Bernard MacMahon

Bernard MacMahon is a filmmaker, most recently directing Becoming Led Zeppelin, a music documentary that holds the record for the highest-grossing opening weekend across IMAX theaters worldwide and is currently the highest-grossing documentary of 2025. He gained international acclaim with the American Epic series, which chronicles the origins of American roots music and the revolutionary impact of early sound recording technology. MacMahon has been recognized for his groundbreaking approach to documentary filmmaking, blending historical research, rare archival footage, and innovative audiovisual storytelling. His work has earned multiple prestigious awards, including audience honors at major film festivals, Emmy, BAFTA, and Grammy nominations and wins. Becoming Led Zeppelin was released in IMAX on February 7, 2025, with a wider cinema release following on February 14, 2025. The film is streaming now on Netflix, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime Video. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Athletic Nicotine https://www. AthleticNicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://Squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://DrinkLMNT.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  When I was 12 years old, my mum was an antique dealer and there was always boxes of totty junk around the house. And in one of the boxes was a little paperback book called Led Zeppelin by Howard Milett. And I actually have a copy of it here.

• 0:44Rick Rubin?

  Fantastic, I'd like to see it.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  And it was in the bottom of the book and I didn't know who they were. I found the story really inspiring because it's four very different guys that as little boys have this idea of doing music and they kind of pursue this dream. Each in their different ways, you know, two of them becoming session musicians and working within, right in the belly of the beast, you know?

• 1:12Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  And the other two as West Midlanders who, you know, are kind of ostracized by the London music scene.

• 1:20Rick Rubin?

  So you were not a Led Zeppelin fan when you read the book?

• 1:22Speaker 00

  I didn't know who they were.

• 1:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  Never heard a note of their music.

• 1:25Rick Rubin?

  So the book really was your introduction?

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I found out years later when this film came out and I was meeting aficionados.

• 1:33Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  They said this guy was one of the few people the group were close and friendly with.

• 1:38Rick Rubin?

  Interesting.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  And he actually, he had lots of access to them. They didn't collaborate on the book, but he was around.

• 1:46Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:46Speaker 00

  And there was a tiny number of people that were allowed into the Zeppelin in a circle and he was one of them.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  And so there was a real sense of who these people were. And then I subsequently got into the group's music and started thinking, well, let's listen to this music.

• 2:02Rick Rubin?

  Do you remember what was the first thing you heard of theirs?

• 2:05Speaker 00

  Led Zeppelin four was the first thing. And then I went back to three, then to two, then to one. And then I went

• 2:15Rick Rubin?

  Past.

• 2:15Speaker 00

  Forward the other way to House of the Holy. But Zeppelin four was the first thing I heard and I played it. And I remember being completely jaw dropped at the end of When the Levee Breaks. And I went, who put this onto this piece of plastic? How is this even done? It seems so beyond what I would hear four people doing in a room.

• 2:37Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  And I remember looking at the label that said Produced by Jimmy Page. And I went, oh, I guess that's The Alchemist that made this.

• 2:44Rick Rubin?

  What was your musical taste like before that?

• 2:47Speaker 00

  My friend's older brother was into The Clash. So I used to play that first Clash album obsessively.

• 2:53Rick Rubin?

  Punk rock is happening when you're growing up.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:57Rick Rubin?

  So by the time that you got interested in them, they were already gone. It was

• 3:01Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 3:01Rick Rubin?

  It was from the past.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Yes, but there was a connection. When my mum saw me reading this book

• 3:08Speaker 00

  for the second time. She said, do you remember this gentleman used to come around to the house and he would talk to you and you'd sit on his knee? And he was always trying to buy antiques from me. And our fireplace specifically. And I said, yeah, I remember this guy. I said, that's the manager of that group, Peter Grant, who used to come to our house.

• 3:31Rick Rubin?

  What were your memories of Peter Grant from childhood?

• 3:33Speaker 00

  Huge guy.

• 3:34Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Very imposing.

• 3:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Had a sort of Fu Manchu beard. And very, very friendly to me as a kid.

• 3:43Rick Rubin?

  Would you say he was imposing just by his physicality or by his demeanor?

• 3:47Speaker 00

  But the interesting thing is he resembled a lot of antique dealers that would buy from my mum. A lot of them looked like him.

• 3:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  So he was not atypical, even though he's very striking when you see his pictures. I'd seen other guys with that appearance. So he used to come and my mum had been recommended to him as my mum was like an entry level antique dealer. She would buy things and have a stall in Camden Passage. So he'd heard from another dealer down the road that you could get really good deals from my mum before the stuff went into Regent Street in these expensive stores. So he'd shop. My dad came home from teaching. At Imperial College one day and saw Peter leaving the house and he parked his car out of view around the corner. It was Silver Shadow Rolls Royce. So my mum then found out what it was he did and he confessed he was the manager of Led Zeppelin. But I

• 4:39Speaker 00

  remember him always trying to buy the fireplace in our living room and he said he wanted it for his daughter's bedroom. It was a rather lovely Art Nouveau fireplace and my mum refused to sell it to him. So when I had took my mum for afternoon tea last month, I was asking, I said, do I remember all this stuff about Peter Grant correctly? And she said, yes. And he said, yes. And I said, and I'm the only person that ever said no to Peter Grant.

• 5:04Rick Rubin?

  So you read the book?

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 5:05Rick Rubin?

  And then what happens next in your personal Led Zeppelin experience? You listen to four, you go back to one, and then you get through the catalogue and are you, would you say, lifelong fan from there on?

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I kind of, I completely fell in love with it. And I think one of the things that enhanced my love for it was knowing about who they were and how they put it together.

• 5:29Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. So the book really informed you?

• 5:31Speaker 00

  Oh, the book was hugely influential on my life. It's probably one of the two most influential books on how I do things as a filmmaker.

• 5:39Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  Because the book was about, when you're a child, you have this light within you. We all have it. And it's like this flame that burns inside you and you hopefully find a direction for that passion. And in my case, it was film. In their case, it was music. And it strikes me as you go through life, you have to protect that flame against people that will try and snuff it out. And then as you go into the commercial world, we have to find ways to protect it against the business forces that come in. So they have Peter Grant that sort of shields them in this bell jar.

• 6:16Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 6:17Speaker 00

  And so I only realized, and I was thinking about this, at the end of becoming Led Zeppelin, I asked Jimmy, please give a message to Your thirteen year old self and other thirteen year olds out there. What can we learn from this journey? And he paused a minute, he looks to me and looked straight at me and he says, if you have something different inside of yourself, you have to work and work and work. But if your aim is true, you can achieve your dreams.

• 6:44Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  I believe this can be done because this is what happens. He's talking about the inner light, you know, inside of himself. And so I, I think what impressed me about this was these guys, they kind of were fueling that and it was these people that,

• 7:00Speaker 00

  they don't waste a minute. Each member of Led Zeppelin, they are never sitting on the sofa or doing the equipment and looking at their telephones. They are constantly out there interacting with people. And I found that very inspiring. So with Jimmy and John Paul Jones, they're doing all these studio sessions. And every single job that comes up, they'll take it, you know. So when Mickey Mouse says to John Paul Jones, do you do arrangements? He goes, yeah, all the time, like this. And he figures out how to do it on the hoof. Or Jimmy goes into studio and he's wandering into the control room and trying to figure out how they're getting reverb, how they're making these effects. So they're learning everything and the same with John Bonham and Robert.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  Even though the London music scene is shutting them out, they're literally in countless groups. I mean, it was, took me almost a year making the film to even figure out tracking all the things they did. It's so complex, all the different groups they're in. And the main thing is they're using every second. They're not wasting a moment. And then when that first meeting happens, this is so true of life. And they're in that rehearsal space in Doran Street. And they start playing Train Kept a Roll and they know what it is they've got. All that time, all that interaction with countless people. All those experiences they've thrown themselves into, they recognize what that moment is.

• 8:25Rick Rubin?

  And the only way they could really know how special it was, was because of all the work they had done leading up to it.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 8:31Rick Rubin?

  This was different than all of the other things they had been doing.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:34Rick Rubin?

  And they'd been doing some really good things.

• 8:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. So when I was a kid, you know, I was like, I was lucky, I got thrown into cinema. My dad banned television, so I wasn't able to watch TV as a small child. Which is probably one of the best things he ever did. He just wanted us to become academics as kids.

• 8:53Rick Rubin?

  What was your father?

• 8:54Speaker 00

  He taught at Imperial College, hydrodynamics. So he was like an engineer and a scientist, very intellectual guy. An inspiring man. But I wanted to work in the arts from a very small age. And so when I was, my next door neighbor has a birthday present for mowing her lawn. When I was about seven, she brought me tickets to my first cinema show, which as I, when I got to cinema, I realized it was Harold Lloyd, Silent Comedy Safety Last, with an old lady accompanying it on piano. Well, to a seven year old, if you've never seen a movie before, this is like mind blowing with him hanging off the clock tower.

• 9:30Rick Rubin?

  It's amazing.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  And so that stayed with me. And then a month later or two, my mum took me to my next cinema show, which was a giant ode in Streatham, which was held two thousand seven hundred people and was totally packed. It was a rerun of Gone with the Wind.

• 9:45Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  So those are my first two films that I saw in a cinema. And so my mind was blown. And then I got a VHS about the making of Gone with the Wind, narrated by Christopher Plummer. And I must have watched that about a hundred and fifty times. It was all about how the film was made. It was so complex and nail biting. And then my next door neighbor, she had David Niven's book, The Moon is the Balloon, which is all these vignettes about Hollywood. You know, each one a chapter on a legendary Hollywood character he was meeting with. And I went, I want to work in that world. Absolutely fascinating. So that was my background. And this somehow related to Zeppelin. I just, it was that thing of experience.

• 10:26Rick Rubin?

  At what point did you decide, I want to make a Led Zeppelin movie? When did that happen?

• 10:30Speaker 00

  Okay, so we, we'd made a series of four films called American Epic, that we did with Robert Redford narrating and producing and.

• 10:38Rick Rubin?

  And that's the history of American music?

• 10:41Speaker 00

  It was on the first electrical sound recordings of the first blues, country, gospel. So it's essentially where all contemporary music today comes from.

• 10:51Rick Rubin?

  And where did the idea for that one come from?

• 10:53Speaker 00

  I had become very interested in those early twenties recordings. So the background to this is the film codifies this period that really hasn't been understood. And. Essentially, in nineteen twenty six, the majority of music sold in America was in the big cities like Chicago, New York, Boston, and it was light classical, show tunes, big band jazz, this kind of thing. Radio exploded in twenty five, twenty six, and within a couple of, a year or so, record sales in America dropped by eighty percent.

• 11:32Rick Rubin?

  I didn't know this.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  Most people don't.

• 11:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  And so, kind of familiar to people that lived at the end of the twentieth century, Napster. So, all these people in the city were like, we'll just play radio now, and, you know. So the record companies went into a panic and they thought, we're going to be out of business. They came up with the idea, why don't we record poor people in rural America? So, they realized quickly that the rural American people would not buy what they were selling in the cities. But they were confident there was a market there because most of the rural communities didn't have electricity in their homes. They thought, well, we don't have to worry about radio, you know, and we can sell them these little wind-up record players. So they organized talent contests across the whole of the South, saying Columbia Records

• 12:20Speaker 00

  will be in Johnson City on February the first nineteen twenty seven, if you want to be immortalized, the phonograph record will be here. And literally thousands of people traveled hundreds of miles. And it coincided with the invention of the first electrical recording equipment, so the first microphone, the first amplifier, which they all packed into these enormous trucks and they traveled with, like, trucks filled with wet cell batteries that would power all this stuff, and then a pulley-driven lathe, because.

• 12:51Rick Rubin?

  This is pre-tape, they went straight to disc.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Straight to disc, cutting to a wax disc. The wax discs from these recordings were then shipped in ice back to the pressing plants in New Jersey, where they would then be plated and the seventy eights would be recorded. This was like this golden time that people at Frank Zappa talk about, where the people running the industry don't understand what the music is.

• 13:16Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 13:16Speaker 00

  And this is when the most creative things happen.

• 13:18Rick Rubin?

  Often the case, actually.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  Yes, and you would be certainly an individual would have ridden the crest of a whole wave of music that people in the industry, when you were starting Def Jam, would be going, what the hell's this?

• 13:30Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  You know, but you had some instinct for it.

• 13:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 00

  And some connection with these artists. And there was this golden point when you were breaking through this stuff, where the suits did not understand what this was.

• 13:42Rick Rubin?

  Not only did they not like it, they thought it wasn't music.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  Right, okay.

• 13:47Rick Rubin?

  That's how foreign it was.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  And so this is the best time artistically, isn't it? This is the greatest time. And all they know is Rick's bringing in this non-music rubbish.

• 13:57Rick Rubin?

  That people seem to like.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  But they're buying it. So Karen pressing it for him, you know?

