Led Zeppelin: Dazed & Confused

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.

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.

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.

Overall, a really insightful look into the band. Always good to hear these anecdotes right from band members. I've been into them for 30+ years now & even I walked away with some new info. The only negative for me- the absence of actual LZ music within. & I get why; $$£. But it would've made it that much better. It was frustrating seeing all this amazing footage of them with generic Zepp riffs playing in the background minus any vocals.

Definitely recommended for any LZ fan, but a great entry level intro for the newbie.

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!