Led Zeppelin: Dazed & Confused

Led Zeppelin: Dazed & Confused (2009)

*** (out of 4)

If you're looking for an all out rocking documentary on Led Zeppelin then you're not going to find it here. What you get here is a rather cheap and quick look at who the band were, how they got together and we hear some stories about their rise to fame and their eventual end when their drummer died. At less than an hour there's really nothing too detailed here as we're basically given information that even the smallest Zeppelin fan should know. We learn about The Yardbirds, how the band formed, being influenced by the blues and then we hear about their manager, the U.S. tours, the various drug issues and of course the end. Most fans of the band are already going to know this stuff and much, much more so that's why they will probably be most disappointed. If you're not familiar with the band or are just going to know them then I think this documentary will work because it will at least give you some basic information and then you can go out there and search for more detailed stuff. There's no Zeppelin music played but we do get some behind the scenes footage, which was nice but we certainly needed more of it.

This is 60 minutes of bad garage band covers that only get worse the further you get into it. Then the director sliced up old interviews from probably 4 or 5 different decades and combined that with newer interviews from people you've never even heard of.

You can learn some good history here of the band nevertheless, it does have its moments and that warrants at least 5 stars I suppose.

What's in "Led Zeppelin: Dazed and Confused" is worthwhile, especially the Peter Grant interviews. It's what's missing that dooms this failure.

It starts off wonderfully, with a decent analysis of the Yardbirds-to-Zeppelin transition, then mostly glosses over the band's history while leaving out the kind of detail that is necessary for this to work. More time is spent on hotel-room destruction -- and, the film's highlight, the myths surrounding that -- than on any particular album nor the details that go into the music that the band created.

Then we get a hugely insufficient roundup of the band members' post-Zep activities, and,voila, we're done.

Any doc on Zep is watchable, but this isn't the one you're looking for.

I can't imagine how difficult it must have been for the surviving members of the band to deal with the death of John Bonham & I get the reasoning for not continuing, but I honestly wish they did. I think they had so much more in them that they could have offered to the world. But hey, thankfully they existed in the first place!

In 1970, I was 17 and was lucky enough to see the band in concert in the Melody Tent, a venue in Beverly Massachusetts. It was an intimate setting and something I will never forget. I loved their music, still do. This documentary captures some of the excitement they generated. The music used in the doc. Sounds genuine enough to me. They changed rock and roll forever.