was abandoned due to Plant's car crash in Rhodes. The film was finally completed by early 1976, 18 months behind schedule and over-budget. Peter Grant later quipped "It was the most expensive home movie ever made". It grossed $200,000 in its first week at the box office.
With an intention to give an insight into the individual personalities in the band, several out-of-concert 'fantasy sequences' were shot for each of the band members, in addition to Peter Grant and tour manager Richard Cole. The sequences are as follows:
Despite its good performance at the box office, the film was almost universally panned by critics for its perceived amatuerish production and self-indulgent content, with the fantasy sequences in particular coming in for some of the harshest crticism.
However, amongst fans the film has retained its popularity, and indeed has garnered something of a cult following. For many years this popularity was in large measure a result of the fact that, until the release of the Led Zeppelin DVD in 2003, The Song Remains the Same was the only official live document that followers of the band were able to access. It was a common feature at many late-night movie houses, and its subsequent release on video and then DVD have ensured a growing base of fans.
Many of these fans, and some members of the band itself, regard the performances filmed at Madison Square Garden as merely average for the time, coming at the end of a long and exhausting tour, but nonetheless representative of the generally high standard the band's live performances during this era. This opinion was endorsed by the fact that, when Jimmy Page was preparing the Led Zeppelin DVD in 2003, he decided to include footage from this same series of concerts instead of avaliable footage from Led Zeppelin's 1977 tour of the United States.
For all of its technical faults, today many view the film as an interesting historical document that captured the band at a particular point in time when its popularity was about to peak, and, on a more general level, as an accurate representation of the excesses of the music and show-business industries in the 1970s.
