Latest news with #LedZeppelin
Daily Mirror
2 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
Iconic The Simpsons scene could have been very different if problem hadn't occurred
An all-time great joke from The Simpsons could have been very different, with showrunner and writer Bill Oakley sharing what the original end to the moment was meant to be An iconic scene in hit animated comedy series The Simpsons was meant to be very different, but one thing changed it. The legendary programme has been running since December 1989 and shows no signs of stopping, although fans would be the first to admit the quality has dropped off since the glory days. Even then, the show receives millions of views on each broadcast. Former writers for The Simpsons have since shared some behind the scenes bits and pieces, with one writer sharing a different ending was planned for an all-time great moment. Costs behind the scenes led to the joke being rewritten, and the scene is arguably better off without the original plan. Former showrunner and Simpsons writer Bill Oakley confirmed the show's use of the Iron Butterfly song, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, was because of song pricing. Another song had been in mind for the Season 7, Episode 4 release, Bart Sells His Soul, but the first choice was simply too expensive to warrant using. The hilarious scene where Bart Simpson switches the church organ music to the Iron Butterfly song was originally meant to feature a classic song from British rock band Led Zeppelin. Clearing the song would have been too expensive, and so the team opted for Iron Butterfly. Taking to X, Oakley wrote: "It was originally 'Stairway to Heaven' by Led Zeppelin but the music was too expensive so we had to go with this more obscure track." Fans believe the scene is better with the Iron Butterfly track and say it fits the moment perfectly. One user wrote: "Much better with Iron Butterfly." Another added: "This ended up being much better for comedy purposes." A third wrote: "This was the better choice. The song name is still biblical but not as obvious and the fact the real song is 17 minutes makes it way funnier than an 8 minute one. "Also for the longest time, I thought the song was called In the Garden of Eden until I looked it up." Other users have credited The Simpsons with keeping the Iron Butterfly song in popular culture. One user suggested: "I feel like I grew up thinking this song was more popular than it was because of this scene specifically." Another shared: "I never knew it was a real song until this moment." A third user suggested it added new depths to Bart Simpson, with many fans praising the writers for the last-minute switch. One fan wrote: "The fact that Bart seems so cultured in Rock Music to orchestrate such a stunt in the first place." Another added: "I think the alternative was for the best because having it be a 17 minute song makes the prank more hilarious."
New York Times
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Rock's Legends Were Messy. You'd Never Know That From Today's Movies.
Like any qualified rock 'n' roll dork, I began consuming the lore around the music early. I was a tenderhearted tween Beatlemaniac when I picked up Albert Goldman's 1988 biography, 'The Lives of John Lennon,' still a landmark of salaciousness. There followed, in some rough order, 'The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones,' by Stanley Booth; 'Hellfire,' Nick Tosches' incendiary character study of Jerry Lee Lewis; and 'Hammer of the Gods,' Stephen Davis's blow-by-blow exegesis of Led Zeppelin. I am strait-laced by disposition, so I was rendered slack jawed by the toxic excesses of rock stardom described in these books, or at least the parts I could grasp well enough to conjure a mental picture. Some things — things you should never Google about Led Zeppelin and mud sharks — remain blissfully outside my ken. I'm strait-laced but not a prude. Over time, I came to understand that sex and drugs and sharks are among the ancillary consequences of taking the world's most gifted, vain and emotionally marginal people, placing them in stressful situations and giving them bottomless expense accounts. Nature simply takes its course. People used to seem endlessly entertained by hearing appalling stories about the results. The feral behavior of even middling musicians was the draw for VH1 programs like 'Behind the Music,' which was light on music but quite detailed about behinds, or '100 Most Shocking Music Moments.' (No. 97 featured Chuck Negron, of Three Dog Night, explaining how a certain part of his body 'exploded' following an exceedingly ambitious surfeit of human contact.) I will admit that I, too, came to relish these tales. I like Mötley Crüe just fine, but I loved Neil Strauss's medium-ironic group history, 'The Dirt,' from 2001 — again, light on music and heavy on dirt, including things you should never Google about Mötley Crüe and burritos. Music documentaries and biopics now feel like a larger part of the entertainment ecosystem than ever, but they've traveled a long distance from that tabloid bonanza. Today's rock historians echo groundbreaking filmmakers like D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles Brothers, treating rock 'n' roll as serious intellectual business. Early this year, 'A Complete Unknown,' James Mangold's biopic of Bob Dylan, did respectably at the box office, bringing figures like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie into a modern frame. Soon after, in Bernard MacMahon's documentary 'Becoming Led Zeppelin,' you could watch that band coalesce, transforming from an also-ran version of the Yardbirds into a juggernaut whose unique