When Led Zeppelin faked a performance at Madison Square Garden
Led Zeppelin’s live performances were just as good as their studio recording. If anything, the live setting allowed the legendary rock band to showcase their talents for improvisation, mainly the lengthy guitar and drum solos of Jimmy Page and John Bonham, respectively.
Whilst several of Zeppelin’s live shows have been highly-acclaimed, including Celebration Day and The Song Remains the Same, the latter actually has a small piece of controversy surrounding its authenticity. The Song Remains the Same concert film was released in 1976, although it was recorded three years prior in the summer of 1973, across three dates in July at the Madison Square Garden in New York.
Zeppelin had initially hired Joe Mascot to direct the concert film. However, they later found that much of what Mascot had captured of the three shows was of low quality and needed to be more functional, could not be spliced together and was sometimes out of sync. Mascot was quickly fired and replaced by Peter Clifton.
Mascot had admittedly captured some great shots during his time on the project, and Clifton had initially been unsure of going ahead with the work. However, he eventually came up with an ingenious idea of reshooting Madison Square Garden. However, how were Zeppelin to play those three shows again?
What Clifton suggested was to recreate the Madison Square Garden stage at Shepperton Studios in London. So much of what we see on The Song Remains the Same is actually Zeppelin playing to an empty room. The band were shown on screen in the prior Mascot-captured footage and could position themselves and move around accordingly.
During the re-recording, Clifton primarily focused on shooting close-ups and medium-distance shots that could be edited together with Mascot’s original footage of long-distance shots and those featuring the crowd. However, a problem arose in the fact that John Bonham had a different haircut to the actual concerts, and Robert Plant had had his teeth fixed, so Clifton had to carefully consider his shots so as to not give the re-staging away.
Jimmy Page once opened up on the re-filming at Shepperton. He said: “I’m sort of miming at Shepperton to what I’d played at Madison Square Garden, but of course, although I’ve got a rough approximation of what I was playing from night to night, it’s not exact. So the film that came out in the ‘70s is a bit warts-and-all.” So whilst The Song Remains the Same, the concert does not!
Check out the concert film below and see if you can spot any of the Shepperton Studios shots.
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