• 14:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  And make money off it. The moment they think they understand it and they have ideas, it's over.

• 14:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, they ruin it.

• 14:09Speaker 00

  They ruin it, yeah. So in this case, you know, the record companies, they're coming in and there's this Cajun music from Louisiana, you know, the Bro Fairs. And they're like, what the hell's this? But it's selling, you know, Lydia Mendoza with the Teano music. Don't know what it is, but it's selling. And the blues music from Mississippi and the country. These records started selling hundreds of thousands of copies. And what was a total surprise to the record companies was that the Memphis Jug Band, that would be the first kind of, I mean, that would be the prototype of hip hop. I had Nas in American Epic doing one of their tracks. And it literally is a hip hop song on the road again. And he says that, he says, God, I didn't realize this went back to 1927.

• 14:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. And the Grateful Dead based their whole trip on jug bands as well. They grew out of jug bands.

• 14:59Speaker 00

  Correct, yeah. So these records started being ordered. The big surprise was the records being recorded in Memphis were being ordered in Illinois, in Massachusetts.

• 15:11Rick Rubin?

  And they weren't expecting that. They thought it would be local for the community, but the records traveled.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so I described it as the first time America heard itself.

• 15:22Rick Rubin?

  Yes, beautiful.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  And I took it to Robert Redford and he said, this is America's greatest untold story and I'll help you get this made.

• 15:31Rick Rubin?

  Fantastic.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  So it was three films traveling through, filming in thirty-eight states and telling the untold stories of nine key musicians, all from totally different backgrounds.

• 15:43Rick Rubin?

  Name one of your favorite tracks from the first.

• 15:46Speaker 00

  Oh, from the first episode, probably "On The Road Again" by The Memphis Jug Band.

• 15:52Rick Rubin?

  That's a sim.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  I wouldn't a black woman tell the reason why. Why? Black woman leave a good things on the slide. No. You look for yourself to be good and hot. Uh huh. She never put a neckbone in the pot. She's on the road again. Oh. Lord, a nasty Barney Eastman on the road. She's on the road again. Oh, Lord. Lord, a nasty Barney Eastman on the road again. I went to my window, my window was propped. I went to my door, my door was locked. I stepped right back, I shook my head. A big black nigga in my folding bed. I shot through the window, I broke his glass. I never seen a little nigga run so fast.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  She's on the road again. Oh, Lord. Lord, a nasty Barney Eastman on the road again. He's on the road again. Oh, Lord. Lord, a nasty Barney Eastman on the road again.

• 17:30Rick Rubin?

  That's from what year?

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Ninety twenty-eight.

• 17:32Rick Rubin?

  Wow. Amazing.

• 17:36Rick Rubin?

  And you tell the story of them.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's the first time their stories have ever been told on film.

• 17:42Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 17:42Speaker 00

  So I have footage of them that hadn't been seen before, images that never been before we made the film. This is one of the most influential African American groups of all time. You could make a case they're the very first American pop group. Yeah, really unbelievably powerful music, amazing story.

• 18:04Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about looking for the archival material. It sounds like this is all lost material.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, it was all lost and there's nothing in the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress.

• 18:15Rick Rubin?

  How do you start out? First of all, how do you know what to look for? And then when you know what to look for, how do you find it?

• 18:20Speaker 00

  So first off, in the period, I realized this is like, this was the well string where everything came from. These recordings and the ones I was familiar with, I went without this, none of these acts that we know today would exist. You know, it's all codified then. So I was like, well, how do I tell these stories? So the first thing I did was I got about a hundred acts. Whose records were so impactful to me that I thought I'm going to research all hundred of these people. And then pick out what are the greatest stories. And so the hundred acts you can find that we did a with Sony, a box set.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  Called the American Epic Collection and it's a hundred songs on a five CD set of what I consider to be the greatest recordings were made. In those extraordinary recording sessions that Columbia and Victor and Paramount did.

• 19:18Rick Rubin?

  And were most of those things out of print?

• 19:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:22Rick Rubin?

  Long out of print.

• 19:23Speaker 00

  Long out of print, yeah. So I'll give you an example of one of the stories in the film. To discover what the greatest records are, I went to a group of 78 collectors and I'd be travelling to their houses across America. Richard Nevins, he's out in New Jersey. It was John Teft Teller, the legendary blues collector in Oregon. And then Michael Kiefer, one of the greats, across the board, all genres from that era, collector based in Los Angeles. And I would spend days in their house pulling 78s off the shelves.

• 19:55Rick Rubin?

  Would they turn you on to things?

• 19:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, and they would go, you gotta hear this, or you gotta hear this. And so there was a whole bunch of things that have never been reissued on CD, you know, in any form. And I was just collecting the ones that just blew my mind. I was looking for things that I thought anyone today that heard this, this piece of music would stop them in their tracks.

• 20:15Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 20:15Speaker 00

  And go, what the hell was that? Who are they? So I'm looking at these 100 acts and so one of the ones was in the gospel area, was this 1927 recording called My Heart Keeps Singing by Elder Birch and Congregation. And it has this wonderful, incredibly familiar sound to me that when I played the Taj Mahal, he goes, no, that's West Indian. That's the whole West Indian thing going on there. And it was just credited to Elder Birch and Congregation, My Heart Keeps Singing. And I just loved this track. No one knew anything about who this person was. And this track had been reissued on a number of CD compilations and was highly regarded.

• 20:58Speaker 00

  So Victor that put it out is owned by Sony BMG. So I went to the Sony BMG archives with the help of Adam Block at Legacy, who let me just wander around. They had all the recording sheets that the engineers would type up at these remote sessions they were doing, field sessions. It had the Elder Birch sheet from 1927. It said, Elder Birch, Cheyenne, South Carolina.

• 21:28Speaker 00

  I got on a plane to Chirorah, South Carolina.

• 21:31Rick Rubin?

  So this is the first bit of information.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  That's all I've got.

• 21:34Rick Rubin?

  You've got, you've got the name of a city.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  And I've no idea if this is his town.

• 21:38Rick Rubin?

  And it's a hundred years ago that you're looking for information.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 21:42Rick Rubin?

  In this little town from a hundred years ago.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Yes. So I go to this little town and the first place you go is the library. They'll always be fascinated with an English person turning up, wanting to know about some record made almost a hundred years ago. Really gets librarians going. That's why libraries are so important.

• 22:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  Other than these internet things, they're much more important because there are people that care about this stuff. So I arrive and they're completely baffled. They never heard of this elder Birch. And then I meet all the various white dignitaries in the town, fascinated but don't know who he is. And eventually I get sent over the tracks to the African-American part of the town. And I'm introduced this elderly gentleman, Ted Bradley, who's in his eighties. His eyes start welling up and he goes, elder Birch, my God, I haven't heard that name in years. He goes, yeah, he had a big story. I used to buy popsicles from him. And he describes the church he had. He built the church, this triumph sanctified church with his bare hands.

• 22:42Speaker 00

  And he said, and we would all sit outside the church and listen to the music. And he said, the white people used to all drive up in their cars, this is in the twenties, and sit outside the church and listen to this extraordinary music. And he said Birch was the founder, one of the founders of the N double A C P in South Carolina. Big force in this. And he goes, but you know who elder Birch really influenced? And I said, no. And he goes, the kid that lived two doors up from his church and would hear that music from his bedroom all Sunday long. I said, who was that? He goes, Dizzy Gillespie.

• 23:15Rick Rubin?

  Wow, that's amazing. Let's listen to that track.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  He taught me how. He taught me how. To ever watch and pray. To ever watch and pray. And now I live in his light and everything. Then Jesus was. Then Jesus was. He in his blood. He in his blood. My heart keeps singing, singing, singing all the time. I'm sanctified. I'm sanctified. With a holy ghost. And a holy ghost. My heart keeps singing, singing, singing all the time. Then Jesus was.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  Then Jesus was. He in his blood. He in his blood. My heart keeps singing, singing, singing all the time. Ever since my death. Ever since my death. He's taken away. He's taken away. My heart keeps singing, singing, singing all the time. Then Jesus was.

• 25:08Rick Rubin?

  Incredible.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  Beautiful, isn't it?

• 25:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 00

  Absolutely beautiful. So, he brings me over to the Triumph Church, and it's still standing.

• 25:17Rick Rubin?

  Really?

• 25:17Speaker 00

  The little old church that Birch built.

• 25:19Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 25:19Speaker 00

  And the preacher's there, the current preacher, Donny Chapman. And if there is a definition of spirituality, it's that preacher that I met, Donny Chapman. Whenever someone's, there's some terrible wreck on the freeway, and there's someone dying, he gets a call, four in the morning, he's there, and he's tending to that person. And so, I came in and we filmed there, and I found all these people in the town that the African-Americans that remembered Birch. And the impact he had and then Dizzy Gillespie's cousin came in.

• 25:57Speaker 00

  And he had all Dizzy's notes for his autobiography in which he'd written about how absolutely all his musical inspiration came from going to Elder Birch's church during the weekend and listening to that music. That was what inspired him.

• 26:12Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  All came from that, the rhythms, the sound and the thing. And so The Triumph Church is part of a small sanctified movement across America called Triumph. And so all the best singers came to that tiny little village in the film. We had them perform My Heart Keeps Singing in this unbelievably rousing, wild performance, yeah. Draw his memory back, you know. So these are stories like this. So this was the guy that, you know, they kind of chased the Ku Klux Klan out of Chiror, you know. And this was music unifying this community. I mean, this is in the depths of segregation. And yet, as I said,

• 26:54Speaker 00

  all the white people would be open around that church on the Sundays, listening to that music.

• 27:00Rick Rubin?

  Do you think the fact that your first cinema experience was a Harold Lloyd with a live pianist, that for you, music and film are just intertwined. Your love of it, they go together.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  That's a very perceptive observation. I fundamentally think that's true. Yeah, I don't, I've never thought about that. Absolutely. I think you're absolutely right. Yes, I see visuals and live music performance as being absolutely intertwined. God, I'm really glad I came here today. That's really clever. That's absolutely, yeah. Because it was a very physical experience, you know, there's this extraordinary imagery, but this woman, she's improvising.

• 27:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  There's no score. When you go to those silent movie things, if you do meet people that do that, yeah, they improvise the music. I think the studio's occasion would send over some general cues. It was very rare that you'd have a whole score that was sent out. Yeah, I think you're right. And so I, I think that music and film are incredibly closely related. I think that a movie has to work like a symphony with movements. And the whole thing has to tie together, there needs to be themes that appear. So you know, when you have a musical, there'll be an overture at the beginning where they play all the highlighted, like South Pacific.

• 28:20Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  The highlight, the key melody lines, so that when you get into it, you kind of go, oh, I know that.

• 28:25Rick Rubin?

  Uh huh. Do you think that coming from the UK was advantageous to see it with new eyes?

• 28:34Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:34Rick Rubin?

  Looking at American music with new eyes?

• 28:36Speaker 00

  Yes, I think there's a number of things I realized. This research was hugely enjoyable because people would, they're very, very kind and welcoming people in rural America. But they're particularly fascinated if you're coming in from Britain.

• 28:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  And you're coming to some tiny town and you're interested in this cultural thing that happened almost a hundred years ago. Particularly if a lot of them don't, aren't even familiar with this person's there. So I would sometimes meet family members of musicians whose songs have been covered by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, and they had no idea.

• 29:11Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  They had no idea that their dad's music had made that impact. Firstly, when you go into the rural areas of the South, you see huge amounts of Old England there. So it's actually very familiar.

• 29:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Because these are settlers that went over and sometimes.

• 29:29Rick Rubin?

  And Scotland and Ireland.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  Yes, and I'm half Irish, so yeah.

• 29:34Rick Rubin?

  And that's the roots of country music.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  It's the roots of blues. Taj Mahal told me, blues is the combination, so this is Taj's thing, and I, I think he's right. He said, blues is the combination of African music with Irish folk music. It's those elements combined, that's how he sees it. And I, I can't think of anyone that's been more deep plugged into that history than him.

• 29:56Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it's also interesting that after the American project, you go on Led Zeppelin, who are so totally influenced by American music.

• 30:09Rick Rubin?

  There is no English music in their vocabulary.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  No.

• 30:13Rick Rubin?

  It's a representation of America from far away. And it takes it to an extreme that most Americans would not take it to because they know too much to amplify it that much.

• 30:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:33Rick Rubin?

  Do you know what I'm saying? In some ways, the freedom that comes with this foreign thing that you can interpret and make it yours. In their minds, maybe they think this is how it is in America. But really, it's because their love of this foreign thing is so extravagant. In their minds, they take it to this extravagant place where it never was before.

• 31:00Speaker 00

  I think that's a very sage observation. There's this huge romanticization of America and American music.

• 31:08Rick Rubin?

  It's like spaghetti western movies, same thing. It's like

• 31:11Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 31:11Rick Rubin?

