The regrettable mistake Jimmy Page made on ‘The Song Remains The Same’
Everybody makes mistakes, even the leaders of world-famous rock and roll bands. From their inception in 1968, Led Zeppelin were firmly on the upper echelon of British rock and roll. As their discography progressed, that reputation only increased, with guitarist and songwriter Jimmy Page regularly lauded as an almost otherworldly musical genius. In what might come as a relief to us ordinary folk, though, even Page was capable of making a few mistakes from time to time, as is evidenced by the existence of the concert film The Song Remains The Same.
Filmed in 1973, when Led Zeppelin took New York’s Madison Square Gardens by storm, the film forms a fascinating account of the band at, arguably, their most successful and interesting period. During the early 1970s, the hard rock style that Page and Zeppelin first introduced had not yet been mastered by many other artists, so the London group was able to set the tone for many future generations of rock artists. Their Madison Square Gardens shows were both representative of their awe-inspiring live shows and the incredible originality of their musical material, but the concert film didn’t quite go to plan.
Given the fact that Led Zeppelin fostered such a legendary reputation, releasing a basic, run-of-the-mill concert film would never have washed. Instead, the band supported the New York footage with extra material recorded at Shepperton Studios in Surrey.
Perhaps the most intriguing and contentious moments within The Song Remains The Same come with the various fantasy dream sequences that are interspersed with the concert footage. These segments regularly and rightly draw criticism for being unnecessary, pretentious, and self-indulgent, but that is not the reason Jimmy Page regrets filming them.
Page seemed to regret much of The Song Remains The Same. Even at the time of its release, the guitarist told NME that it was “not a great film,” explaining, “But there’s no point in making excuses. It’s just a reasonably honest statement of where we were at that particular time. It’s very difficult for me to watch it now, but I’d like to see it in a year’s time just to see how it stands up.”
Expanding upon his particularly potent hatred of the fantasy sequences, Page then revealed, “We shot it in December, so there was snow on the ground, and these great clouds were going past the full moon.”
Continuing, the guitarist shared, “We created this scaffold for filming the shot, and everything was perfect and ready to go, but I’d forgotten the most obvious thing — that I was going to have to do multiple takes climbing up and down. I kept thinking, ‘What have I done!’ It was bloody cold up there, too, I know that much!”
As Page himself confirmed, The Songs Remains The Same is not a very good film – even by the standards of mid-1970s concert movies. Just as the Madison Square Gardens footage represented a rock and roll band at their best, the film itself acted as a good summation of how overblown, elitist, and self-indulgent the movement had become by 1976. Being cold during filming should have been the least of Page’s worries.
Admittedly, the film was not helped by its overly long production time. In 1973, when the New York footage was filmed, the band was on top of the world. However, by the time the film was actually released in 1976, the greatest days of Led Zeppelin were firmly behind them. Their next studio releases, Presence and In Through The Out Door, were incredibly lacklustre and best forgotten about, much like The Song Remains The Same.
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