books about led zeppelin biography

Top 7 Most Revealing & Best Led Zeppelin Books

Known for influencing music history with their stadium rock and album-oriented rock styles, Led Zeppelin is a cultural icon in the industry. Plenty of books on the band came out over the past decades, but some of them stand out with their accuracy and deep insights into the band members' lives. All in all, here are some of the best Led Zeppelin books out there.

When Giants Walked the Earth , by Mick Wall

Mick Wall is known for his rock journalism and his book on Led Zeppelin is one of a kind. The book tells the story of a band that has managed to take rock to a different level through excess and creativity at the same time.

Led Zeppelin dominated the rock industry in the late 1960s, as well as the early 1970s. The book is written by a former associate of two band members, so the author has some unique data on what was actually behind the scenes.

There are plenty of revealing details. Some of them cover the deep relationship between Plant and Page, while others focus on the disasters that damaged the band – death and addiction. Rich and intimate information makes the difference.

Hammer of the Gods , by Stephen Davis

Led Zeppelin was referred to as a legendary band and from multiple points of view. It was a magic band that could stimulate the fans’ fantasy, power and imagination. Now, what did really happen behind the scenes when the band was on tour?

This book brings in some incredible details about what happened on tours. That era was all about rock and roll, drugs and sex – in excessive amounts though. These tales are now clearly explained in a book that some may find outrageous.

The book is based on actual facts, as well as interviews with people who were close to Led Zeppelin. There are detailed documents, pictures and revelations about a band that created history in a unique manner.

Led Zeppelin All the Songs , by Jean-Michel Guesdon

As a fan of Led Zeppelin, you are probably familiar with the band’s greatest songs and albums. While it all happened about half a century ago – when the band was practicing in a Soho basement, the music still dominates new generations of rock listeners.

This book is about both the famous and less famous songs. It is about the inspiration that boosted all the great hits out there, as well as the motivation and elements behind them. At the end of the day, Led Zeppelin sold dozens of millions of copies.

Find out more about the genesis of the Led Zeppelin lyrics and what drove the band to sing about such things. Moreover, the author even describes the album covers and the stories behind them, as well as the necessity of certain instruments in music.

Led Zeppelin: The Biography , by Bob Spitz

People associate rock stars with a bunch of different bands and singers. However, the truth is this term all started with Led Zeppelin and the way the band members lived their lives. No one has done it as they did it.

It all started with the first songs. The first album let everyone know that this band meant something else. It was supposed to be a different style. It was a mix of pure force, delicate English folk and artistic ambition. Somehow, it worked for Led Zeppelin.

The band has been constantly featured in all kinds of books, but this is by far one of the best Led Zeppelin books if you are after a biography. It has some irresistible details and some undeniable facts that most fans are not aware of.

Bring It On Home , by Mark Blake

This is an authorized biography and surprisingly for some, it is not about Led Zeppelin. Instead, this is the biography of Peter Grant, one of the most prolific rock managers in the music history – the manager of Led Zeppelin as well.

To many, Peter Grant was considered the fifth member of the band. He has always been featured in various Led Zeppelin biographies, but none of them has explained his true nature and influence over the band’s style.

This is the first book to tell his story. It is the first biography that actually defines Led Zeppelin from the manager’s point of view. Just like you have probably expected already, it features unique aspects from Led Zeppelin’s style as well.

Stairway to Heaven , by Richard Cole and Richard Trubo

No matter how many Led Zeppelin books you read, no biography will ever match this one. It is easy to tell why – no one really knew the band members better than Richard Cole and you can tell as you start reading the book.

Richard Cole was the tour manager of Led Zeppelin for more than 10 years. He was there when the band made it big. He was also close when it became a cult. More importantly, he was close to the members when they toured and that is when all the wild things happened.

From private Boeing 707 flights and stadiums to country estates and hotel rooms, Richard Cole was there to witness everything. He witnessed all the drugs, sex and wild things. This book is both about the highs and the lows of the band and it provides some amazing insights.

Jimmy Page: The Anthology , by Jimmy Page

This is a revealing book written by the one and only Jimmy Page. It all starts with his early days as a musician, his years as a prolific world-renowned singer and his solo collaborations. Jimmy Page was spectacular and this book describes it better than any other – the inside story of a unique career.