  The idea of taking it to this extreme, this poetic extreme.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. That is why, if you look at that generation and the subsequent generations, the love of the original rockabilly, the rock and roll music. There's nowhere more fervent than Britain for the adoration of that. It's hugely romanticized, and similarly, the blues.

• 31:35Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 31:36Speaker 00

  The blues is just massively romanticized in Britain, you know.

• 31:40Rick Rubin?

  And jazz as well. And jazz in Europe.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  Yes, you're right.

• 31:44Rick Rubin?

  American jazz in Europe is much more popular today than it is in America.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, because, you know, when James Reese Europe came in in the First World War with the Harlem Hellcats and he brought jazz to the European battlefield, that's when the French fell in love with it.

• 31:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Speaker 00

  You know, so he's bringing in, you know, those W.C. Handy songs and stuff like this. And the French were like, what the hell's this, you know? And this was, I guess, music brought in to rouse the troops of the Americans. But to the to the French, this was exotic and exciting. The Zeppelin story came out. We made American Epic. We made these three historical films. And the fourth film, our sound engineer that worked on Zeppelin rebuilt from original parts, the full recording lathe, the amplifier and the microphone. So we brought a whole group of artists in to record for the first time in almost a hundred years exactly how you would have done in nineteen twenty seven.

• 32:35Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful.

• 32:36Speaker 00

  And they all had to come in, do it live to the wax disc.

• 32:39Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  And then we pressed up the records.

• 32:42Rick Rubin?

  Fantastic.

• 32:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, the first three films were the history of the Carthaginian wars. And then the fourth film was like, we film a group of people crossing the Alps on the elephants, you know, and doing it ourselves. So this film, I wanted to do one more music film that picked up from where American Epic left off, which would be sort of World War Two. And something that took us from World War Two to, say, nineteen seventy. This felt like a very, very exciting arc in communication and music. This is the arrival of tape and countless other things. And I thought, you know, it would be kind of good, rather than researching a hundred

• 33:25Speaker 00

  acts, and this area, my previous era, Super Mysterious American Epic, there's nothing known about most of these acts. Is there one act that rides that wave? I remembered that book I read when I was twelve and I went, Zeppelin. And no one's ever told their story before.

• 33:43Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  They're as mysterious as the Memphis Jug Band.

• 33:45Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  The record's all known.

• 33:47Rick Rubin?

  It's one of the things that's so interesting about the old blues artists, where there might be one photograph, you know, like Robert Johnson, there's one photograph. Maybe with Led Zeppelin, they made it a point to never put themselves on the covers.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:01Rick Rubin?

  They kept, they also had this mystery about them always.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:07Rick Rubin?

  You know, before them, the Beatles were always on their album covers.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 34:11Rick Rubin?

  They were pop groups. But Led Zeppelin was something else.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. Zeppelin was, is surrounded with myth and conjecture.

• 34:19Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  I remember as I got into Zeppelin's music after reading that book and totally falling in love with it. I remember talking to kids my age and contemporaries that were listening to it too, going back and listen to this music. And thinking that my sense of what this group was was different from theirs, having read this long out of print paperback book.

• 34:41Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  And I realised it was Zeppelin. The story is being codified by books published in the eighties and beyond that are looking back. They're looking from John Dobonham's death backwards.

• 34:55Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  The interesting thing about this obscure little book that I read that said long out of print was it's looking forward.

• 35:03Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  The end's in the mid seventies, the end is not written.

• 35:07Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  So the whole perspective in the book is from the perspective of these children on this journey. And they haven't even reached the end of it by the time the book's printed. So my perspective on this was by thanks to that little paperback was very different. And this book ended with a world of possibilities.

• 35:26Rick Rubin?

  As does the film.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. This is what you want in a movie is you want something, the purpose I think of a movie is to inspire people.

• 35:36Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  You, I want them to walk out of the cinema and go, you know, I'm going to form a group or I'm going to apply these things to something I've learnt or something I'm doing, anything you can do that helps you when you leave the cinema go, I figure this out, this is what I'm going to do. That's the highest goal you can have as someone that creates something.

• 35:57Rick Rubin?

  And that's how the book influenced you.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:59Rick Rubin?

  It wasn't so much about music, it was about following your inner light.

• 36:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. It was like, how do you make music, demystify, what are the things you knew to do creative things? Because what we all do in this creative field, we're craftsmen. And I think the great myth about this is people tout around words like genius and things like this and auteur. As if we're kind of touched by, certain people are touched by the hand of God.

• 36:26Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  My experience in what I do and looking at Cled Zeppelin is that it's an enormous amount of hard work. Masses of incremental work that eventually becomes, it's so many bricks that eventually you have the Great Wall of China.

• 36:42Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  And you're like, how the hell, this, you can see this thing from space. And it's the same here. And that's, I suppose, what people might term as genius. But it's, it's very counterproductive to use those terms.

• 36:53Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  And so what I liked about this is it was showing you, the book was showing, and the film was showing the practical things that you do. And then it lets the music play, you get to hear the music.

• 37:03Rick Rubin?

  Another part of it is that you can only put in that time if you really love something.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. You've got to really love it. So I, I was looking at this follow up and I said, this is the story. This is the story we've got to make after American Epic, I said, this group takes us through from Jimmy's born and he's the oldest in 1944. So it takes you from World War Two through to 1970. And I knew the exact point where I wanted the film to end, which would be with their homecoming at the Albert Hall. And so with all the films I do, I would never knock on someone's door and say, hey, I've got an idea, I want to do a film with you. I, I've got to, in my mind, I have to work out exactly how I'm going to make that film and can I do it? How would I do it?

• 37:53Speaker 00

  So with this, I spent about eight months writing a script and tracking down archive.

• 38:01Rick Rubin?

  So this is in preparation before you've ever talked to anyone in the group?

• 38:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 38:06Rick Rubin?

  And they could very easily say no?

• 38:09Speaker 00

  Correct. I was aware going into it that, that they had never participated in a documentary.

• 38:14Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  They had never, ever sat down and formally told their story in any form to a biographer or anything like that. So the received was absolutely would be no.

• 38:25Rick Rubin?

  Yes. So you spend eight months putting together what you would do in a dream project that likely would not happen. Your mindset was, I'm making this film with these people?

• 38:37Speaker 00

  Yes, that was my mindset.

• 38:39Rick Rubin?

  And you've not met them, you don't know them?

• 38:41Speaker 00

  Don't know them, no. In fairness, I had met Robert Plant. I'd been introduced to Robert Plant through a wonderful musician called Justin Adams, you know, who discovered Tenor, When and all those great groups.

• 38:52Rick Rubin?

  Fantastic.

• 38:53Speaker 00

  And Justin, that was through David James, the great music manager. And Justin had brought me backstage to meet Robert, long before Epic was finished. And so Robert was familiar with our work. But I could tell what I knew of Robert Plant, that that would have no impact on, you know, other than he kind of the American Epics, I thought. But yeah, so hadn't met them. And certainly didn't met Jimmy or John Paul Jones.

• 39:24Rick Rubin?

  Prior to this project coming to be, what do we know about the relationship between those three people at that point in time before you reached out?

• 39:35Speaker 00

  It was apparent to me that of all the groups, the major acts, and they've got to be like in the top three, haven't they? No one does less publicity than they do.

• 39:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, none.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  They do none?

• 39:50Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  I mean, I think when the last big series of reissues came out with the double LPs and the CDs, I don't think Robert Plant, John Paul Jones did a single interview or post of any kind on their social media.

• 40:05Rick Rubin?

  The last two things I remember anyone doing were there was a concert that was filmed and recorded where they changed the way the songs were presented.

• 40:17Speaker 00

  Oh, yes, yes, yes. That was Robert and Jimmy.

• 40:20Rick Rubin?

  And that was sometime maybe in the 80s?

• 40:22Speaker 00

  Or 90s. I actually saw that show.

• 40:25Rick Rubin?

  How was it?

• 40:26Speaker 00

  Fantastic. Pure chance. Friend had a spare ticket. It was no media. And it was I knew someone. They said, do you want to come? So these are all these interesting things. I'd actually got lucky and seen these things. I was actually too young to have seen that plane. So all these things that kind of were pointing the way. This is your film, you know? And then, you know, I got a last minute ticket to see the O2 show as well.

• 40:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah. And the O2 show, also, there was no publicity. There was one show. It was announced. They did the show and that was it.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. So I think it's fantastic. That's what I love about them is they don't do any of that stuff. I mean, like.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  You know, the thing that's exciting about Zeppelin is what I've often wondered, apart from the musicianship, which is, you know, let's say apart from the extraordinary musicianship and the songwriting production, is I think what makes them very exciting is when they appeared in sixty nine as the Beatles were essentially falling apart.

• 41:26Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  This group appears that literally has no Beatles in its DNA whatsoever.

• 41:32Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  And of all the big groups, even Pink Floyd, there's elements of Beatles in there. There's zero Beatles in the Zeppelin to my ears.

• 41:41Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  And I think that was what the public needed and wanted after this massive, almost decade-long infatuation, influence of the Beatles. This group appears and is so different in its DNA that it caught their interest, you know.

• 42:00Rick Rubin?

  There's a moment in the film where you show the album chart with Led Zeppelin number one and Beatles number two. And I'll say it's a shocking thing to see.

• 42:10Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 42:11Rick Rubin?

  Because the Beatles are still the Beatles.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's exactly, you know, as you said, a hugely,

• 42:18Speaker 00

  hugely important and fantastic group. And yet Zeppelin is so different in every way.

• 42:24Rick Rubin?

  And I love Jimmy says in the movie, he played on everybody's records except the Beatles.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  It's like no Beatles connection.

• 42:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  And as you say, he virtually played with everyone. It's like, it's almost like it's destiny, this thing is, you know. And those things are exciting things where something comes in and it's the polar opposite of whatever dominated the thing for ten years. Those are the things that are exciting, but they're also, they're the most difficult things to break through because nobody in the business gets it.

• 42:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, there's no point of reference for it. It's brand new.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  The media by and large can't stand them.

• 43:02Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 43:02Speaker 00

  You know, no record company in Britain was interested in paying in advance for them. Incredible. And listen to that album.

• 43:10Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  You know, if you talk to Glenn Johns, which I, you know, I did extensive background interviews. He brought that lacquer of album one and played it to all the prominent people in the music business. He told me he played them at Jagged, potentially get them on the Rolling Stone circus. Jagged like don't, didn't get it at all, he said, and hired Jethro Tull instead. Yeah, he played it to. Certainly to George Harrison, I can't remember if he played it to other Beatles, and Pete Townsend, he played it to all these people.

• 43:37Rick Rubin?

  Same thing happened with the Beatles.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  Right, yes, exactly.

• 43:40Rick Rubin?

  Nobody would sign the Beatles either.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  Exactly, yes, you're absolutely right, yeah. It was like, rock bands are finished, isn't it?

• 43:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  It's over. Because they were kind of like a, they had that Motown thing they loved, but they were really a throwback to the, their big things were, you know, the Crickets. The Crickets and Carl Perkins, those songwriting rockabillys. That's what they liked. And there, that was considered in 1960, late 1960s, that was considered completely out of date, wasn't it? Yeah. God knows what those record companies are wanting to throw us into, you know? I mean, wasn't it all Bobby Darin, all this kind of, it was definitely going super middle of the road, wasn't it? I think that's what the industry wanted, I think the industry wanted to get rid of these drug-taking, pot-smoking, rockabilly musicians and replace them with entertainers again, you know?

• 44:30Rick Rubin?

  What do you think made Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin?

• 44:34Speaker 00

  It's the sheer technical ability of these four master musicians. I can say that, having made this film, it's been, you know, years editing this film, and however tricky it was to get it to the film it is now, in terms of like, the way it's sequenced. When the performances would play in the edit bay, every single time I heard them, my heart would jump for joy at how amazing they sounded. I never got bored of that music. I was never less than elated when that music came in. So, it's a combination of like, from the ground up, you know,

• 45:17Speaker 00

  Bonham's drumming, absolutely mind-boggling. I mean, he's a jazzer, he's a jazzer with strong love of soul music. He's not a rocker, he's not on the floor at all. Everything swings with Bonham, so the first thing you've got is a rhythm section that swings. And I think that's so many of the groups that want to be inspired by Led Zeppelin, unfortunately don't get it, that what makes Zeppelin works is the rhythm section swings.

• 45:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, people mistake Led Zeppelin for heavy metal.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's totally not.

• 45:49Rick Rubin?

  Something else.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  And then you move to John Paul Jones, who literally didn't, told me he did not understand what rock music was, as it was in the late, you know, 60s. This is not his thing at all. So he comes in with a whole different. So you listen to these things like Good Times, Bad Times, the opening track. I mean, he's playing like Motown style bass lines on these songs. I mean, no convert rock bass player would think of playing what he plays. So there's, he's got him with John Bonham. So you have Bonham's extraordinary patterns. His drumming is so sophisticated, it showed up technical flaws in how every movie is delivered to the cinema.

