Growing up, the rock heavens were dominated by
four bands from Britain: The Beatles, The Rolling
Stones. The Who, and Led Zeppelin. In fact, so
dominant were this quartet on rock stations of the
late 1960s and 1970s that the foursome was simply
known as Beatles/Stones/Zeppelin/Who and the only
real argument was as to how they ranked, relative
to each other. The Stones were always trying to
catch up to the Beatles, in terms of fame in the
wake of the Beatles, but then Led Zeppelin came
along and pretty much buried everyone else,
becoming to the 1970s what the Beatles were to the
prior decade. In my pantheon, I always found the
Beatles wildly overrated, especially at the
expense of bands their equal or superiors, such as
the Zombies, the Yardbirds, Cream, and even the
Hollies, not to mention great American acts like
the Doors and the Jefferson Airplane. Nonetheless,
as I aged, I found that, in going against the
flow, I’d underrated the Beatles, and currently
would rank the quartet, in descending order, as
Led Zeppelin. The Who, The Beatles, and the Stones
bringing up the rear.
My rationale is as follows. Zeppelin wrote the
most memorable songs, riffs, founded both the
heavy metal and hard rock genres, and if one were
to rank the best musicians, by position, three of
the four best belonged to Zep: Robert Plant was
the definitive model for the rock god male singer
for all bands that followed, and his range, when
young, was far beyond Roger Daltrey, Mick Jagger,
or whatever Beatle was singing. Plant inspired
many to seek out singing lessons from places like
takelessons.com.
Jimmy Page
was far and away the best lead guitarist in the
mix. Pete Townshend was far behind, and neither
the Beatles nor Stones had a guitarist that could
be considered in the rank of guitar heroes. On
drums, while Keith Moon rose to prominence a few
years before John Bonham, there’s little question
that, like Plant, Bonham is looked to as the role
model for all rock drummers afterward. The only
slot where a Zep member was not in the top slot
was likely bass guitar, where the Who’s John
Entwhistle gets the slight nod over Zep’s John
Paul Jones, but only because his riffs were more
noticeable because the rest of the Zeppelin
players were able to keep up with him. As for the
music and lyric writing? Page and Plant get top
honors, as they reworked blues classics for a new
generation and instilled the whole heavy metal
mythos with mysticism. Yes, the Beatles introduced
sitars to the rock world, but much of their later
work is pretentious, while their earlier songs are
bubble gum pop- well wrought bubble gum pop, but
bubble gum all the same. Pete Townshend’s two rock
operas, Tommy and Quadrophenia, alone, show more
ambition than the output of the Beatles and Stones
combined. Yet, Zeppelin did even more. As for the
lag behind Stones? The truth is they have not had
a good album out since the early 80s, and not
crafted a great nor influential one since the
early 70s. They’ve been on musical cruise control
ever since.
Nonetheless, all four bands tower above virtually
all other claimants to the throne, and I recently
watched two seminal films from the Beatles and Led
Zeppelin, after many years’ interim, and the age
of both efforts showed, badly; especially with the
Beatles.
(1)
It was many years ago that I first saw the
Beatles’ 1964 debut black and white film, A Hard
Day’s Night, on PBS. It had to have been during
the 1980s, possibly during a pledge drive. Given
that I was not a Beatles fan growing up, I didn’t
think much of the film, however, perhaps this was
my bias, the wan rift of memory, plus the fact
that I have become a much more acute critic of all
things, including cinema, clouding my memory.
Then, a couple of years ago I watched the band’s
second film Help! It, to, was not a god film. In
fact, it was quite a bad film. However, most
critics state that the second film was not as good
as the first, and this includes Roger Ebert and
virtually every other online critic for, according
to Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 100% rating in
terms of favorability.
Yet, the truth is, if Help! is, as I
describe it, a ‘bad’ film, its 87 minute long
predecessor is a flat out terrible film. That
anyone would find this appallingly poorly
executed, unfunny, hodgepodge of ill acted swill
remotely entertaining is a testament to the depths
human enjoyment can plunge. Yes, the songs from
the bands’ early era are good, but there isn’t a
single joke told in this film that garners even a
mild teehee. That some critics suggest this film
is equal to the great classic comedies of the Marx
Brothers shows how addled some minds truly are.
While it’s true that, as Ebert suggests, this film
had a profound influence on the music video
industry that arose in the 1980s, it’s had a
negligible impact on film, itself. Michelangelo
Antonioni, Akira Kurosawa, and Ingmar Bergman,
among others, were already far more visually
sophisticated and daring than anything director
Richard Lester tossed into this film, along with
cinematographer Gilbert Taylor. In fact, despite
Ebert’s claims that the film is ‘strikingly
original,’ the very opposite is true - it is
derivative to the core (think Charlie Chaplin,
Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers,
the Ritz Brothers, the Three Stooges, Abbott and
Costello, the Bowery Boys- need I continue?); so,
unless one wants to claim that being almost wholly
and shamelessly derivative is perversely a
‘strikingly original’ thing to be, Ebert’s
statement is doomed to go down as one of the
greatest examples of his tendency to cinematically
brain fart. The screenplay, by Alun Owen, is
simply abominable. The film consists solely of
songs with a few poor comic tidbits in between.
