The Song Remains the Same movie storyline. The members of Led Zeppelin are called back from vacation by manager Peter Grant to play Madison Square Garden. The film is enhanced by each of the band member’s personal fantasies (hallucinations?), such as the opening scene (which is awfully confusing the first time around) in which Peter Grant, dressed in a 1930s black gangster suit drives a 1930s black Ford to a house and blasts everyone with a machine gun.
The Song Remains the Same is a 1976 concert film featuring the English rock band Led Zeppelin. The filming took place during the summer of 1973, during three nights of concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York City, with additional footage shot at Shepperton Studios. The film premiered three years later on October 20, 1976 at Cinema I in New York, on October 22, 1976 at Fox Wilshire in Los Angeles, and at Warner West End Cinema in London two weeks later. It was accompanied by a soundtrack album of the same name. The DVD of the film was released on December 31, 1999.
Promotional materials stated that the film was “the band’s special way of giving their millions of friends what they had been clamouring for – a personal and private tour of Led Zeppelin. For the first time the world has a front row seat on Led Zeppelin.”
About the Filming
The plans to film the shows at Madison Square Garden were threatened when the local trades union tried to block the British film crew from working. After the band’s attorneys negotiated with the union, the crew was allowed to film the concerts. The footage of the band arriving at the airport in their private jet airliner, The Starship, and travelling in the motor cavalcade to the concert was filmed in Pittsburgh, before their show at Three Rivers Stadium on 24 July 1973.
For the band’s three New York performances, two band members, Robert Plant and John Bonham, wore exactly the same clothes to facilitate seamless editing of the film, but John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page wore different sets of attire on some of the nights, which created continuity problems. Page is seen wearing a different dragon suit in “Rock and Roll” and the “Celebration Day” remaster.
In an interview from 1997, Jones said that the reason he didn’t wear the same stage clothes was that he asked the crew if they would be filming on those nights and was told no. “I’d think ‘not to worry, I’ll save the shirt I wore the previous night for the next filming’. Then what would happen is that I’d get onstage and see the cameras ready to roll.”
As Led Zeppelin’s popularity soared throughout the 1970s, Peter Grant became increasingly notorious for being brutally protective of his band and their finances; The Song Remains the Same captures one such exchange between him and a concert promoter. When Warner Bros. approved the film they did so on the provison that expletives would be ‘bleeped’ out. Clifton took the optical print and removed the words, and the film was given an appropriate rating. However, on every other print, the words were retained and were fully audible.
In the scene where Peter Grant is driven to the police station to be questioned about the theft from the safe deposit box at the Drake Hotel, he has his arm outside the police car. According to an interview conducted in 1989, he explained the reason he wasn’t handcuffed was that the policeman driving the car used to be a drummer in a semi-professional band which had supported the Yardbirds on one of its US college tours in the late-1960s. Grant had at the time been manager of the Yardbirds. The money stolen from the safe deposit box at the Drake Hotel was never recovered, and while no one has ever been charged, it is alleged that a staff member of the hotel quit their job and fled to Jamaica soon after the theft.
Scenes of young fans attempting to buy tickets, an unruly fan being ejected by security, and Grant berating the promoter for receiving kickbacks were all shot at the Baltimore Civic Center on 23 July 1973. Grant purportedly recommended the “Dazed and Confused” sequence wherein the camera zooms into Page’s eyes and cuts to the scene. Some unused backstage shots filmed at Baltimore and at Pittsburgh later found their way into the promotional video for “Travelling Riverside Blues”, released in 1990.
The Song Remains the Same (1976)
Directed by: Peter Clifton, Joe Massot
Starring: John Bonham, John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Richard Cole, Derek Skilton, Colin Rigdon, Led Zeppelin, Jason Bonham, Patricia Bonham, Tamara Jones, Maureen Jones
Screenplay by: Peter Clifton
Cinematography by: Ernest Day
Film Editing by: Humphrey Dixon
Makeup Department: Colin Arthur, Jim Gillespie
Music by: Led Zeppelin
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Warner Bros. Pictures
Release Date: October 20, 1976 (United States)
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