• 46:32Speaker 00

  I could hear errors in the way that the D C P, which is the thing he lives in, the way that had been packaged because Bonham's drumming is so sophisticated. It shows up if things aren't in sync.

• 46:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  You know, then you've got Jonesy coming in, weaving in in and out of that with his extraordinary imagination. Again, this is a guy that's played on countless types of music. And then Jimmy, I mean, we opened the film, the second song you hear is the Johnny Burnett Trio, Train Kept A Rolling. And I got an original forty five of that, you know, and it just, the sound of that is so ferocious. It's so exciting. There's no drums on it. It's a double bass, electric and rhythm guitar and a vocal. And I think, I talk to Jimmy, that track is like a total touchstone for him. So you have Elvis in Memphis.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  And he was working for an electrical company and he was the driver and the electrician was Johnny Burnett. So these two guys are in a truck together. And Elvis does, goes to Sun and does the sessions with Sun with this wonderful soaring voice.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  And Johnny is the hardcore feral rockabilly. And he does those initial records for Coral, like Train Kept A Rolling. I mean, that's about as aggressive as you can get. And I think it's just Jimmy's meat, that sound.

• 47:54Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  I remember playing Howling Wolf with him and he was like, oh, he just, his face lights up, that kind of real feral, edgy, raw. So you've got that in there and then. He was showing me at his house, Jimmy, he had this collection of like early Arabic music. These are records from the 50s that he had as a kid. So this is sitar music and these are rare records, but they were put out, you know, on his master's voice. And you could tell these were the original copies he'd had from childhood.

• 48:23Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  So that whole eastern music thing, he was into that from his childhood. So all that's in the mix, you know, and he has this enormously broad session career. And then Robert, Robert had sung in almost every style you could imagine before Zeppelin. He's like a troubadour, you know?

• 48:41Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  So he'd, he'd been a mod, he'd been a soul singer, he'd been a Tom Jones type singer.

• 48:47Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 48:47Speaker 00

  As he, as he said, throwing it against the wall, seeing if it sticks. But there was this big passion for blues and just before Zeppelin, you know, I came across all these recordings he'd made with Alexis Corner, who's like the father of British blues. And it's Robert singing and you can hear this sort of template emerging and this different voice emerges. He doing all these things, but you know, he describes in the film, you know, that as a kid going to see Sonny Boy Williamson on the, on the American Folk Blues Tour at the Birmingham Town Hall was like a life-changing experience. And so I think it's the combination of these guys coming together with all their different interests. And the fact that unlike most groups, they're meeting as relative strangers in that room.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  You know, Plank and John Bonham knew each other and they played in some groups together. But as Robert says, you know, John Bonham's lovely wife had said, don't play with that plant. Don't go near him, he's a disaster. So they were kind of like, you know, this was a sort of a, almost a covert operation.

• 49:49Rick Rubin?

  Funny because we think of Bonham as the outlaw character in the band, but it was, it was Robert.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think Robert's the most outlawish. He's the most outlawish. He was the one, he was thrown out of his house by his parents.

• 50:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  You know, so the great thing also about the Zeppelin story is if you're, you're a kid and you're setting out on your journey, whatever that journey might be, and you have something you want to do, that is not what your school or your parents are telling you should be doing, whatever it might be. You are one of the four members of Led Zeppelin on that journey, so. They're archetypes. They're archetypes. So John Paul Jones, his parents are vaudeville entertainers, so they're in the theatre business. The only difference is that John Paul Jones's father thinks bass guitar is a novelty instrument. In two years' time, it'll never be heard of again. Get yourself a saxophone, it'll always work. It's my favourite line in the film. I just love it.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  And he goes, no dad, I want bass guitar. He'd heard um, he'd heard uh, shaking all over by Johnny Kidd and the Pirates and the bass thundering through the, through the jukebox. He goes, that's why I wanna play. And so, you know, he goes on that journey with, so he, he grew up literally standing on the wings of these shows. Then you have Jimmy, who's, I relate to a lot because his mother, like mine, was very supportive of his music. And all his school friends that he introduced us to remembered Patricia, his mum, as like encouraging them to rehearse in the living room.

• 51:23Speaker 00

  And whereas Jimmy's father was more like, get your studies done, what's all this guitar business? But the mother was, saw something and she encouraged it. And then you have John Bonham, whose parents are neutral, but they're, as long as you're paying for your kid and your wife, that's fine with this music thing. But there's always a job for you at the family building firm. And then the other end of the spectrum is Robert Plant, where parents wanted to be a chartered accountant. And when he, it emerges, he doesn't wanna do that, they throw him out of the house. Yeah. So if you're a kid, you are one of those archetypes. Yeah.

• 52:00Speaker 00

  That's the full, all the four points on the compass. So that's another thing about the story that struck me, is its usefulness. I thought, everyone has an entry point into this story. Yeah. You're one of those kids. You've got the support of both parents, one parent, neutral, or no support. Yeah. You're one of them. And so those are the things I'm interested in the film, that like, what's the meaning? None of this film was ever approached in the point of, oh, this could make a lot of money. I never, it never entered my mind. I just remember, I loved this when I was twelve, and boy, would this music make an extraordinary score for a movie. Yeah. So I had the South Pacific story, you know, which is, in South Pacific, it's like this thing about racial harmony.

• 52:45Speaker 00

  And in Led Zeppelin, it's a story of a quest. And we had songs every bit as good as Barley High. Or Happy Talk with Zeppelin, Dazed and Confused. So you've got this amazing story that's illustrated by Communication Breakdown, you know?

• 53:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  A whole lot of love, ramble on. So to me, it was like, that was what I was thinking. I was thinking of it like a musical. Like I was saying, I wanted to make a film that I could go to the Brixton Ritzie like I used to when I was a teenager, and I could watch it three times a year.

• 53:15Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 53:15Speaker 00

  That was the whole thought in my head. I wanted to make that kind of film and with the best sound possible, you know? And.

• 53:21Rick Rubin?

  And you have it. It sounds, it's insane how it sounds, it's so good.

• 53:30Rick Rubin?

  Tell me when you first met Jimmy Page.

• 53:33Speaker 00

  So I'd, I'd done all this research, got a storyboard together. And so storyboard is where you, you create the film in pictures. So I'd written a script. And then I, I had this storyboard, a bound storyboard. And this is it here.

• 53:50Rick Rubin?

  Oh, fantastic.

• 53:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's got a bit tatty now, but this, it's, it's housed in a nineteen, these are, this is a nineteen twenties, seventy eight RPM album. And I've taken the wallets out. And so I basically had the whole story depicted through, this is all their childhoods.

• 54:12Rick Rubin?

  A series of photographs.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:14Rick Rubin?

  Both of them and what was going on in their lives at that time.

• 54:18Speaker 00

  Correct, exactly.

• 54:19Rick Rubin?

  It's a young Jimmy Page.

• 54:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, Lonnie Donegan. Yeah, John Paul Jones, I hadn't tracked down the church yet.

• 54:26Rick Rubin?

  Because John Paul Jones played organ in the church.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  Yes. So I had this storyboard ready and I reached out, I wrote to Jimmy Page and said I'd like to meet, and I didn't say why I wanted to meet.

• 54:43Speaker 00

  And a meeting was granted.

• 54:45Rick Rubin?

  That's odd.

• 54:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it transpired when I got to the meeting that he was very familiar with American Epic.

• 54:52Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  And had watched all the films and he had the book and the soundtracks. There were nine soundtrack albums.

• 55:01Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 55:02Speaker 00

  All of this is because of American Epic, because of the work on that film. So I sort of sat down, he arrived with some like shopping bags, which he like, a bunch of them, which he put down by the door. And we were in a hotel and I pulled the storyboard out and said, look, I've got this film. And I started walking him through the storyboard and he became very animated. And was like making lots of observations as I was walking through. And it was very kind of meticulous, like I remember, I I planned to maybe spend two hours doing this. It was seven hours.

• 55:40Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  Of just absolutely constant conversation, there was only a break in the middle. So we went for afternoon tea up the road at the Orangery, which is where afternoon tea was invented.

• 55:52Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so we kept so seven hours going through. And like not stopping for breath, just I'm I'm walking through and he's adding all these things and additional observations and going, yes, and this was the handle. And every now and then, he would just fire a question at me. So I think at one point I said, um, so this is the point where you travel up on Terry Reid's recommendation to go and see Robert Plant. Singing at a teacher's training college, I think it was. And he turned to me and he said, what was the name of the band he was in? And I'm like, Obstweedle. He goes, very good, carry on.

• 56:33Rick Rubin?

  Testing you.

• 56:35Speaker 00

  As well he should, you know, as well he should, I mean, I I would, I would. So what happened here is the storyboard's like a hundred pages of images. And there's not a single piece of text written on it.

• 56:48Rick Rubin?

  So you're telling the story, you're looking at the images and explaining the story.

• 56:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I have everything committed to memory.

• 56:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 56:55Speaker 00

  Every date, every person, every place, it's all committed to memory. And so. Jimmy, in this process, I mean, it was very enjoyable engaging, but I realised afterwards, that was seven hours of memory.

• 57:10Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 57:10Speaker 00

  That I had to have, I couldn't look up anything. And so at one point, I said to him, oh, such and such happened in May. And he sort of, he was like, I thought it was early June. And I went, no, I'm sure it's May, it's something like this. And he went, let's check. And he went for bags he'd brought. And he took out the bags and poured the bags over the contents of the bags. And it was all his diaries going back to sixty two.

• 57:34Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 57:35Speaker 00

  I brought a picture of it here to show you. And so this is that first meeting.

• 57:39Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  And those are the diaries in front of him.

• 57:43Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, he looks happy.

• 57:44Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes. He's a really, really nice guy. He's a really, really nice person.

• 57:52Rick Rubin?

  Describe his personality to me.

• 57:55Speaker 00

  Super enthusiastic, I mean, total real love of music. Like, he opened up the dressbook and gave me the numbers of like, he gave me the number of Rod Wyatt, who he was still very close to, who taught him his first chords on his guitar. And I met Rod, and Rod was this just wonderful kid, still this kid. He was like approaching eighty, but he was this kid. And he had this passion and I recognised, and I met all Jimmy's friends, I went, he's got the same passion for music he did when he was thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. He's never lost it. That thing of music he has is totally unjaded. And so when we would talk about things and we would talk about pieces of music that were entering the story,

• 58:40Speaker 00

  he just, the eyes would light up when he was recording Johnny Burnett. He still feels the same way about the record like when he first heard it. So I think what I loved about, liked about him was just the joy, the excitement in it. There was no cynicism. Once you're, when you're in the inner circle and you're just talking about the stuff, real enthusiasm.

• 59:00Rick Rubin?

  Do you get the sense that he still plays?

• 59:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 59:04Speaker 00

  I mean, he came out and did like a year ago, he did a, they were inducting Link Ray into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He came out and like, like completely out of bounds and turned up and played Rumble, you know, at that, like a fucking champ. I mean, so powerful. Actually, I haven't asked him, like, do you sit and play? I mean, if I'm making a film with somebody, my relationship really centers around with them on the film.

• 59:38Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 59:39Speaker 00

  And so I kind of like to keep that relationship about the period that I'm covering. So if it's from childhood to 1970, I quite like to stay in that zone with the subject. So when they meet me, their head's totally in that zone.

• 59:56Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  And so if you watched and you see the film, they're never in the film talking, looking at it now, this is what I, I think. I wish I'd known, they're in the moment, they're walking you through the film, they're living it in real time. Unless someone starts chatting away, which some of them do about things. I, I don't probe into like, the day to day specifics of how he might play today or whatever. My view is that that's a whole other book.

• 1:00:25Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, the, the film is not who they are today. The film was a moment in time.

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31Rick Rubin?

  And we're living it with them.

• 1:00:33Speaker 00

  Exactly. So the first thing I went through is when he's talking, the first thing I'm looking is like, I'm with this guy and he can see, you make it American for love, you don't make American epic to make money.

• 1:00:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  You make it because it's an important story, it needs to be told, and it's the last window before anyone that was there is dead.

• 1:00:52Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Speaker 00

  And that was the thing that fueled epic. And he could tell when I walked into that room that I actually loved this story and I thought this story was meaningful and it was, the world would be a better place, particularly for kids, if the true story of how this group did what they did was out there.

• 1:01:08Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  And I just saw all those sort of. Tabloidy books that were published in the eighties about largely written by people that went on a jumbo jet with them for a day, a week or so, and hung out at some parties. Well, that's not how you get from nineteen forty-four to nineteen seventy. That's a whole bunch of insane work to get you to that place.

• 1:01:30Rick Rubin?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  And so when I'm talking with him, what was really interesting, he was like, he just got really enthused. He was like literally brought back to that time as we were going through the pages. And because the film, as you see, is quite thorough.

• 1:01:43Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  In each of these stages. I thought I was probably talking to him for two or three hours before we even got to Gerard Street.