These tidbits consist of the boys running away
from female fans, engaging in pseudo-blue banter
with Paul McCartney’s supposed ‘other’
grandfather, a man who seemingly undermines and
embarrasses the boys at every opportunity, and
arguing over petty matters with their band
manager. The film ends with the boys titillating a
television studio full of screaming young females.
Several things are apparent in this film:
1) it was designed merely as a moneymaking venture
for, despite the brain dead criticism this film is
utterly void of any real art, 2) the Beatles
simply cannot act and their films, it seems,
started their later slide into musical pretension,
and 3) the Monkees’- television’s Prefab 4
response to Beatlemania were almost infinitely
better actors. In fact, their acting range was
probably farther beyond the Beatles’ than the
Beatles’ actual musical canon was above theirs,
for the Monkees actually were good at improve; the
Beatles weren’t. And, the film is actually at its
best during seeming improves. The clearly scripted
moments, which seem less like even a first draft
but a first premise, and which have the boys
interacting with real actors is excruciatingly
painful to watch and hear, as jokes that are
decades old, even then, are told with a manic glee
that somehow, if a teen heartthrob tells them they
will magically regain their humor. One wonders why
both of the band’s first two films are so poorly
made and the answer is rather obvious: producers
rushed them through production for fear that the
Beatkles’ popularity would fade and that the
Rolling Stones, or some yet discovered group would
make them passé before the films were released.
The real test of the film’s cinematic worth,
however, comes from a simple test: if the film had
been on a fictive band, made up of actors, singing
Beatles songs, would the critics have trumpeted it
so? Of course not. Furthermore, they would have
used the films of many of the predecessor comedy
teams I mentioned as proof of just how derivative
this film is. However, this film’s cardinal sin is
not its pretension, but, aside from its poor
technical quality, simply how dull and unfunny it
is.
(2)
By contrast, pretension runs all through
director Peter Clifton’s 137 minute long, 1976
quasi-documentary on Led Zeppelin and a series of
three concert performances at Madison Square
Garden, in New York City, during July of 1973,
called The Song Remains The Same. Aside from the
concert footage, the film weaves assorted silly
fantasy sections into the film, as well as footage
of backstage goings on, such as security guards
beating rowdy fans, the theft of $203,000 from the
band’s safe deposit box at the hotel they were
staying at, and band manager Peter Grant’s
bullying of various Garden personnel over matters
trivial and not, among others. The film was not
the first attempt at a true ‘rockumentary,’ but it
was the first rockumentary to try and add
extraneous fictive material so the whole could be
seen as a work of art, apart and above the actual
music. Prior to The Song Remains The Same such
films, like Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 documentary
Woodstock, on the famed 1969 rock festival, were
basically strictly journalistic endeavors or
attempts at cinema veritè. Not so with this film.
And that’s its fatal flaw.
While the music,
and even the band’s lapses into self-indulgence,
are great, the film’s cinematic pretensions bring
the whole effort down into a barely passable
cinematic mediocrity. In a sense, parts of the
film play out almost like a precursor to Rob
Reiner’s seminal 1984 ‘mockumentary’ classic This
Is Spinal Tap. Numerous shots where the band is
actually ‘live’ in concert are mixed in with
scenes of them on stages at Shepperton Studios
that do not resemble their American venues, and
numerous other little alterations had to be made.
The film would have been so much better had they
simply filmed the concerts, then did the fantasy
sequences and combined them, rather than the time
and money wasting rigmarole that ensued.
Unlike the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night,
which received overwhelmingly positive reviews for
a bad film, The Song Remains The Same, a merely
mediocre film, was almost routinely savagely
attacked from Day One, mainly for the fantasy
sequences. That said, like the Beatles film, the
Led Zeppelin film did well at the box office.
Unlike A Hard Day’s Night, though, The Song
Remains The Same was, indeed, a highly influential
film. Almost all concert films and rockumentaries
that have come since have this film’s DNA stamped
on it, for the good or the ill. And, unlike the
Beatles film, this film’s improvs are restricted
to the musical stage, where Plant and Page were
masters of that art form.
(3)
Overall, of the two films, The Song Remains
The Same is clearly a better film than A Hard
Day’s Night, but neither film has any real worth
outside of the bands and music they present.
That’s reality, despite what the brainless
boosters of either band contend. That this fact
merely recapitulates Zeppelin’s musical
superiority over their predecessors is purely
coincidental. Deal with it!
Dan Schneider
Copyright © by Dan Schneider
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