Detroit Free Press Led Zeppelin DVD article

[brian ingham <brianingham@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.freep.com/entertainment/music/led26_20030526.htm

Page brings Led Zeppelin to DVD 

May 26, 2003

BY BRIAN MCCOLLUM
FREE PRESS POP MUSIC WRITER

Led Zeppelin earned its reputation on the back of its music, a
nuanced howl of blues-rock that deftly found working room between the
Mississippi Delta and the cosmos. 

But there's another big reason the British quartet's legacy thrives
more than three decades since the band's launch and 23 years since
the death of drummer John Bonham: the mystique. Zeppelin -- which
shied from releasing singles and rarely performed on television -- is
perhaps the least chronicled superstar act in the history of rock 'n'
roll. That lack of accessibility has helped maintain an alluring air
of mystery for subsequent generations, who have long been relegated
to grainy bootlegs and an iffy official concert film, "The Song
Remains the Same," to get their fix. 

That's why the band's new self-titled double-DVD set, in stores
Tuesday, will serve as something of a release for longtime devotees
- -- and a potent introduction for newcomers. At 5 1/2 hours, the video
is a revealing, often intense, document of the biggest band of the
'70s, a group whose live performances are the stuff of legend. The
video set moves chronologically, kicking off with footage from shows
in Denmark and London and closing with Zep's final show at the
Knebworth festival. 

"It's a really good little historic piece," says guitarist and
producer Jimmy Page, who rounded up the footage from his personal
collection and supervised production. "We got something which really
is a pretty good live testament of what was going on. Not the best
performances we ever did, and not the worst, but here we go -- we can
actually see how we were ticking. And it's not a bootleg -- how about
that?" 

Also in stores Tuesday: "How the West Was Won," a three-CD set
recorded live in California in '72. By phone from New York, Page
chatted with the Free Press about the new project. 

QUESTION: This stuff just never seems to die, does it? 

ANSWER: Yes, it's been crying out for something like this, really,
hasn't it? Everything that we did in the studio has been out in one
form or another, but that whole aspect of what the band was about --
which was its live performances and live creativity and the
synchronicity of it all -- was something which really needed a
commitment to go in there and put it together. Even though we didn't
have a lot of material that spanned those years, to look at what we
did have and make something out of it -- it shaped up to be a
journey. 

Q: The band was always shrouded in a kind of mystery. So for many
people this is almost like a big relief -- the veil comes off. You're
revealing a part of Zeppelin that a lot of people never got to see. 

ANSWER: From the first album or the second album, there was no desire
to want to be doing singles and to want to go on television miming.
That was the norm of the way you promoted stuff, but it wasn't the
way the band was -- every time we played the numbers, they were
slightly different, sometimes radically different. Because of that,
there wasn't a lot of footage that was shot of us. Straight away,
that made it slightly mysterious. But we were being heard. We were
being measured by the albums. And we were being measured up by the
live performances, which showed how we could extend things -- how the
whole thing was living, how organic it was. Q: You put together a
Surround mix for the new DVD. What were you going for? 

ANSWER: With the Royal Albert Hall, the stereo image sort of moves
slightly to each side of you, to the left and right. But as the
journey carries on, and it gets to Knebworth, the band is coming
right around you, and you're almost inside the band. One of the
things I didn't think would be a good idea would be to have it too
gimmicky -- to have things flying out of this and flying out of that.
There's a couple of areas where that happens, but it's contained, and
it's not overdone. 

Q:The goal was to maintain the vantage point of the audience? 

ANSWER: Pretty much, yeah. So much so that you'd be able to see it
and concentrate on it without people pushing past you in the row or
shouting out or spewing up next to you or whatever. (Laughs.) 

Q: When you look at the whole 5 1/2 hours of video here, can you
single out a performance that stands out -- a personal favorite? 

ANSWER: I wouldn't do that, because to be honest with you, everything
means something to me in one way or the other. The overall thing that
should be achieved by looking at this is to see just how much fun we
were having, but also how intense it was -- how we were living on the
moment and having a great time. That's what's to be taken from it.
The other aspect is the freedom that we had. That goes through
everything. The whole 11-year career was total freedom, really. We
were allowed to fly.