• 1:01:49Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  You know? So he was going so into this world. And what was nice, I think, for him was I had learnt all this stuff, or as much as I could. And so it became very collegial and you'd be filling me in on things going, well, actually it was also this and there was this. And so I could tell straight away he was collaborative.

• 1:02:08Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:02:08Speaker 00

  So the other thing that's really lovely about Jimmy Page is I know there's this sort of image of him as this sort of iconic guitarist. And of course, you know, on stage, you know, he is this. But the thing I thought was interesting in meeting him and is at the core, I think, of Zeppelin stories, he's actually a very collaborative person in my experience. So when he meets Robert Plant, who's this nineteen-year-old kid singing an obs tweedle, and it's just recommended by Terry Reid, he wouldn't have had any way of hearing Robert Plant. I mean, Robert had made some records, but it was so obscure.

• 1:02:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  Jimmy wouldn't have been able to get his hand.

• 1:02:48Rick Rubin?

  And Jimmy was already both a top studio musician and in the Yardbirds.

• 1:02:53Speaker 00

  In the Yardbirds, absolutely.

• 1:02:54Rick Rubin?

  Which were a significant band.

• 1:02:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I met Shel Talmi, you know? I did about one hundred and seventy interviews as background research for this film.

• 1:03:01Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:03:02Speaker 00

  I'm talking to Shel Talmi. And he said, if you were trying to make a contemporary record, and you couldn't get Jimmy Page or John Paul Jones, forget it. If you needed, you needed additional musicians to supplement a group because you didn't think the group was tight enough to play their first single or whatever.

• 1:03:19Rick Rubin?

  So they were the sound of British music at that time.

• 1:03:22Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:23Rick Rubin?

  Unspoken.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:03:25Rick Rubin?

  Behind the scenes.

• 1:03:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:26Rick Rubin?

  But they were the sound already, before Zeppelin.

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. They were the guys. And Shell Talmud said, it ain't happening if you don't have those guys on it.

• 1:03:35Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  Unless you're trying to do some middle of the road. If you're trying to do something that's meant to sound contemporary, it's meant to be sounding to a teenage audience. If you can't get those guys, forget it. That's how highly they were regarded.

• 1:03:46Rick Rubin?

  Yeah, it was also remarkable hearing that the famous telecaster was given to him by Jeff Beck.

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  Right, yes. I think he told me that, I mean, they were childhood friends.

• 1:03:55Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Speaker 00

  I think he said Jeff made a guitar himself. I don't know why I thought I was thinking it was a bass. I can't remember. He made a guitar and I had the impression it was quite crudely fashioned, you know. They go way back and he said it was all about, I mean, they loved James Burton. They loved him. I mean, when I was a kid and I heard Believe What You Say, that single, good God, and that Burton solo rips out, you're like, is that even a human being playing this thing? I mean, it's just mind boggling. So he said that they were all like, let's hear your version of My Babe, and it would be in one of Ricky Nelson's tracks. So those kids, you know, they were like, of the rock and roll records, James Burton was the real touchstone guitarist.

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  And he doesn't get props Ricky Nelson now, but those records are amazing. And it's Burton, you know, Burton's a guitarist on Suzie Q. That's him, aged freaking sixteen or something.

• 1:04:50Rick Rubin?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:04:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's James Burton.

• 1:04:52Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  Dale Hawkins, one of my second ever concerts I went to. Yeah, but anyway, so, so he goes up to see Robert Plant and obviously he's impressed and invites him to his house in Pangborn to try him out. And he, you know, it's a well-known story. He says, I wanna do a reinterpretation of this Joan Baez recording. You know, babe, I'm gonna leave you and I've got this idea for how to do it. He's plant, sinks and he's totally thrilled with it. And they both know this is something incredible. And that point he tells Robert, you know, I've got this band together. And Robert's like, no, no, no. Whatever drumming you've got in mind, you've got to see this guy I know. And I think this is, tells you about Jimmy Page.

• 1:05:39Speaker 00

  And why he's different from other people. He is the most experienced session musician in London.

• 1:05:46Rick Rubin?

  He's played with all the greats, period.

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  Exactly. And he's in the Yardbirds, so he's been in the counterculture. He's seen all those musicians up on the West Coast. I mean, who's had more experience? Yet he listens to this nineteen year old kid. And he goes to some gig with Tim Rose to watch this guy drumming. And I just think, how many people, if you're twenty four, whatever he was then, twenty four. And a nineteen year old, you think it's a good thing, I said, you go, that's all right, kid. Cause you're only nineteen, twenty four, that's a big age difference.

• 1:06:18Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  And yet he listens to him. I think there's a lot that tells you about Jimmy Page. That he's got this incredible focused vision about what he wants to do. And I think this is the aspirational, but yet he's open to ideas. And so when I was going through with him, I felt he's a collaborator. And all he wants to know is that you're the right singer or you're the right filmmaker. So when it got to the end of the presentation, I said, he said, how do you wanna do this? And I said, well, I want to do it with everyone, all the bands. And he goes, ah, that's a, that's a bit more of a task, you know? And he says, you know, he says, well, we have to get the other two on board. I said, yeah. And he said, well, I'll help in any way I can, you know?

• 1:07:02Rick Rubin?

  But he didn't speak for the others.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  No, not at all.

• 1:07:06Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Speaker 00

  No, it's, it's very much like a kind of a democracy, you know? And, yeah. And, and he indicated this would not necessarily be easy. You know what I mean? Absolutely.

• 1:07:17Rick Rubin?

  Like he would be supportive and helpful.

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  He'll be supportive.

• 1:07:20Rick Rubin?

  What's the next step?

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  So I said, the other thing, Jimmy, is it needs to be an independent production. I'm making this as an important historical film. And as you can see, I'm bringing into full film together. I want to make a film focusing on music and this musical journey, this inspiration. He goes, so it needs to be independent film. He goes, that's fine. You make the film. And so from then on, you know, I went to track down John Paul Jones. And he hadn't seen American Epic, so I sent a copy of the American Epic films to his manager. And said, would you just ask him to watch 20 minutes of this?

• 1:07:57Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  And if he's not interested, he'll never hear from us again.

• 1:08:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  And I think it was a day or two later, I got a phone call and the manager says, he wants to meet you in the, tomorrow.

• 1:08:08Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  If you're free.

• 1:08:09Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  And so we met at this club in Chiswick. And I sat down with him. And that was in a magical meeting because John Paul Jones is the most press shy, does the least amount of media of a group that does no media. And John Bonham even less.

• 1:08:27Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:28Speaker 00

  But John Paul Jones, no, John Paul Jones might have done the least media of any of them.

• 1:08:31Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  He doesn't feel any compunction to be like blathering to the press at all.

• 1:08:36Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37Speaker 00

  So I'd done a huge amount of research on him. And I was fascinated by his story. And so I sat down with him and started walking through the storyboard. And the first thing that struck me that I'd never seen in the few fragments of bits and pieces done was, he's an incredibly charismatic guy. Really funny. I mean, you see it in the film, can't you? I mean.

• 1:08:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  He is a natural raconteur. And I was saying, I mean, I have to say, I was looking from a filmmaker's point of view and I was going, this guy's absolute gold. This is him comfortable and relaxed in a private place. And I'm walking through and I'm talking through all these details about his childhood and his musical background. He has said tons of stuff, like two hours before we get to the first opening rehearsal. And I'm into this. And you can see how interested in this stuff. And so he's like piling in all, that he had lots of stuff that is not known. Because he is, he's the most mysterious of any of the Zeppelin things. If you look online before we started, there's not even a picture of his parents anywhere. You know, which is unheard of with an act of that magnitude.

• 1:09:42Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  There's always little bits and pieces. He is incredibly mysterious figure. So he's every bit as mysterious in his life as the, the 1920s blues.

• 1:09:52Rick Rubin?

  How would you say the meeting with John Paul Jones and Jimmy were different?

• 1:09:58Speaker 00

  Jimmy's meeting was very focused on all the details that make up the whole.

• 1:10:07Speaker 00

  And Jimmy has this real attention to detail, like it's all the bricks make the giant castle. And so he's going through and you're going talking through the whole film. And he's essentially trying to ensure that all the pieces are there.

• 1:10:23Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:10:23Speaker 00

  And and if there's any additional things he's going, well, that led to this and this is to this and then this is, you know. So he's like checking all the wiring. John Paul Jones was more of a raconteur. And so he was like a great after dinner speaker. He would try and give you the feel of those times. So he was really was someone trying to evoke like when he he would talk about the vaudeville careers of his parents. He'd really try and bring you into those theatres with those acts. When he's playing his little band and he's chatting to this, because all those little bands they'd play in youth clubs. And the youth clubs were generally run by churches. And so this preacher comes up to him and says, do you play the organ?

• 1:11:09Speaker 00

  And and John plays a bit of piano and he goes, oh, yeah. Like this, and he says, well, we're looking for an organist, then we also need an organ. And Jonesy's just fourteen, just says, I can get you an organ. And so the priest, who's who's actually a young priest, I think he's only like twenty four or something. The Rev Gordon Bates, I found out later. I tracked him down, the priest. He was still alive, he's now ninety.

• 1:11:34Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:11:34Speaker 00

  The loveliest man, so he's the one when I tracked him down. He provided all the photographs you see of the church with the congregation. Because that church that Jonesy goes to, it was bulldozed like a couple of years later in sixty four. I think he was there in about sixty one. And so all that stuff is like completely lost to time and the Rev Gordon Bates. And the Rev Gordon Bates also has all these old cuttings, including a picture of Jonesy's first band, The Shadows, at the youth club. He had a photograph of that. And so amazing stuff. And so Jonesy was really good at evoking these places and the atmosphere. And I just found like I was in these streets with him. He talked about as a little boy, he wanted to be a studio musician.

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  And he didn't get his dad to set it up for him. He went down to this street in London where all the musicians would congregate. Called Archer Street, which is in Soho. And it'd be like, you need a bass player, you need a drummer, like this. And he's there with these old grizzled old session musicians, this little kid with his bass guitar. And he gets a gig playing with one of the Shadows, you know, Tony Miian. And so I remember thinking with him, he was very effective at giving you a feel of places, what atmospheres were like. And so you see in the film, he's the one that really is quite evocative about being in that room in that first rehearsal. And he's like, there's all this equipment and it's like, he's so and so, meets so and so.

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  So I thought he was brilliant because he made me feel like I was in these rooms, in these studios.

• 1:13:09Rick Rubin?

  At the end of that first meeting with him, did you get the sense this could happen?

• 1:13:14Speaker 00

  He said at the end of the, he said, he was being very engaging for the whole time, but he didn't make any comment on the, on the overall film. And he just looks at me and he had this half smile, this somewhat impassive expression. And he looks, he goes, by the way, this is me excited. When can we start?

• 1:13:32Rick Rubin?

  Wow, amazing. So next is Robert.

• 1:13:37Speaker 00

  He's, yeah.

• 1:13:38Rick Rubin?

  Tell me about that.

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  So Robert was the only person that was aware of us. We were on his radar, as I said, through American Epic. The person that really got me started in the entertainment business was Brian Eno. I was working on a multimedia project called Towering Inferno. And Brian Eno, I'd gone to see him and asked for his help, which he very, very kindly extended to us. And he was, it was a very important thing about the Holocaust. I was the only Gentile in all Jewish production. And Brian lent enormous support and guidance to help get this thing. And I got the soundtrack signed to Island Records. And Brian recommended, I said, look, he said, you need an experienced person helping you navigate getting in funding for this and doing so.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  He recommended this amazing manager called David James, who managed Jar Wobble and all these people like this.

• 1:14:33Speaker 00

  And Justin was a member of Invaders of the Heart, Jarwobbles band, Justin Adams. So these were the guys that got me into the into the business on the music side. And and so Justin and I had stayed in touch through David James, and Justin then had become Robert's musical director for many, many albums of years. They were very close. And all those wonderful things where they were going and playing in the desert and stuff like this, that was all with Justin, because Justin's area is like Robert's hugely broad in that musical area. So Justin had been telling him about these guys he knew that were tramping around the South and had found photographs of Henry Thomas, photographs of such and such.

• 1:15:15Speaker 00

  So occasionally, I think, some of these things we were finding that I was texting Justin were being passed on to Robert. So we'd met Jimmy, we'd met Jonesy, and the next thing was to meet Robert. And I I was just reaching out to each of them individually in the in just whatever seemed to be the easiest order. And I didn't say when I made the meeting, I've met with so and so. And normally, at the end of the presentation, I think Jonesy might have said, you've seen Jimmy? I said, yeah, I saw him last week. Is he in? I went, yeah, he's in. And he goes, and it's always like that. So Robert had just begun a tour, and one of the first dates on the tour was in Perth, Scotland, which is where my producer Alison McGorty's family are.