Jimmy Page provides exclusive access to his lifestyle and tells the secrets and less-known facts about his time with Led Zeppelin. The author guides readers through a plethora of rare and unique facts that no one had any clue about – everything, from music to lifestyle decisions that affected him overtime.

Bottom line, these are some of the best Led Zeppelin books for both fans and those interested to find out more about an iconic rock band. While the list can go on forever, these books stand out in the crowd with the unique details they provide.

If you interested in rock bands you can check also the  best Pink Floyd books .

My profession is online marketing and development (10+ years experience), check my latest mobile app called Upcoming or my Chrome extensions for ChatGPT. But my real passion is reading books both fiction and non-fiction. I have several favorite authors like James Redfield or Daniel Keyes . If I read a book I always want to find the best part of it, every book has its unique value.

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Led Zeppelin: The Biography

On Sale November 9, 2021 Pre-Order Now

To order a personalized, autographed copy of Led Zeppelin: The Biography or any of Bob’s other bestsellers, please click here .

Led Zeppelin:

The biography.

From the author of the definitive New York Times  bestselling history of the Beatles comes the authoritative account of the group Jack Black and many others call the greatest rock band of all time, arguably the most successful, and certainly one of the most notorious.

Rock stars. Whatever those words mean to you, chances are, they owe a debt to Led Zeppelin. No one before or since has lived the dream quite like Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham. In  Led Zeppelin , Bob Spitz takes their full measure, for good and sometimes for ill, separating the myth from the reality with the connoisseurship and storytelling flair that are his trademarks.

From the opening notes of their first album, the band announced itself as something different, a collision of grand artistic ambition and brute primal force, of delicate English folk music and hard-driving African-American blues. That record sold over 10 million copies, and it was the merest beginning; Led Zeppelin’s albums have sold over 300 million certified copies worldwide, and the dust has never settled. Taken together, Led Zeppelin’s discography has spent an almost incomprehensible ten-plus years on the album charts.

The band is notoriously guarded, and previous books shine more heat than light. But Bob Spitz’s authority is undeniable and irresistible. His feel for the atmosphere, the context—the music, the business, the recording studios, the touring life, the radio stations, the fans, the whole ecosystem of popular music—is unparalleled. His account of the melding of Page and Jones, the virtuosic London sophisticates, with Plant and Bonham, the wild men from the Midlands, into a band out of the ashes of the Yardbirds, in a scene dominated by the Beatles and the Stones but changing fast, is in itself a revelation. Spitz takes the music seriously, and brings the band’s artistic journey to full and vivid life. The music is only part of the legend, however: Led Zeppelin is also the story of how the 60’s became the 70’s, of how playing in clubs became playing in stadiums and flying your own jet, of how innocence became decadence. Led Zeppelin may not have invented the groupie, and they weren’t the first rock band to let loose on the road, but they took it to an entirely new level, as with everything else. Not all the legends are true, but in Bob Spitz’s careful accounting, what is true is astonishing, and sometimes disturbing.

Led Zeppelin gave no quarter, and neither has Bob Spitz.  Led Zeppelin  is the full and honest reckoning the band has long awaited, and richly deserves.

Praise for Led Zeppelin: The Biography

“Music biographer Spitz ( The Beatles ) calls on his supreme research and analytical skills to deliver the definitive story of one of the greatest rock groups of the 1970s. While this isn’t the first (or second) telling of the Zeppelin saga, it reigns superior to its predecessors with an exhaustive history that never flags in momentum or spirit. To start, Spitz provides a fascinating look at each band member’s evolution and their common love of American blues, detailing how the British electric blues boom of the late ’60s “laid the groundwork for a musical upheaval” and how guitarist Jimmy Page used the form—and the power of vocalist Robert Plant and bassist John Paul Jones—“as a springboard to something bigger and more dynamic.” He gives new insights into each of Zeppelin’s eight main recordings, as well as their dynamic live performances, which, he writes, were “comparable with how jazz combos performed, with loose arrangements that depended on synchronicity and intuition.” At the same time, he takes an unsparing look at how the band’s massive success snowballed into a “heedless hedonism” that led to their decline and disbanding after the alcohol-fueled death of drummer John Bonham. For all the excess and cruelty Spitz recounts, his passion for the band’s musical genius will captivate rock enthusiasts.” –Publishers Weekly, ★ STARRED​ review

