Jimmy Page Shared His Regret About Led Zeppelin’s ‘The Song Remains the Same’ Movie
Led Zeppelin dominated popular music in the 1970s. Breaking concert attendance records set by The Beatles proved it. Much like the Fab Four, Zep decided to become multimedia stars with a concert film. Guitarist Jimmy Page once revealed his regret about his The Song Remains the Same movie segment when he had to climb a mountain multiple times. Still, the movie achieved its goal despite mixed reviews.
Jimmy Page regretted that his segment forced him to shoot outside in the winter
Making The Song Remains the Same wasn’t easy. The film crew tasked with shooting the concert footage at Madison Square Garden in 1973 didn’t do the best job preserving continuity. Gaps in the songs left large portions of the footage unusable. That’s why Led Zeppelin’s members recorded personal vignettes that appeared in the 1976 movie — to fill in the gaps.
Page’s interest in magic and the occult surfaced in his segment. He climbed a mountain near his house in Scotland. When he reached the summit, the guitarist encountered a waiting hermit, only to become the cloaked figure before aging in both directions.
Page’s regret about his The Song Remains the Same movie segment wasn’t the storyline. He was proud of it, as he told Light & Shade author Brad Tolinski. What he didn’t love was having to ascend the mountain multiple times at night in the winter:
“We shot it in December, so there was snow on the ground, and these great clouds were going past the full moon. 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!”
Jimmy Page
Page’s second-guessing his personal story was just par for the course with The Song Remains the Same. Bassist John Paul Jones had to wear a wig when Led Zeppelin attempted to recreate some of the missing concert footage. That was after the band fired the first director.
‘The Song Remains the Same’ received poor reviews from critics
Led Zeppelin filmed the concert footage for The Song Remains the Same in 1973 during the final five nights of a marathon North American tour. The movie hit theaters nearly two years behind schedule in 1976. So it’s probably not surprising that the long-delayed film didn’t meet critics’ expectations.
Worn down by the long trek and extracurricular indulgences, Page and his bandmates weren’t at their peak at the end of the 1973 tour. Led Zeppelin displayed some of their outside interests in the fantasy sequences, but they came across as puzzling and not cohesive.
Film critics torched the movie. Words such as pretentious, inconsiderate, and trash landed in some professional reviews. Professional movie-watchers hated it, but Led Zeppelin never intended to satisfy the critics with The Song Remains the Same.
Page and his Led Zeppelin bandmates scored a hit with the fans
What Led Zeppelin’s fans thought of the band was always more important to them than what the critics thought. They made The Song Remains the Same movie for the die-hard Zep fans who might not have been able to attend a concert in the mid-1970s.
“That’s why we did it,” Page told Tolinski. “It made sense to do it.” Critics blasted it, but the fans made it a hit.
The movie debuted in October 1976 and quickly won over fans. Midnight showings became events for Zep’s far-flung fans. They showed up time and again to see The Song Remains the Same, and it earned an estimated $10 million at the box office by 1977, per Tolinski.
Jimmy Page regretted choosing an outdoor, nighttime, winter mountain climb for his The Song Remains the Same movie vignette. The concert film/vanity project didn’t win over critics, but it served who it was meant to serve — Led Zeppelin’s dedicated fans.
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