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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A magnificent glimpse of a great live band in concert, 24 Jan 2002
By A Customer
Led Zeppelin's only (official) live album is a 'must buy' for any genuine fans and, indeed, anyone who has seen the film or who likes the band but missed out on seeing them live.
The band really were a magnificent live outfit and for anyone not fortunate enough to have seen them live, this album, together with the accompanying film, offers a taste of what they were like in concert.The band do great justice to their classic songs "Stairway To Heaven", "Rock 'n' Roll" and "Whole Lotta Love" - the latter being an extended version complete with the "Boogie Mama" middle section. The highlight for me is a truly astounding version of "No Quarter". John Paul Jones excels himself on keyboards, while, not to be outdone, Jimmy Page contributes one of his most magnificent and memorable guitar solos. This track is vastly superior to the studio version, which sounds a little bit flat by comparison.
In similar vein the versions of "The Song Remains The Same" and "The Rain Song", although closer to their studio counterparts, are still superior. "Dazed and Confused", at 27 minutes, may be too long for some... but with all the tempo changes and having see the film and remembering Jimmy Page playing the guitar with a violin bow at one point, the time seems to fly by. Whilst "Moby Dick", which is John Bonham's drum-solo extravaganza, can be entertaining on screen it rapidly becomes rather irritating just listening to it.
The only other curiousity is the inclusion of "Celebration Day". The band play a decent enough version of it but it doesn't feature in the film and it seems to have been included on the soundtrack at the expense of "Since I've Been Loving You" which, for me, is the absolute highlight of the film. Very strange.
Those slight criticisms apart, this is still an excellent live album which captured the band at their peak. It is worth the purchase price just for "No Quarter".
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The song remains a pain, apparently, but deserves better., 31 May 2003
During the twenty years that is gone since I first heard 'The Song Remains The Same', it has become customary to read bad reviews about the album. An album cursed with an aura of being something close to a failure in the Zeppelin-catalogue. Indeed, even Led Zeppelin themselves claimed they were never too happy about the whole affair. And that to such an extent that Jimmy Page chose to neglect it when the studio albums got remastered in 1990. This - together with the fact that the movie 'The Song Remains The Same' remains lukewarm in the hands of the same critics, has caused a general tendency amongst them to be in denial of the indisputable qualities there are to be found in these 1973-recordings, qualities which everyone with an ear for rock and roll are likely to acknowledge sooner or later. Well, at least one can always hope. Frankly, I have never quite fully understood the critisism. As far as I'm concerned, I was in my late teens when I first heard this soundtrack-album. Tellingly, I was in the innocent situation that nobody told me what had gone before. No chance then for being influenced to believe anything about the record in advance. I simply got introduced to 'The Song Remains The Same' through a good friend of mine, a Zep-fan like myself, who happened to dig both the film and the soundtrack to death - everything in a time when Zeppelin weren't exactly the hottest news around. But triggered by that soundtrack, it didn't take long before I rediscovered the band and completely got hooked up into Led Zeppelin's almost formidable world of obsessive guitar-licks, drama, uncompromising drive, beauty, development, complexity, boogie mama and thunderous kit-thumping. Fans and musicians happen to dig this album, actually, also most of the ones I've met personally. Critics, on the other hand, are by contrast almost universial in their consensus of panning it. Therefore, in the wake of the release of the live-DVD and accompanying (three CD) live-album (which I haven't heard at the time of writing, I'm sure it's fantastic), I'd like to put in a vote for 'The Song Remains The Same' and encourage people with a soft spot for rock and roll to sit down and listen carefully to this soundtrack without prejudice. I'm not saying it's perfect, but to me it is more interesting to explore what is great about 'The Song Remains The Same', rather than focusing on the eventual shortcomings it's been accused for having, i.e. too few songs on too many minutes for instance, lack of film/tapes from more recent gigs never to be realised due to accidents/delays etc. O.K., so what? Stairway To Heaven, No Quarter and Rain Song are all beautiful, Dazed And Confused and the title track are both dazzling. What some songs lack on one level, they usually compensate for on another. To me, that makes the album very human, grounded as it is in a different soil than many of today's sterile live-productions. 'The Song Remains The Same' is a bold record full of risk-taking directions, a quality never foreign to rock and roll anyway.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"The most expensive home movie ever made...", 29 May 2007
To fully appreciate the impact this film had you must go back in time to 1976 - expensive
home videos had only just become available, computers, internet and mobile phones were
the stuff of science fiction, cars were still running on cross-ply tyres and leaded petrol,
there were still only three TV channels in the UK (no breakfast television) and the digital
age, and Sunday opening for the stores, was still something waiting to come in the far
distant future. As for Led Zeppelin, they were still at the top of their game around this
time, having completed a monster world tour and made a series of
legendary performances at London's Earl's Court the year before - I queued up at 7 o clock
in the morning to get tickets for this, and still feel it was the most exciting rock concert i
have ever attended.
The relationship between the press and the band was suspicious and bitter, to put it mildly,
only a privileged rare few were allowed into the "Houses of the Holy", any news about
them was scant to say the least and added to the mystique of the band, only music
papers such as "Sounds" and "Melody Maker" were really the only sources of information,
and the fanzine "Tight But Loose". The huge touring schedules Zeppelin undertook around
the world earned them a massive fan base, their concerts included many songs and
improvisations not available on their studio albums so a plethora of live bootleg albums
appeared, mostly with appalling sound quality. When visiting towns on tour Jimmy Page
would visit local record stores and buy up all the bootlegs he could find, believing they
spoiled the band's reputation obviously, eventually deciding to release an official live
album to counter the trade in illegal recordings.
The "Song Remains the Same" project started off as a self-indulgent home movie which
grew and grew, incorporating live performances which were eventually decided to be
filmed at Madison Square Garden, and to include a short film piece profiling each of the
band's home life, character (as in the runes on LZ4) and fantasies, which also included
manager Peter Grant.
The film, and this companion double album released in October '76, contains some
amazing performances, the sound quality is still very good, and kicks off with an exciting
version of "Rock and Roll" melding into "Celebration Day", but the album/film's crowning
glory in my opinion is the brilliant version of "No Quarter", the John Paul Jones section of
the film. This is the most amazingly proggish version of this song i have heard - the album is
worth buying for this track alone for the hardened progger, a truly amazing performance.
This set also contains their live favourite extended improvised version of "Dazed and
Confused" (Jimmy Page's amazing violin bow tricks were something to behold!) and "Stairway to Heaven". The now underrated "Moby Dick" is here (I loved
seeing John's solo at Earl's Court, and laughed when all he got was a banana for his
efforts!), also the beautiful "Rain Song", and a lively version of "The Song Remains the
Same", and their signature tune "Whole Lotta Love".
In 1976 this whole project seemed like an early Christmas present from the band to their
fans and should be appreciated as such in these modern times of media saturation from
every direction, and is something I will always value!
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