“The book is a towering achievement of research and storytelling that eschews rock hagiography to tell the full story of the humans who comprised the legend. The eliciting of complicated feelings is a testament to Spitz’s work, not a mark against it.” – Chicago Tribune , Biblioracle Book Awards

“Spitz’s deep research shows in spades: He’s either interviewed or culled past interviews with the principals as well as many of the lesser-visited people around them — childhood friends, former bandmates, various people from the business — to present a view of the band that, while familiar, provides enough new detail to capture even the most educated Zep fan’s imagination.” — Variety , Best Music Books of 2021

“Bob Spitz always gets right to the heart of the story, whether it’s the story of Dylan, the Beatles, or Julia Child. This story, the outrageous story of Led Zeppelin and all its rock ’n roll craziness, is right here in these pages.”  —Graham Nash

“Wielding his signature tools of meticulous reporting, piercing analysis and trenchant writing, Bob Spitz proves again that he’s a modern master of cultural biography.  Led Zeppelin: The Biography  cuts through the myth and murk to reveal the true story of the biggest, bawdiest rock ‘n’ roll band of the 1970s. Like the music they made, Led Zeppelin’s story is equal parts inspiring, electrifying and shocking. Led by the most brutal manager in the business, the quartet blitzed the world like a marauding army, crushing critical resistance and sales records as easily as they seduced groupies and consumed mammoth quantities of booze and drugs. Spitz goes deeper and sees more clearly than any previous biographer, and his storytelling powers make it spellbinding.”  —Peter Carlin, author of  Bruce  and  Sonic Boom

“As he did with his book on the Beatles, Bob Spitz uses deep research and a wide lens to create the single most comprehensive book about a legendary band. So much of Zeppelin’s history is cemented in lore that hardcore fans may feel they know ‘all’ the history already, but Spitz’s great accomplishment is to make every corner of LZ’s history—from their 1968 debut to their Berlin swan song—feel fresh again. You simply don’t want this story to end, or this book.”  —Charles R. Cross, author of  Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain  and  Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix

“Bob Spitz shows Led Zeppelin as the iconoclasts they were, grinding the self-consciousness of rock ’n roll in the 70s into submission without a backward glance. Infamous stories from the road, tales of excess, dominance, and ego are balanced by the band’s insatiable desire for heat and beauty. This is the story of poetry and power, rape and pillage, of rock ’n roll incarnate. A valuable recording of rock art history. So well done!”  —Ann Wilson, Heart

“As he did with his magisterial  The Beatles , Bob Spitz tells the story of Led Zeppelin with a poet’s heart, and with a knowledge of that sweep of musical and cultural history that is breathtaking. Every detail, from their formation via leader Jimmy Page’s Yardbirds to their last show, in Munich, in 1979—the recordings, the live shows, the business, the debauchery, the way it all landed in the world—is explored with sophistication. And the book makes a serious contribution to the #MeToo canon. Panoramic, viscerally exciting, and sociologically majestic: books on popular culture simply don’t get any better than this.”  —Sheila Weller, author of  Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—And the Journey of a Generation “From LZ’s guitar-god origins through its boozy, drug-addled decline, Bob Spitz doesn’t miss a riff, solo or trashed hotel room. But like the band itself, what emerges most profoundly is the historic, stop-what-you’re-doing sound—loud, bluesy, unapologetic. This is everything you could want in a rock biography.” —Jess Walter, author of  Beautiful Ruins

“Big and definitive … Led Zeppelin: the Biography glides past the rowdy fun of past histories for something more authoritative … It finds room for both the hedonistic superstar cruelty and a well-researched appreciation.” Chicago Tribune

Glory and the mayhem: New Led Zeppelin biography tells tale of groupies, drugs and rock 'n' roll

There are a few different approaches one can take in chronicling Led Zeppelin , the larger-than-life hard rock band that blazed through the 1970s like an out-of-control comet. You can stick to the music, the approach taken by the worshipful upcoming documentary “Becoming Led Zeppelin.” You can go salacious, as in Stephen Davis’ highly unauthorized 1985 book “Hammer of the Gods.” Or you can bite off the whole story, the glory and the mayhem, the train wreck and the true bliss.