• 1:16:00Speaker 00

  And so we went up there, and Justin Adams put us on the guest list of the show. And so we come backstage, and it's this big old theatre full of people. But wonderfully, for some reason, no one had been given backstage passes apart from us. It was like a dream, basically. So we're on our own backstage, Justin and Robert strolls in and comes and gives this really warm greeting and sort of says, I just want to say how much I've enjoyed American Epic. The films are amazing, and the book and everything like that. It's all this wonderful stuff. And he turns to me and he says, what are you gonna do next?

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  So I said, funny you mention that. We'd like to do you, Led Zeppelin. And he sort of looks at me like somewhat like blankly. And I brought like a piece of archive. I I thought I would never dream of pitching someone a film at an after show. Yeah. But I brought, I think I brought something like a piece of proof of where that first rehearsal was. I think I got some paperwork. Cause it's always been a source of mystery. It's on Gerard Street. That's been, no, there's been some people that speculate, but generally was understood it was on Gerard Street in Soho, which is Chinatown now. But the exact building, until we did this film, has been lost in the midst of time.

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  So I had some piece of research that I'd found that indicated the address of where that was. And he was like, I could see his eyebrow raised. And then we just changed the subject. And we chatted about lots of things and stuff like that, super friendly. And at the end of the evening, he just, he shook hands and said goodbye to Alison and me. And then he went out of the room and he stuck his head back in the door and he goes, I know your game and I'm interested. Meet me in Sheffield. So a few days later, we went down to a show in Fresh Sheffield. We met him there, had this really nice chat, but he had loads of people backstage there. And then he sort of said, at the end of the evening, he said, meet me in Los Angeles, which is where I live.

• 1:18:04Speaker 00

  So this is like, I know a few, a week or two later, we're back in Los Angeles and we go to see him at the Orpheum. And this wonderful concert, really, really memorable show. And what was quite good was actually, I really loved the concert he was playing. It was like a fantastic concert. I was going to read this version of Blue Birds Over the Mountain, which is a terrific show. So I was getting to see these shows, each of these missions act to watch the show before meeting him. But I really enjoyed that show. So it was kind of very memorable, that whole thing. But if you go backstage in Los Angeles, there must be like 200 people there. And he comes in and says a quick polite hello. And he talks to every single person in the room. Really politely goes to the wall. So it's like two hours later and eventually I said, well, we should go.

• 1:18:48Speaker 00

  So he says, no, stay. And eventually everyone's gone, it's this giant room and he's standing against one wall with his manager Nicola and we're at the other wall. And then he just walks over and comes over and says, are we going to do this? And I said, yeah. And he goes, meet me in Birmingham. So we go on a plane, we go to Birmingham. And then, God bless him, he walks into the hotel and standing next to him is Pat Bonham.

• 1:19:14Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

  And so I thought, you lovely man, you've spoken to Pat, you've told her about who we are. You haven't been pitched to film, but you obviously, you obviously.

• 1:19:24Rick Rubin?

  He understood.

• 1:19:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was very, it was heartwarming. He called her up and said, we should come to this. And I just sat down and went through it. And she came, she was so lovely. She came with this pile of photographs, you know, that had never been seen before of John Bonham.

• 1:19:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Speaker 00

  All these images. And they chatted through and when Robert saw the story, he was really funny. And I just saw this side of him I'd never seen in the media before, so open, like, kind of wanting to be understood. And we're going through the story and I remember he, he, you could see his spirits raise when he saw it went up to nineteen seventy.

• 1:20:04Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:05Speaker 00

  That was when it ended. And I kind of mentioned this with him and he said, this is so wonderful because this was a really wonderful time for me.

• 1:20:13Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:20:13Speaker 00

  He said it was, it was before it was all kind of formalized being into it. So he said, we're playing to these wonderful hippie girls dancing. And he said, and there was no plan. We were just winging it, you know? Now, of course, Jimmy had a plan, but it was this energy.

• 1:20:31Rick Rubin?

  I understood.

• 1:20:32Speaker 00

  And I totally got it. I think he saw, yes, this film.

• 1:20:35Rick Rubin?

  And even though Jimmy had a plan, there's no telling what's gonna happen.

• 1:20:39Speaker 00

  Absolutely, there's no telling. So for this was like, this was all exciting. So I'd brought a little piece of paper up that was said like, I think I got it here. I brought this little piece of paper up that was like, we're gonna do this film, you know, kind of thinks I could have something. No law or anything like that. He just signed it straight away with Pat.

• 1:21:00Rick Rubin?

  This is incredible.

• 1:21:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:03Rick Rubin?

  This is incredible.

• 1:21:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. He was like, I'm in.

• 1:21:08Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:21:09Speaker 00

  Great guy. So then we set up the interviews and we have this, we have a meeting with all of them, all three of them together.

• 1:21:15Rick Rubin?

  And how's that? And how are they different together versus independently?

• 1:21:21Speaker 00

  Well, you know that rhythm that you have that people like, they just have a, it's all of us, you know, we have like.

• 1:21:29Speaker 00

  If you put me in the room with my brother and my dad, I'm gonna talk differently than if I'm on my own. So it's no different from any of those things. You just get a slightly different rhythm for people, you know? One person might be quieter than they are when they're with you.

• 1:21:44Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:21:45Speaker 00

  Another person might be louder. Yes, it was one of those things that is very, when you make documentary films, this is very common.

• 1:21:53Rick Rubin?

  Yes. Tell me the differences, though. Tell me in the group meeting what was different.

• 1:21:58Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, this is a meeting to really formally decide, are we gonna do this film, kind of thing? Are we gonna, are we gonna let you, are we gonna allow you to make this film? In a sense, you can't make a documentary about someone without their permission to use the music. So I think in terms of that meeting, what was really cool about it was that they agreed that the film and supported the film, we should have complete artistic freedom to make the film. So collectively, they agreed that. And I thought that was unprecedented in terms of like, an act of that magnitude.

• 1:22:33Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:22:34Speaker 00

  And so they never ordered a frame of the film. And so they're not producers of the film. But it was very personable. They're very individually, very entertaining and charming people to be with. But when I was with the three of them together, that was the first time I had this sense of like, this is like a major organisation. There was something about the gravitas for the three of them in the room together.

• 1:23:02Rick Rubin?

  Probably even for them.

• 1:23:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, those meetings are rare, as I understand, you know? It was very kind of them to organise that, you know? So, yeah, you felt like you were at a summit meeting of like these, almost these three countries or something.

• 1:23:17Rick Rubin?

  Very cool.

• 1:23:17Speaker 00

  It was very, yeah, so that was the point. So it was like, you know, when they agreed to this artistic freedom and they were like, yeah, you make it.

• 1:23:27Speaker 00

  Looking back on it, what I thought was really ingenious, I mean, we required it, but it wasn't like something we had to kind of like push for. What was really smart about it is that when they made a decision as a group that they were going to do something, and as you know, the last one was the O2, so these are very rare, these things. And that's one of the wonderful things about Led Zeppelin is they're not like pushing product down people's throats. They let the music stand for itself, as I see it. What I thought was really great about it is they put all the onus on you, the filmmaker, because you go, I'm in this place that no one's allowed to be in to make this film, and they've given me the freedom to make it, so it better be bloody good.

• 1:24:09Speaker 00

  You know, because you've got no one to blame by yourself if it's not working.

• 1:24:13Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:13Speaker 00

  I thought that was, on so many levels, it's smart, you know? And so we set about putting the thing together, and then we did the interviews with them. And first, the other thing that's worth mentioning is they have incredible memories, like way better than mine, like astonishingly good memories. Don't forget, I've done 175 background interviews with everyone from Vic Flick to Glenn Johns to, you know, Rev Gordon Bates.

• 1:24:39Rick Rubin?

  Yes. None of which is in the movie. It's just the information you need to make the movie.

• 1:24:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:24:45Rick Rubin?

  Only voices in the movie are the band members.

• 1:24:47Speaker 00

  Because...

• 1:24:48Rick Rubin?

  And the music.

• 1:24:49Speaker 00

  Because they're alive, apart from John, and so let the audience, they've agreed to let them talk, don't interrupt them and tell the story. I knew after meeting them, I thought, they're reliable witnesses. So I'd done, I said, eight months of, I was obviously very familiar with Led Zeppelin before, but I've done eight months of hardcore research. And so I'm aware when I'm talking to someone if they're a credible witness, you know, do they remember things correctly?

• 1:25:13Rick Rubin?

  How did you find the Barnum audio interviews?

• 1:25:18Speaker 00

  So I started thinking, what, if we have all three of them talking, we have to have John in there. And I thought, God, this is a high bar, because he was super press wary. And so I thought I've got to try and track down something with him talking. And I remember Robert saying, because I think I said to them, I want to have John to have an equal presence. And I remember Robert saying, how are you going to do that? It's like, I don't recall hearing anything of him talking more than a few sentences. And I said, we'll find it. And I think he said something like, well, he did American Epic, I guess. He found all that stuff from the twenties.

• 1:25:54Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:55Speaker 00

  You know. So how I did that was I tracked down every interview that John had done in the print media and anywhere else. And I contacted all the journalists, most of whom were alive, and said, did you have a tape? And in most cases, they either had done shorthand or they discarded the tape or whatever it had been. And eventually I'm talking to Sam Rapallo, who runs the Led Zeppelin website, who's a huge repository of like Led Zeppelin material. And he passes on this bootleg recording of an interview with Robert and John. And it's like a really good interview. It's a short excerpt, but it's excellent journalist.

• 1:26:39Speaker 00

  The sound quality was not good enough to use in the kind of film we make for a cinema. It was like third or fourth generation, but I could tell it was originally from a quarter inch tape. And it was, I could tell it was also a radio journalist because he was not talking over them and he was had an Australian accent. And so I contacted the University of Canberra in Australia, which is where radio tapes in Australia, that's where they get sent if someone can be bothered to send them in. Unfortunately, the University of Canberra had done a giant American Epic festival. So they were helpful.

• 1:27:12Rick Rubin?

  You had a relationship.

• 1:27:13Speaker 00

  I had a relationship. So I sent through the tape, an excerpt of the tape with the journalist speaking and saying, can you identify who this is? And they identified him as this journalist from a Sydney radio station. And he was a stringer that had obviously been doing this interview in advance of their first Australian tour. I went to the radio station. They said, we don't have that tape. So I went back to the University of Canberra and said, has this tape ever been sent to you? And they looked and they went, no, we don't have it. And then before I put the phone down, I said, how many unmarked reels do you have? And they went, thousands. Because doing Epic, I'd found that with the Library of Congress and these things,

• 1:27:56Speaker 00

  there are pallets of stuff that get bequeathed to them that they receive, but it can take years to process that material. So they said thousands of unmarked reels. And so I persuaded them to start looking through the unmarked reels. And I think it was a couple of months later, I got a phone call and they said, go to your email. Like that. And I opened up the email and there was a MP3 transfer. And it was that interview and it sounded bloody amazing.

• 1:28:24Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:28:24Speaker 00

  And so I persuaded them to send the reel.

• 1:28:26Rick Rubin?

  Great.

• 1:28:27Speaker 00

  In to our endpoint audio where our engineer Nick Bergen, we transferred it. It was fantastic. And it was just like the dream interview. So many comments from him that other band members hadn't said.

• 1:28:39Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:28:40Speaker 00

  And then after that, we found two other American interviews that just discovered shorter ones. And between those three, there he was.

• 1:28:51Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  And I said, he was never doubling up what the rest of the band said. And he was talking about all these things in the moment. I remember Jimmy sort of saying, he said, in the funniest sort of ways, like the star of the show, isn't he? Because he said, he's right there in the moment. Because his interview was so close to the events when they're happening. So he's got, he's fresh and he's got all these perspectives. So those were the elements that came together. And when the band turned up to do the interviews, I said, all of them turned up with bags of photographs and sound recordings, everything I'd never seen before. So Robert turns up with all these pictures of him from his different groups and his bands, but also a lacquer of this track that him and John Bonham in their group.

• 1:29:33Speaker 00

  Robert Platt and the Band of Joy called Memory Lane, they'd written together. And no one had ever heard that before.

• 1:29:40Rick Rubin?

  So cool.

• 1:29:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so he said, there you go, have this. And all of them, John Paul Jones, all it just, I think this is interesting with Zeppelin. That's all I'll say. I mean, I don't want to speak for them, you know. But what I did notice, and the lesson I say to kids, when they go for it, they go for it.

• 1:29:56Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:29:56Speaker 00

  They do it properly. They don't hold back. And I think there's those interviews in the film. They're super candid. Those are people really telling you what they feel.

• 1:30:05Rick Rubin?

  Where did the footage come from of the live performances?

• 1:30:09Speaker 00

  I searched everywhere bar the Mariana Trench for any existing footage. So there were two or three known performances that were filmed from that time. And a lot of material that isn't been seen before. But there were two or three known performances. The first thing I would do is I would track down the filmmakers. Or whoever had filmed it, I'd go go to those facilities and I'd go through and get all the rushes and the original elements. So with this film, everything you see on the screen has been in our hands. So, you know, like here, so this is the actual negative for the performance of Dazed and Confused.

