Becoming Led Zeppelin

Never a fan of Led Zeppelin per se, I heard their music over the years without thinking much about it. That was until we decided to watch the documentary “Becoming Led Zeppelin” on Netflix, that I could form some opinion on a rock group that I had always found loud, eccentric and excessive, and did not quite understand what made it so popular. 

After making the effort to watch the film from start to finish, I began to appreciate the work they did, seemingly by osmosis, perseverance and lucky timing, of creating a complex and innovative sound blending acoustic folk, blues, and hard rock, augmented by their unique stage presence and production technique. 

This biopic covers the early years of the four founding members just before the death of their drummer, John Bonham. Each surviving member including vocalist Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist-keyboardist John Paul Jones participated in reminiscing about these early days. 

All of them including John Bonham were kind of unique in their respective field, and the band's innovative, improvisational live performances further cemented its legacy of influencing both hard rock and heavy metal. Bands like Rush, Van Halen, Aerosmith & Queen were just a few that were inspired by Led Zeppelin. Not my favorite kind of music, but certainly a significant part of the ever changing popular music landscape. 

Interestingly, the band’s name Led Zeppelin came from a comment by Keith Moon of The Who, who jokingly told Jimmy Page that his group would "go down like a lead balloon" in expressing his pessimism about the band’s chances of success. 

John Entwistle, also with The Who, further suggested the name could be a "lead zeppelin". Page, inspired by the image, adopted the name for his new band. The 'a' was dropped from "lead" to ensure the correct pronunciation as "led," and "zeppelin" replaced "balloon" to illustrate the band’s powerful and one-of-a-kind sound...