combination of brute force and strange, feminine vulnerability has rendered them an insoluble legend. Yet in both, something seems to be missing. If you, like me, have mentally cataloged the countless forms of bad behavior that marked the Dylan and Zeppelin years these films cover, you find yourself practically jonesing for a scene of rampant chemical intake or at least a television being hurled through a hotel window. Aside from Robert Plant's glancing mention of the ambient feeling of drugs and girls arriving on the scene as Zeppelin's fame grew, a blissful innocent could watch MacMahon's film and believe the individuals on the screen endured the Caligula-like high-water mark of their fame with the quiet dignity of devoted family men. These masses of songs are now blue-chip properties with reputations of their own. It's not that I want to see the nasty stuff for fun; a lot of it is depressing, idiotic, cruel or seriously criminal. The question is what is actually true and how much we care about it. There was a time when we were prepared to hear all sorts of shocking tales, but today's filmmakers seem to be moving expediently in the opposite direction — toward cleaned-up, on-message image-making, the sorts of revised mythologies fans are eager to engage. Consider, for instance, the Disney+ documentary 'The Beach Boys.' The band started off writing songs about surfing and cars, to match contemporary trends, and were photographed in matching striped shirts that, in some crucial way, they were never allowed to take off; they would become emblems of a carefree baby-boomer adolescence, the innocent 'before' in the before-and-after picture of the 1960s. But perhaps more than any other band of the era — an enormously high bar — the Beach Boys' story only got stranger, with problems ranging from the typical (drugs, alcohol, fights, lawsuits) to the infamous (Brian Wilson's yearslong breakdown) to the bizarre (Dennis Wilson's brief acquaintance with Charles Manson, whose song 'Cease to Exist' the band recorded a version of). In 1983, the secretary of the interior, James Watt, banned the group from performing a Fourth of July concert on the Washington Mall, on the basis of their degeneracy. Very little of this is covered in the documentary. By its very nature, it needs to see the Beach Boys the way their fellow Californian Ronald Reagan must have when he moved to restore their annual Washington gig — as a sunny redoubt of wholesome Americana, a totem of nostalgia too sturdy for those details to topple. One simple explanation for today's hagiographies is that everyone involved is eager to cement a musical legacy, not sort through unflattering gossip. The three surviving members of Led Zeppelin are in their 70s and 80s now, fathers and grandfathers; they have, in various ways, assumed an austere dignity. As for filmmakers, looking at some of the band's past behavior through today's eyes must be just as unappetizing. Their films would be expected to devote half their run time to weighty moral investigations; almost inevitably, the music would be subsumed by the outrage. But there is also, increasingly, the question of brand value, the preservation of intellectual property for maximum future profit. 'A Complete Unknown,' for instance, skirts the speedy, druggy side of Dylan's early work; it even massages the particulars of Dylan's personal life such that within the film's love triangle, there is no mention at all of his pregnant soon-to-be-wife, Sara Lownds. My 79-year-old mother, who has excellent taste, loved the film and walked out eager to engage with Dylan's music, despite being more of a show-tunes lady. She might not have been so smitten with a less tidy version of his life. It's not just the artist's reputation that is at stake. In 2020, Dylan sold his catalog of more than 600 songs to Universal Music Group for a reported $300 million. Many other big-ticket acts have cashed in their catalogs in recent years, including Bruce Springsteen (sold to Sony for an estimated $550 million) and Queen (also to Sony, for what is said to be more than $1 billion). These masses of songs are now blue-chip properties with reputations of their own; why tarnish their value with off-brand looks at their creators? There's a quote often attributed to the Illinois senator Everett Dirksen: 'A billion here, and a billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money.' Profit motive, fan service, squeamishness — all are present. On the other hand, I recently worked on a liner-notes project for a beloved band that was notorious for its excesses, to the point where the musicians' sheer will to debasement will always feature in the first two paragraphs of their Wikipedia overview. The more time I spent with their story, though, the less I found their self-destructiveness as interesting as their constructiveness — the factors that made four reprobates hold things together long enough to make a handful of generationally defining albums. Once you've heard about enough toxic behavior, a certain tedium sets in. The familiar pileups of sex and drugs and narcissism start to feel less like a thrill ride and more like a dull narrative cul-de-sac. People don't remember the saxophonist Dexter Gordon for his heroin addiction; they remember him for 'I Can't Get Started.' For even the most debauched of our great musicians, time is on their side. Elizabeth Nelson has written for The New Yorker, The Ringer, Pitchfork and others and is a singer-songwriter for the Paranoid Style, a band based in Washington. She last wrote for the magazine about Tiger Woods and Vanessa Trump. Source photographs for illustration above: Macall Polay/Searchlight Pictures; Michael; Larry Hulst/Michael.