• 1:30:47Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:30:47Speaker 00

  This is what comes into our hands. So we have all these pieces. Back in the days of the 40s and 50s, sound was like the one of the highest priorities in the Hollywood movies. And and really hence the enormous attendance figures that movies used to have then. Now, sound is kind of a bit of an afterthought in films. And so when we get these films in here, what we're doing is we're transferring the original film. We're able to do really high quality scans. But what makes this difference is that Nick Burg is probably one of the best transfer engineer on the planet for pulling audio off all these different mediums because he did the American Epic film. So he didn't just like learn how to transfer 78. He has the original recording system.

• 1:31:32Speaker 00

  Each era of Hollywood, he has all the original mixing desks. So, you know, we were working on the mixing desk that they mixed Oklahoma on.

• 1:31:39Rick Rubin?

  I see.

• 1:31:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so he understands all that material. He is able to record this stuff going in. And so he knows what he's meant to be hearing when he's getting the original mags or the elements, what's meant to be coming out. And so, you know, I experienced that when we were using the original nineteen twenties recording kit for American Epic. I suddenly knew how the seventy eights were meant to sound because I was making them. I was making them with Willie Nelson and Nas and Jack White. I could hear what these things are meant to sound like. So when I would get the seventy eights from the twenties, I would know what was a product of deficiencies on that disc that, as opposed to what the actual wax disc it was cut to sounded like, you know? So all these things that you get to learn from working.

• 1:32:24Rick Rubin?

  Every medium brings something to the recording, positive or negative.

• 1:32:30Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:32:31Rick Rubin?

  It always does something. Like, we fetishize vinyl because it sounds so good, but it doesn't sound like what the tape sounds like. It sounds like vinyl.

• 1:32:39Speaker 00

  Exactly right. And so that's the fundamental thing of the movie, when you watch it, is actually what you're listening to. So with Led Zeppelin support, we have access to master tapes, remasters of the Zeppelin material. But from Epic, I also started listening to the original discs. And I remember thinking, what are we gonna give the public? As you mentioned, when you make a record.

• 1:33:05Rick Rubin?

  Sounds different.

• 1:33:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. There are three steps in that process. You have your quarter inch master that Glynn Johns and Jimmy mixed down in Olympic for Led Zeppelin one. Then that goes to Atlantic and a production master's made. And various things are done to that tape to get it ready for being cut. Then stage three, a lacquer is cut by a George Piras or a Bob Ludwig. And that has a huge amount of stuff done to it, as you know. So in the case of, say, Zeppelin II, Bob Ludwig hugely goose that cutting of that record so that it has this extraordinary sound.

• 1:33:50Speaker 00

  In fact, that record is so loud that after they pressed the first, I don't know, two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand of them, they were getting complaints from people that had cheap turntables because the needle is moving. You know, when you play a record, the volume is created by the needle moving more violently. So you have more dramatic peaks and troughs for the needle to be passing through, and that creates the volume. And so in the cheap record player, the needle will jump out. And so. That Ludwig cut is like magical and so I started assembling all these records. I brought a few here to show you. So this is the original Ludwig, you know. This was sealed when I bought it, so I I had to buy a whole bunch of these,

• 1:34:33Speaker 00

  what appeared to be very first pressing sealed, hoping that there would be one of the Ludwig versions in there. And then similarly, this is like the legendary, you know, first turquoise pressing of Zeppelin I. But my favorite version when I was playing it is this version here.

• 1:34:53Rick Rubin?

  Did you A B the sound on all of them?

• 1:34:55Speaker 00

  We we had masses of copies of these records.

• 1:34:58Rick Rubin?

  But I'm saying you would pick based on what sounded good, not based on what you thought was.

• 1:35:04Speaker 00

  What sounded good?

• 1:35:05Rick Rubin?

  Reported to be the best.

• 1:35:07Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:35:07Rick Rubin?

  You always went by what sounded best.

• 1:35:09Speaker 00

  So yeah, with these records, what you have here is in in America, I think there are four pressing plants that are pressing Zeppelin I. And each of them have different cutting engineers. All approaching and this tape is a tricky tape. There's some azimuth issues on Zeppelin I, the production master that was made by Atlantic. And so they're trying to work correct for this. And so all these lacquer cuts are very different. And the British one's different, so we must have had about, I don't know, sixteen, seventeen versions of.

• 1:35:43Rick Rubin?

  What were you playing them back on?

• 1:35:44Speaker 00

  Oh, we were at Endpoint, probably the best playback of Lath on the planet, you know?

• 1:35:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:50Speaker 00

  And so we're going through these and what I noticed is these original records, they have a quality to them. There's a quality to the sound. I went, this is what the public heard. This is what excited the public. And I thought, why don't we in this film, give the public what they heard in nineteen sixty nine, but on the best copy of that disc on Planet Earth, played back on the best hi-fi on Planet Earth.

• 1:36:15Rick Rubin?

  Which was not hearable, other than in your movie today.

• 1:36:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:18Rick Rubin?

  You can't hear this.

• 1:36:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can't hear this. But it's the truest sound to what was originally intended because of course, when these were made, when Jimmy's in and the band are in the studio making these records, they completely know that the endpoint is that disc.

• 1:36:31Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:36:32Speaker 00

  The master tape is not going to be distributed.

• 1:36:34Rick Rubin?

  No.

• 1:36:34Speaker 00

  And in fact, the master tape is made, knowing in mind that all these things are going to be done to it.

• 1:36:40Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:36:41Speaker 00

  So in the case of this example here. Led Zeppelin II. This is this extraordinary cut by Robert Ludwig, which I remember Jimmy saying to me, this is the way to hear Zeppelin II, is this particular pressing.

• 1:36:52Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:36:53Speaker 00

  Now, this is made one of the plants called Presswell. Atlantic were notorious for using bad, impure vinyl to save money. So Atlantic Pressings are traditionally quite noisy. So this one here happened to be what you call a really good, clean puck. And it's in one of the best pressing plants. And so this one was incredibly clean copy. So what we did is we're presenting this, and this is in the film with no equalization, no compression. All we've done is if there's any minor clicks in the transfer, they're manually removed. So you're hearing the music, the way it was intended the day it came out.

• 1:37:33Speaker 00

  And we're serving it to like a pineapple, cut off the tree in Kauai, sliced in half and put on your plate. That's what we're doing musically.

• 1:37:42Rick Rubin?

  And it sounds, I've been listening to Led Zeppelin music for as long as it's been around, and I've never heard it sound like it sounds in the movie. And it's thrilling. It is thrilling, breathtaking.

• 1:37:58Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:37:58Rick Rubin?

  However you did it, it worked.

• 1:38:02Speaker 00

  So for me, when you hear the recordings that are the studio recordings like Little Richard and Johnny Burnett, you're again hearing the original disc was those original lacquer cuts as they were done. And if you know a bit about like early recording, those 50s records like the Chess records, you know, Howling Wolf and things like that, or the early rock and roll records. Those cutting engineers were applying reverb as the lacquer was being cut. So when you listen to the original Chuck Berry records from the 50s, that's the only way you'll hear that original sound is getting the original records. You can't re-

• 1:38:40Rick Rubin?

  They were also sped up, often with the Chuck Berry records.

• 1:38:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're right. Yes, I'd forgotten about that, yeah.

• 1:38:46Rick Rubin?

  Because they wanted Chuck's voice to sound younger.

• 1:38:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:49Rick Rubin?

  So they sped up the record.

• 1:38:50Speaker 00

  So, so there's this enormous amount of like artistry that goes into cutting those records that 50, 60 years later, you can't get back to.

• 1:39:02Speaker 00

  So what I'm interested in the film is if you wanna make a two hour film about Led Zeppelin, and you think a film about Led Zeppelin is worth an audience spending twenty bucks and sitting in a cinema for two hours, do not mess with the music. And so my view is, we're all here because of this music. So give it to the audience in the purest form you possibly can. And when I go through all the variables, I go, the purest form is what you would have heard the day it came out. When they approved on that test pressing, I went, okay, that's fine. That's the finished article that the public heard.

• 1:39:43Speaker 00

  So I'm giving it to you on a system, a copy in a system is beyond anything you could own domestically. If you're doing this story that takes you from nineteen forty-four through to when they meet in sixty-eight, you're hearing each of those pieces of music that influenced them or that they played on, like Goldfinger.

• 1:40:02Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:02Speaker 00

  You're hearing those records as they were cut in fifty-six, as they were cut in sixty-two, as they were cut in sixty-one. So you're hearing the exact sound of how those records were envisaged in each of the years, so that you're taking a musical journey through time, a recording journey through time in the film.

• 1:40:22Rick Rubin?

  It was a damaged piece of film of Jimmy playing acoustic guitar. Where did that come from?

• 1:40:28Speaker 00

  He appeared on a BBC TV show called The Julie Felix Show, and she was like a folk singer. They had two tape machines recording the performance, one of which there was some grit or something on the head of the machine, and so the recording was damaged as it was being made. The other copy was lost years ago. We have searched high and low for that everywhere, not turned up. So all that survived was that damaged tape.

• 1:41:00Speaker 00

  But the sound was undamaged. The sound is phenomenal.

• 1:41:03Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:41:04Speaker 00

  And and so I went to see Melissa Quintus, who is one of the VFX artists for James Cameron and Avatar. And she did some restoration work on film footage for American Epic. And I presented this to her and I said, look, we can't afford the budgets of Avatar. But would you in your downtime, look and see if you can approve this? And she very kindly spent months and months in her, the few hours she had off making Avatar Way of the Water, whatever. She would tinker with this and just literally frame by frame, try and paint out the worst of the lines that were running across it. And what she did is compared to the original tape is a miracle.

• 1:41:44Rick Rubin?

  Wow.

• 1:41:44Speaker 00

  The original tape would induce like, you know, an epileptic fit or something watching it.

• 1:41:49Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:49Speaker 00

  So she did a phenomenal job. So there's no AI whatsoever in the film. Anything we've done is old school. But what was very touching about is I remember screening the film for Jimmy before the restoration was done. Yeah, sometimes you do screenings for the group. You know, just in case someone watches something goes, oh, I've actually got a photograph of that, you know?

• 1:42:14Speaker 00

  And he watched it and then he turns and he goes, I do hope that stays in the film. That clip, he says, because I imagine when you sell this film, there'll be probably people will try and tell you to take it out. Because it was very damaged then.

• 1:42:27Rick Rubin?

  It's still damaged, but it's one of the highlights of the film.

• 1:42:29Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:42:30Rick Rubin?

  It's so out of context of anything we've seen of Jimmy playing. We've never seen anything like that, sitting down with an acoustic guitar and killing it, which he does.

• 1:42:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:42:42Rick Rubin?

  It's breathtaking.

• 1:42:43Speaker 00

  Thanks. Yeah, and that's the, that's that folk side, that folk eastern, eastern side. Yeah.

• 1:42:51Rick Rubin?

  What's the first time you got to see the film on a big screen?

• 1:42:54Speaker 00

  Directors Guild. I did a rough cut of the film. It tailored to the pandemic. And the only way we could screen it in front of an audience was to submit it to Venice Film Festival. And it wasn't finished, but they accepted it. And we opened the festival with it and I took it to the Directors Guild Theatre in Hollywood and I screened it on that giant screen.

• 1:43:14Rick Rubin?

  And what was the experience for you?

• 1:43:16Speaker 00

  Oh, mind blowing. All the work that we put in getting all those original prints, all the original sound. That's when you see it blown up, makes it all worthwhile. But the thing that was the most mind blowing was that um I took the film to went to New York and I went with Sony Pictures Classics and screened a film for Tom Bernard, who runs that company and his team. He's like the old Hollywood bosses that I read about in David Niven's book. I didn't think people like him exist anymore. They're like shoot from the hip kind of guys. No marketing plans, just like, do it, you know? And if they're in, they're in and they go for it. So I screened the film for

• 1:43:57Speaker 00

  him and I just made some comment and he went, okay, we want to do this, you know? And he had seen Zeppelin live at the Texas Pop Festival in sixty nine. And his head of sales, a guy called Tom Prasis, had seen the film. That's the guy that sells the film to all the theatres. He'd seen Zeppelin on that first tour. So what are the chances you were the studio with the two key guys had been to see the group in that period that the film's covering, you know, that early period? So I knew we're in the right place. And I just turned to Tom and I said, hey, you know, it'll be really cool, I think, with this. I don't like this normal thing where you ram stuff down people's throats and there's posters everywhere, this giant marketing thing. That's

• 1:44:40Speaker 00

  so un-Zeppelin as well. Be really cool if the film was introduced like Zeppelin were back then. Like it just comes in in the underground on the West Coast and gradually word of mouth spreads. And he took that idea and he ran with it and he called up and he said, oh, you need to go and screen it for IMAX. And he'd approached IMAX. Because IMAX have, I don't know, just a limited number of cinemas around America. I know it's like five hundred or something like that they've got. And so we turn up to IMAX and I have to screen the film, test screen it at IMAX before all the heads of IMAX watch it. I never would in my wildest dreams imagined that our

• 1:45:20Speaker 00

  movie would be on in IMAX. And I'm sitting watching it and it comes up on the screen. And I was like, Jesus, this was made for IMAX.