That’s how Bob Spitz approaches his sprawling account, “Led Zeppelin: The Biography” (Penguin Press, 688 pp., ★★★½ out of four, out now). Spitz, whose previous subjects include The Beatles , Bob Dylan and Ronald Reagan, knows he needn’t exaggerate the band’s abhorrent behavior, from drummer John Bonham’s blind-drunk sexual assaults to guitarist Jimmy Page’s petulant entitlement. He also knows said behavior doesn’t eliminate Led Zeppelin’s mighty musical triumphs as the most popular rock band of its generation (they routinely outsold The Rolling Stones). The good, the bad and the ugly coexist in the Led Zeppelin story, and Spitz knows well enough to report and tell it all.

'The Lyrics': Paul McCartney reveals crush on queen, how John Lennon 'gleefully' quit Beatles

It all starts with the blues, an obsession for English white boys of the ’60s looking to break free from safe pop strains. “For a generation of British teenagers looking to leave their mark,” Spitz writes, “the blues had become a state of mind.” Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker and others made these young musicians’ hearts go pitter-patter, including a skinny, outrageously talented guitarist named Jimmy Page.

Before long Page was jamming with The Yardbirds alongside his friend Jeff Beck. To his credit, Spitz doesn’t portray this pairing as some kind of collaborative paradise. One stage wasn’t big enough for those two egos. Besides, Page had something bigger on his mind: a super group, boasting the kind of talent and profile no one else could match.

Check out: USA TODAY's weekly Best-selling Booklist

From the London studio scene he plucked bassist John Paul Jones. In the blue-collar Midlands pub scene he found wailing singer Robert Plant and ferocious drummer John Bonham. There’s a relative innocence to these early, assemble-the-troops times. Zeppelin had yet to become a collection of divas. The mountains of cocaine, rivers of booze and piles of cash hadn’t yet curdled the quartet. Their demands and expectations hadn’t yet become ridiculous. The band’s manager, Peter Grant, hadn’t yet become a coked-up bully. Zeppelin just wanted to be louder, and better, than anyone else. And oftentimes they were.

More: 'Sopranos' actors write definitive look at HBO show: 'You’re getting it from two guys who were there'

Zeppelin obviously wasn’t the only band of its time and milieu to partake in ’70s rock ’n’ roll excess. But they did seem to push hedonism to unusually destructive lengths. The book details two instances of attempted rape by Bonham, who drank himself to an early grave at the age of 32. Page was a connoisseur of underage groupies: “Robert’s girlfriends weren’t as young as Jimmy’s; many hovered around the age of consent,” Spitz writes. Regarding the groupie scene, it was Plant who said, “One minute she’s twelve and the next minute she’s thirteen and over the top.”   

“It’s telling of attitudes of the time that cultural commentators didn’t call out such sentiments as offensive,” Spitz writes. “Rock ‘n roll bands – especially Led Zeppelin, perhaps the most egregious in the behavior department – were given a pass.” 

Spitz, on the other hand, gives nobody a pass. Hovering above all the parties and all the jams and the richly detailed accounts of creating each album is an abundance of abominable behavior that only grew worse as Zeppelin’s fame exploded. Blame the drugs and the alcohol and the enabling if you wish, but this is one group portrait that doesn’t flatter. 

clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

Was Led Zeppelin the best or the worst of rock-and-roll? A new book will help you decide.

Depending on whom you ask, Led Zeppelin embodied either the best or worst of rock-and-roll. The band — Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John “Bonzo” Bonham — epitomized either the dreamy idealism of the ’60s or the bloated vapidity of the ’70s. It was either an appreciation of blues and folk or a wholesale theft of those genres.

