Shirley Yanez / 13 September 2025 / Categories: Movie and TV Shows, Movie

Becoming Led Zeppelin Iconic Rock Band

Documentary about Led Zeppelin

Becoming Led Zeppelin: A Sonic Birth Captured in Light and Shadow

The projector whirs. Grainy Super 8 footage flickers—a young Jimmy Page backstage in ’66, hollow-eyed, tuning a Danelectro amid the damp concrete smell of a Scandinavian dressing room. Just session work, his posture whispers. Pay check. Cut to Robert Plant, seventeen, hair like a Wheatfield gilded by Black Country sun, belting "You Shook Me" in a Wolverhampton dive. The microphone cord snakes around his boot like a restless serpent.

Bernard MacMahon’s lens doesn’t tell you they were destined. It unearths destiny.

Bonham’s laughter erupts from archival tape—a thunderclap in a tin can. Behind the drum kit, sweat-soaked shirtsleeves rolled past elbows, he’s a force of nature contained by wood and skin. John Paul Jones materializes in silent home movies: arranging horn sections for Dusty Springfield, fingers tracing invisible staves in the air. A craftsman awaiting his cathedral.

Then—the alchemy.

The screen floods with the burnt-orange glow of Page’s Pangbourne boathouse. September 1968. No myth-making here. Just four men in a room smelling of river damp and amplifier heat. A single take of "Babe I’m Gonna Leave You." Plant’s voice—raw, almost too present—collides with Page’s Telecaster snarl. Jones’ bassline locks onto Bonham’s kick drum like tectonic plates shifting. You don’t hear the music. You witness gravity forming.

MacMahon’s genius shines through in capturing not the forming of another iconic rock band but the pure magic when the recipe for perfection is already buried in the stone, he just chipped away at the rock until Led Zeppelin emerged. This is a trip down memory lane and truly has you glued to the screen. This isn’t a documentary. It’s a séance.

When Plant leans close to the camera, eyes glacier-blue under creased lids, and murmurs, "That first note John Paul played in ‘Dazed’… it wasn’t bass. It was *architecture*," you don’t need the chord progression. You feel the foundation shake.

Final frame: The New York Times review of their debut show. "Like watching buildings fall." The screen goes black.

But the feedback lingers.