• 1:45:29Rick Rubin?

  It really was.

• 1:45:30Speaker 00

  And this is where music films live, is in IMAX. Because you know what it's like, Rick? When you have a musical thing, you kind of want to be in that world.

• 1:45:39Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:45:39Speaker 00

  So your dream is to be inside the biggest speaker system and to be completely enveloped. No one wants to listen to music through a teeny transistor, you know what I mean?

• 1:45:48Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:49Speaker 00

  You want to hear it big. So I'm in there and of course, all that work, we killed ourselves to get our hands on every single film print, every photograph. And everything is scanned at this extraordinarily high level so it could be literally projected on the Empire State Building, you know. And so when I'm getting into IMAX, I was going, thank God we did all that work because you can blow this thing up, huge. So I'm watching it in there and amazingly, IMAX said, we'll do it. So what he had done, which was clever, is we ended up having this exclusive run in IMAX. So it's a limited number of cinemas and the whole opening two days sold out.

• 1:46:28Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:46:29Speaker 00

  So it was like the way Zeppelin was launched. He didn't set up a single review or anything like that, no media. He just invited a bunch of interesting people to come down and watch it in IMAX. These are musicians and film people. And there was no instructions, don't post on social media. So they just literally told their friends. So that's how the work, the film got out. It was not done through any campaign. It was just like play it to a bunch of people and they told other people.

• 1:46:54Rick Rubin?

  And how is it doing so far?

• 1:46:57Speaker 00

  I'm kind of embarrassed to say in a way, but I mean, IMAX said it's their most successful music release of all time.

• 1:47:04Rick Rubin?

  Wow, beautiful.

• 1:47:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:47:07Rick Rubin?

  Beautiful and it deserves it.

• 1:47:09Speaker 00

  Oh, thanks, yeah. I mean, what I'm hearing is a lot of people going to see the film two, three, four times.

• 1:47:16Rick Rubin?

  Well, it's like you listen to Led Zeppelin two a million times. Why wouldn't you go see the movie over and over? Makes perfect sense.

• 1:47:23Speaker 00

  Do you know, that's the funny thing about the film. Obviously, I'm working intensely in Zeppelin one and Zeppelin two. I'll confide here what my hope was. When I made the film, that's why you've got these full songs and there's so much work on just giving you the pure sound. You know the way you get a fix and there's something you want to hear and you have a hankering to listen to, I don't know, it might be Beyonce or Howling Wolf or, or the New York Dolls or whatever it might be, or the Beastie Boys. I thought if you have that yen once a month to go to early Zeppelin one and two, I thought I'd love if I could make a film that could equally fulfill that yen.

• 1:48:07Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:48:07Speaker 00

  So if I want to go into that zone, I could go, I could put the albums on and blast them. Or I could watch this film for two hours and get all that music with the visuals and everything accompanied. And that could be an equally appealing pop proposition.

• 1:48:22Rick Rubin?

  Absolutely. The communication breakdown footage is incredible because the the reception is so nonplussed. Tell me, tell me about, when did you first see that footage?

• 1:48:36Speaker 00

  One of the tenets of the story, I mean, it is a journey to America. This is an American quest. So as you said, it's like in Britain and and Europe initially, a certain audience had been nonplussed by Zeppelin and did not know what to make of them. So I came across this footage that had been shot for this French show called Teuton Sen. And when I looked at the footage, I thought I got to go to the the facility, the Teuton Sen archives. And I went there and I got all the rushes for this and some footage that hadn't been seen before. Everything was shot. So if you look at the film, if there's a performance

• 1:49:17Speaker 00

  that is in the movie that has been seen, a number of people have spotted this already. It's completely recut with different camera angles. So you're not watching anything that is in a form that has been seen before.

• 1:49:30Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:49:31Speaker 00

  So we've looked at it as like film directors going, you know, but this is a Hollywood movie. I would be hitting him the bass player on this cue. The broadcasters missed the cues.

• 1:49:41Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:49:41Speaker 00

  You know, and you see it all the time.

• 1:49:42Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:49:43Speaker 00

  The singer starts singing, they're still looking at the drummer, you know what I mean? So we are using the footage to correct for anything like that. So you're getting this super impactful performance. So I was going through the rushes and I noticed this. Kids in the audience with their fingers in their ears.

• 1:49:59Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:59Speaker 00

  And there's a, there's a woman with a baby in arms. She's holding her baby and she's next to her husband. And the band are blaring away and she's just shaking her head in just horror.

• 1:50:09Rick Rubin?

  People look bored.

• 1:50:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're completely bored.

• 1:50:12Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:50:12Speaker 00

  And the band are just, they're going for it. They're going like gangbusters.

• 1:50:17Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:17Speaker 00

  So what I was able to do was I was able to get these additional camera angles. Where I could pan across the audience. And if you look how it's cut, I've got other camera angles from behind the group.

• 1:50:30Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:50:31Speaker 00

  Which confirmed those kids with their fingers in it, they're still there.

• 1:50:34Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:50:34Speaker 00

  The particular time, as you can see that it's not.

• 1:50:36Rick Rubin?

  You can see what the band is seeing, the lack of reaction.

• 1:50:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And so what was wonderful about it was like, it's perfect thing, it was like, the whole film is constructed like a Hollywood musical in that the songs are used to advance the story. So they're not getting it over. What are they singing? Communication breakdown, you know? When Jimmy goes to try and get the deal in America, what, what are you hearing? Your time is gonna come.

• 1:51:00Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:01Speaker 00

  So all the songs are kind of chosen to work this way. But the thing in the film that was the joy was in terms of getting the story across is, so they're playing for this European audience with their fingers in their ears that aren't getting it. Then they get on the plane and they go to the west coast of America. Which is where Jimmy had envisaged this was where this group was gonna take off. And he saw that as the future. Yeah, this is where it was about, these long shows, albums, not singles in all this business. And she's, he's on his way out there. When they get to the Fillmore, and this is the thing Jimmy told me. When I first presented to him, he goes, it's all about that Fillmore show.

• 1:51:44Speaker 00

  We had this warm up show in LA, but we were all sick with flu. At the Whiskey A Go Go. But he said the Fillmore was the make or break show. And he said, if that show hadn't worked, it wouldn't have happened. This was where it happened. And he said, because we were hitting dead center in the counterculture.

• 1:52:03Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:04Speaker 00

  And it was like, here it is. And the word would have spread out one way or the other. And it was like boom. And then interestingly, totally independently, Robert Plant said to me, he said that Peter Graut had come up to him. Before the show and he said, you better be good tonight. He said, because if you don't cut it here, it's over. That's in the film, Robert says that.

• 1:52:24Rick Rubin?

  Amazing.

• 1:52:25Speaker 00

  You know, so it was all on that show. And so what's brilliant, what are they playing there? Communication breakdown a second time. You normally wouldn't use a song twice, but that version.

• 1:52:36Rick Rubin?

  It tells a story.

• 1:52:37Speaker 00

  Yeah, it tells a, it's ferocious.

• 1:52:39Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:52:39Speaker 00

  It's absolutely almost Ramones intensity performance.

• 1:52:42Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:43Speaker 00

  And it gets over.

• 1:52:44Rick Rubin?

  How would you say each of the band members deal with the legacy of Led Zeppelin?

• 1:52:53Speaker 00

  You know, it's interesting, I mean, this isn't for me to speak for them. What is for me is to put across in a film what they're telling me. And what they're telling me is also informed as a filmmaker by, as I said, 175 background interviews. I'm trying to be in a position where Robert Plant says one sentence to me in a five hour interview. I know that's important because I've, I've spoken to all the people you grew up with. We don't often deliver some of our most important things in giant monologues. Sometimes one passing comment might allude to an enormously important thing. So you have to do that background to.

• 1:53:33Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:34Speaker 00

  To know what you're listening to.

• 1:53:35Rick Rubin?

  Yes.

• 1:53:36Speaker 00

  And that background is, you can be talking to me and we're speaking English. But unless I really have looked into your background, for example, I don't necessarily understand everything you're telling me. I've got to know what you mean, you know?

• 1:53:50Rick Rubin?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:51Speaker 00

  And so if I've done that research, hopefully, when you're telling me something. So I think in terms of this, my sense of it was off the top of my head. These guys strike me as musicians, professional musicians first and foremost. I have no sense of that this was done for self-aggrandizement or to make money.

• 1:54:16Speaker 00

  I think the principal motivator was to make music. And to try and make music in the least messed with way possible. To have the most, the ability to pursue these ideas in the purest form in a collaborative, collective whole. There's a point where John Paul Jones in the film says, when he gets to pang war, they're all about to start rehearsing properly. And he goes, we didn't want to be on TV. We just wanted to make music really badly.

• 1:54:49Rick Rubin?

  And that might have been different than a lot of other bands at that time.

• 1:54:51Speaker 00

  I think it's very different from a lot of other bands. Because a lot of other bands, they all know each other. So they've all sat in front of the TV set and watched the Beatles come on the Ed Sullivan Show. Or they've gone to see the Sex Pistols or whatever their entry point is, or Black Flag or whatever it might be. And there's this element of like, you know, posing in front of the mirror with your hairbrush, singing, you know, and reading about his things in magazines. What's interesting about these guys is that you have two of them that are so fundamental, are seriously professionals, even though they're so young, they're professional studio musicians.

• 1:55:32Speaker 00

  And John Paul Jones was telling me, his day was get up super early in the morning, go to say Abbey Road or wherever. And I think the first session might have been as early as eight AM. And that was jingles. Then there would be three sessions a day. And your session was considered total failure unless you got three songs fully in the can. I've never asked why it was three. You thought it would be two for a single, it was three. So whether it was the Who, the Kinks or Lulu, three songs. And that's in a three hour session. And you have three of those a day. Then he was writing arrangements and so he would go home at night and be up until

• 1:56:14Speaker 00

  the small hours writing arrangements for the next day or the day after. Some driver would pick those up, then he'd be off crack of dawn, mad hours. And he was doing that, I think, like six days a week, you know. Professionals. Serious professionals. So you've got half of Led Zeppelin coming in as that. Yeah. Then you have two other guys coming in that are from, are really like the beating hearts of the band because they're from the West Midlands. So that's, that's the home of Shakespeare, that's the home of Tolkien. So that's in those guys' bloods. I mean, that's the epicentre of British culture where Robert and John Bonham come from.

• 1:56:59Speaker 00

  People in Britain, London, where I grew up, will try and tell you not, but it is. When you go, they go, this is our wellspring here, up there. Anyway, these guys are coming in, they had worked so hard. It's one of the mid-teens, they are every day out there trying to get gigs, playing gigs, meeting in bands, all this business. So when they get their first, I mean, Robert had, don't get, Robert had made singles, he'd gone into London, made singles, but there were brief moments this would happen and then the single wouldn't be promoted or it wouldn't take off. And he's nineteen. And he's nineteen. So when he comes in to this room with this twenty-four-year-old and twenty-three-year-old,

• 1:57:38Speaker 00

  top studio musicians, I think the way that Led Zeppelin operated a music group was shaped by the experienced session guys. Yeah. Like, as John Paul Doane said, it was like, you don't arrange songs in a studio, you come knowing exactly what you're going to, studio time is money, you come in and you've got it worked out. So I, my sense of it with them is like, despite the extraordinary flamboyance of the music and the wildness of it, the abiding feeling I have of this is that these are like, kind of like master craftsmen. Yeah. And it's hard to reconcile that with the appearance and the long hair and the thing. Yeah.

• 1:58:20Speaker 00

  And this was like a gig, this was a music gig, it just happened to be a music gig that was enormously successful. Yeah. More importantly, enormously influential. Yes. I think that's the thing that's probably more important to them, if I had to guess, was that it was influential. So. I got the impression it was about, all about music with them. Which is why the film, and probably a little book I read made me feel that. This is why the film is, is very focused on the music and the making of the music. It's because in the time I, I had the pleasure of spending in their company, no one ever talked about money or awards or anything like that. None of that stuff came out. I just didn't seem to register at all. It's all about music. Yeah.

• 1:59:02Speaker 00

  But I think that's probably what's been the, the huge missing part of the story. And you know, it's the fundamental part is it was done for music. And it's, it's very telling when Jonesy says that comment like, "We wanted to play music really bad." How, how many people say that? I don't think most people say that. I don't hear people in interviews saying that, you know? "I just wanted to play music really bad." They're not really like anyone else that I've encountered.

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