While critically underappreciated for the 12 years it existed, Led Zeppelin’s art has since been both revered and mocked. It’s generally accepted that punk rock was — to a degree — a response to what many saw as the self-indulgence and pompousness of the band and others of its ilk who shared a proclivity for stadium spectacle and extended drum solos. The 1984 satirical rockumentary, “ This Is Spinal Tap ,” was inspired in part by the same aspects; the film got some of its biggest laughs by utilizing Led Zeppelin’s absurd 1977 Stonehenge stage set. Today, few deny the artistic value of the group’s catalogue, but it would be an understatement to say that the Led Zeppelin’s history is complicated.

The cheeky subtitle of Bob Spitz’s new book “ Led Zeppelin: The Biography ” is bold considering the numerous books about the band. Spitz, who has written well-regarded biographies of the Beatles and Julia Child, delivers a 600-page tome that collects every (reliable) story previously reported, and is bolstered by original reporting and interviews — all delivered in brisk and straightforward prose. But readers be warned: Spitz doesn’t hold back in describing the band’s antics, its displays of ego and cruelty that today’s audiences might find less than acceptable.

The book begins with a witty prologue chronicling what it was like for a young Steven Tyler (later of Aerosmith and being Liv Tyler’s dad) to see the band that arguably invented heavy metal play the heavy, progressive blues that it didn’t invent but exemplified. The prologue is breathless and slangy, befitting the point of view of a hormonal rocker having his mind blown. It’s cute. The reader is happy for Steven Tyler.

Then the book gets serious. “In the beginning there was the blues,” Spitz intones, before jumping right into postwar England and recounting the seismic effect the blues had on the country’s nascent youth culture. The book is peppered with musical references that Spitz describes as evocatively as mere writing can describe music, and cultural references (at one point Spitz says that a manager of the Yardbirds had “his fingers in as many pies as Mrs. Lovett”) that may cause some readers to fall into a rabbit hole of music minutia. It may cause others to give up.

Spitz is admirably unsparing, without being egregiously harsh, in his assessments of the attempts by White British musicians to approximate the sounds coming from imported, eagerly collected records by legends such as Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. When American blues musicians start touring the U.K., the joy felt by wide-eyed young Eric Claptons and Jimmy Pages is contagious. Also contagious, at first, is Spitz’s affection for the book’s main subjects. At first, all four men who formed Led Zeppelin are lovable. Whether it’s Page and Jones’s Zelig-esque studio work (the number of pop classics Page in particular worked on before becoming famous never fails to impress) or Bonham and Plant striving as a working-class mid-country bar band, the reader is pulling for each of them.

A look at the man who helped solidify Led Zeppelin’s hard-partying reputation

But after Led Zeppelin forms, or at least once they gain even a modicum of success, little is endearing about any of the band members besides the music they make. Once the group’s thuggish manager, Peter Grant, enters the picture and it becomes clear, over and over, that nobody will tell him or any member of the band “no” for the next decade, human decency joins the hotel televisions in going out the window.

Many people might insist on separating the art from the artist or believe that ethics in touring culture can occasionally be situational. But the stories Spitz unearths and reiterates about what Led Zeppelin and their entourage got away with are, even to readers jaded to bad celebrity behavior, appalling. Many anecdotes in “Led Zeppelin” inspire a visceral disgust — sexual violence and other crude behavior that can’t be detailed in a family newspaper. Spitz delves into some of the more infamous incidents, adding new details that make these tales ever more shocking. The reader is frankly relieved when the band eventually settles into the banality of inconsistent live shows and tax troubles.

Spitz’s handling of all this is patchy. At times, he denounces. At times he equivocates. At times, he slyly hints at judgment at the band’s various inanities and unsavory behavior. He lets Robert Plant’s famous proclamation of “ I am the golden god ” lay flat on the page in a way that allows the idiocy to speak for itself. He follows Lori Mattix’s name repeatedly with “the fourteen year old,” so that even the most fervent Jimmy Page fan is hopefully forced to reckon with the guitarist’s relationship with a teen. As for Mattix herself (also known as Lori Maddox), readers will have to look elsewhere to hear her complicated, evolving perspective on her own experience.