The Guardian
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
For a Brummie like me, Ozzy Osbourne's voice mattered
In the olden days, you could listen over and over again to your musical heroes doing their thing, yet go for years without hearing them speak. The songs themselves gave few clues to the real accents of the singers. Singing seemed to iron out regional vowel sounds so that, in song, everyone sounded the same – rather American. I was aware that Slade and (half of) Led Zeppelin were from the same neck of the woods as me, but I struggled to pick up any trace of Walsall in Noddy Holder's singing voice or any hint of West Bromwich in Robert Plant's. It was years before I heard either of them talking properly in their own proper Black Country accents. I loved it. I'm talking about the 1970s here, when there were fewer radio or television interviews, and very little in the way of what came to be known as reality shows. Even when the 70s turned into the 80s and I was old enough to go to concerts, the spoken words of British frontmen and women, when they found something to say between songs, sounded at best neutral and at worst mid-Atlantic. Over the years, with all the touring or living in the States, their original English accents could even desert them completely. I never saw Black Sabbath live, but I suspect Ozzy Osbourne, even as he addressed the crowd through a mouthful of bat's head in Iowa, sounded as Brummie as could be. From the beginning to the end, while speaking if not singing, he talked like a bloke from Birmingham should talk. You could take the man out of Aston, but this man's accent never left the place. For me, this was always important, even though Ozzy's accent made mine sound as posh as a minor royal's. If you get chance, have a look at Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm, a film about the studio in Monmouthshire. Fifty years after Black Sabbath first went there, you'll hear Ozzy talking about it in the same accent he'd have had back then. 'We'd never been in a studio; we'd never been on a farm. So everything was new. You'd come and see a cow in a field, you know. We were from the streets of Aston – the only thing we ever saw was a police horse. It was brilliant.'
Yahoo
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Is Rock Back? Let's Look at the Data
Luminate's 2025 midyear report has arrived, and it has some surprising data: Rock is back. According to the report, rock came in second in the top U.S. core genre, ranked by on-demand audio streaming. It sits with 123.3 billion, behind hip-hop and R&B at 171.1 billion. But that's not all: Rock experienced the highest growth compared to the same timeframe as 2024, with Latin, country, and Christian/gospel following. The Sinners soundtrack — and the adjacent activity of featured artists — caused a spike in the blues. More from Rolling Stone Rocket Are Ready to Launch Into the Stratosphere How Lifeguard Unleashed the Melodies Inside Their Punk Noise Jimmy Page Faces New Lawsuit Over 'Dazed and Confused' Meanwhile, Becoming Led Zeppelin landed at No. 1 in the Top Music Documentaries So Far in 2025, with 329.8 million minutes watched. The documentary caused a bump in Led Zeppelin's global on-demand audio streams, experiencing a peak at 40.4 million during the week of Feb. 27. Since then, streams have averaged 39 million per week through July 3. The authorized film, directed by Bernard MacMahon, focuses on the band's early years. While not a biopic, it's similar to films like A Complete Unknown, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Elvis in that it's introducing the band — and rock as a genre — to younger generations. Elsewhere in the Luminate report, Morgan Wallen's I'm The Problem leads the U.S. Top 10 Albums with 2.562 million total album-equivalent consumption, with SZA's SOS and Kendrick Lamar's GNX behind it. The latter topped the list of the Top U.S. Vinyl Albums, with Sabrina Carpenter's Short n' Sweet in No. 2. Classic rock albums appeared on the vinyl chart as well as the Top 10 Cassette Albums: Fleetwood Mac's Rumours came in with 83,000 in vinyl, while Nirvana's Bleach hit 4,000 in cassettes. As Neil Young once said, rock & roll can never die. Best of Rolling Stone Sly and the Family Stone: 20 Essential Songs The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked Solve the daily Crossword
The Guardian
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
For a Brummie like me, Ozzy Osbourne's voice mattered
In the olden days, you could listen over and again to your musical heroes do their thing, yet go for years without hearing them speak. The songs themselves gave few clues to the real accents of the singers. Singing seemed to iron out regional vowel sounds so that, in song, everyone sounded the same – rather American. I was aware that both Slade and (half of) Led Zeppelin were from the same neck of the woods as me, but I struggled to pick up any trace of Walsall in Noddy Holder's singing voice or any hint of West Bromwich in Robert Plant's. It was years before I heard either of them talking properly in their own proper Black Country accents. I loved it. I'm talking about the 1970s here, when there were fewer radio or television interviews, and very little in the way of what came to be known as reality shows. Even when the 70s turned into the 80s and I was old enough to go to concerts, the spoken words of British frontmen and women, when they found something to say between songs, sounded at best neutral and at worst mid-Atlantic. Over the years, with all the touring or living in the States, their original English accents could even desert them completely. I never saw Black Sabbath live, but I suspect Ozzy Osbourne, even as he addressed the crowd through a mouthful of bat's head in Iowa, sounded as Brummie as could be. From the beginning to the end, while speaking if not singing, he talked like a bloke from Birmingham should talk. You could take the man out of Aston, but this man's accent never left the place. For me, this was always important, even though Ozzy's accent made mine sound as posh as a minor royal's. If you get chance, have a look at Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm, a film about the studio in Monmouthshire. Fifty years after Black Sabbath first went there, you'll hear Ozzy talking about it in the same accent he'd have had back then. 'We'd never been in a studio; we'd never been on a farm. So everything was new. You'd come and see a cow in a field, you know. We were from the streets of Aston – the only thing we ever saw was a police horse. It was brilliant.'