Sure, Spitz allows, not all of the band members or roadies preyed on teenage girls, and defecated and urinated on fans, but all were at various times either complicit or, at best, voyeurs to a nauseating level of violence and degradation. And, yes, even in the context of the times. While there are numerous available examples of rock stars behaving in similar fashion as the members of Led Zeppelin, there were plenty of musicians in the ’60s and ’70s who were aware that women, even young women, were human beings. Buffy Saint-Marie, who was arguably as innovative as Zeppelin in her work within folk traditions, never degraded her fans. The Monkees were famously sweet to their legions of fans. Even the inventor of shock rock, Alice Cooper, is considered (as described in Michael Walker’s excellent “What You Want is in the Limo”) to be a nice guy. It was possible.

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“Led Zeppelin: The Biography” was written without the cooperation of any surviving members of the band. It’s hard to blame them. While largely admiring in tone, no grisly detail is omitted — and who would want to answer for any number of the stories told, especially when, in 2021, young and extremely high is no longer considered exculpatory. Even without the assistance of Led Zeppelin or its inner circle, Spitz manages to tell a compelling story (despite a few factual errors in my edition). The music criticism is often insightful and evocative: Spitz describes the bass in “Good Times, Bad Times”as pulling “at the center like an undertow,” and Robert Plant’s singing as “otherworldly, like it was coming out of a pneumatic compressor.”

The world Led Zeppelin inhabited is fascinating. But without the protagonists’ input, the center feels incomplete — sketches within a painting. John Paul Jones comes off best by not coming off at all. Robert Plant’s feckless pliancy throughout is hard to square with the exploratory nature of his later work. Jimmy Page comes off as a caricature of not-exactly-dumb-but-hardly-smart mystical libertarianism. John Bonham and Peter Grant, both dead, are portrayed as designated monsters.

The book ends abruptly, with sputtering reunion attempts and amiable charity gigs. Fans and naysayers alike will be disappointed that in Spitz’s telling nothing any of the men did after Led Zeppelin broke up seems to warrant much discussion. As a compendium of the often brilliant music created by ravaged souls, the book works well enough, but at this point both Led Zeppelin’s fans (and critics) yearn for more.

Zachary Lipez  is a freelance writer. He has co-authored (with Stacy Wakefield and Nick Zinner) a number of books of essays, poetry and photography. He sings in the gothic metal band Publicist UK and has a newsletter on Ghost titled “Abundant Living.”

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Led Zeppelin: The Biography Hardcover – 11 Nov. 2021

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• Print length 688 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Press
• Publication date 11 Nov. 2021
• Dimensions 16.31 x 3.71 x 24.16 cm
• ISBN-10 0399562427
• ISBN-13 978-0399562426
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“From LZ's guitar-god origins through its boozy, drug-addled decline, Bob Spitz doesn't miss a riff, solo or trashed hotel room. But like the band itself, what emerges most profoundly is the historic, stop-what-you're-doing sound — loud, bluesy, unapologetic. This is everything you could want in a rock biography.” -- —Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

From the Back Cover

About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

Sunday, January 26, 1969

They had been playing the band throughout the week. Entire sides of the album. FM radio, the underground free-form pipeline, was a godsend. He'd been tuned in to WNEW-FM, New York's preeminent alternative outlet, when it started: "Dazed and Confused," "Communication Breakdown," "You Shook Me," even "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You," a Joan Baez number that had been hot-wired and jacked. Scott Muni, the station's afternoon deejay, couldn't help himself. He played the grooves off that record. Alison Steele, NEW's Nightbird, programmed it as though it were on a loop.

Led Zeppelin.

The name alone had visceral power. Sure, it was incongruous. A lead zeppelin was the ultimate sick joke, but spelling it "Led" took nerve. It told you everything you needed to know about this band-it was dynamic, irreverent, subversive, extreme-primed to rock 'n roll, not a toady to Top 40 populism. Led Zeppelin wasn't gonna hold your hand or take your daddy's T-Bird away. They meant business. This was serious, meaty stuff.

He loved what he'd heard. All that was left was to see them for himself.

As luck would have it, his friend Henry Smith was humping Led Zeppelin's equipment into a club in Boston that weekend. If he could get himself to the gig, Smith had agreed to slip him into the show. But how? He was basically broke. They'd been crashing at his parents' apartment in Yonkers, where his band, Chain Reaction, had been scratching for work. If he was going to get to Boston, he'd have to hitch.

Sunday-afternoon traffic was sparse along the I-95 corridor. The weather hadn't cooperated. An area of low pressure in Oklahoma had been creeping its way eastward, dropping temperatures below the freezing point along the Atlantic coastline. The sky was grim. The forecast predicted a nor'easter would hit Boston later that night or tomorrow morning. With a little luck, he might beat it to the gig.

A ride . . . then another, as the succession of cars plowed up the interstate, stitching a seam from Stamford to Bridgeport to New Haven to Providence and beyond. The songs in his head carried him through dozens of miles. These days, you couldn't take a breath without inhaling a killer. "Jumpin' Jack Flash," "Dock of the Bay," "All Along the Watchtower," "White Room," "Hey Jude," "Heard It Through the Grapevine," "Hurdy Gurdy Man," "Fire." You could feast all day on those babies and never go hungry. But Led Zeppelin had thrown him an emotional curve. Their songs hit him deep. There was something dark and sensual about them, something strangely provocative in their nature. They rolled over him, allowing his imagination to run wild.

Small wonder that they'd erupted via Jimmy Page. He knew all about Page, a guitar virtuoso in the tradition of Clapton, Stills, and Jimmy's itchy alter ego Jeff Beck, with whom Page had served a brief but stormy stretch in the Yardbirds as that seminal band was coming apart at the seams. There was already a heady mystique about Page. He'd contributed uncredited licks to scores of hit records, not least on sessions with the Who, the Kinks, and Them. But Page had taken Led Zeppelin into another dimension, a province of rock 'n roll that was hard to define. Sometimes it was basic and bluesy, sometimes improvisational, other times a hybrid strain they were calling heavy metal, and all of it seasoned with enough folk, funk, and rockabilly elements to blur the lines. That was a lot to take in for a budding rock 'n roller. Seeing Page and his band would help to put things in perspective.

It was dark by the time he pulled up at the gig, a club called the Tea Party in a converted Unitarian meeting house-cum-synagogue that stood halfway along a solitary street. A hallucinatory gloom had fallen over the South End of Boston, casting East Berkeley Street in a desolate embrace. This was not the Boston of wealthy Brahmins, of culture and entitlement. "It was a tough neighborhood, a place you didn't want to hang out at night," says Don Law, who ran the joint. There was no sign of life in the surrounding tenements, aside from a bodega next door, whose light threw a waxy fluorescence across the pitted sidewalk. In the silhouette it projected, he could make out the outlines of heads, shoulders hunched against the cold, stretching down the street and around the corner. There must have been-what?-a couple hundred people waiting in line to get in. More.

Where the hell did everyone come from?

Led Zeppelin was hardly a household name. Until recently, they'd actually been billing themselves as the New Yardbirds. Their debut album had been released only two weeks earlier. Sure, he'd expected the freaks and the diehards, but this turnout was way off the chart. Obviously, word had rumbled out along the jungle drums. It wasn't unheard of. "We'd have a totally unknown British act open on Thursday," Don Law recalls, "and there'd be lines down the street by Saturday." He'd seen it with Jethro Tull, Humble Pie, and Ten Years After, all of whom had played the club during the past few months. Radio helped to a large degree. Boston's FM rock venue, WBCN, was still a novelty, in its infancy. Most of its broadcasts were piped right out of an anteroom at the Tea Party, its jocks a ragtag assortment of ex-college kids from the communications departments at Tufts and Emerson. Bands would come off the stage and do an on-the-spot interview. FM airplay of any good album had become one of the surefire weapons to launch a new act. With Led Zeppelin, the evidence was right there on the sidewalk.

Getting into the Tea Party for their final performance was going to take some doing. The lines looked daunting; the hitchhiker feared he'd arrived too late. Fortunately, Henry Smith had been on the lookout for him near the door, and the two men disappeared inside before management-or the fire department-could cut off admission.

You could tell from the vibe. An air of expectancy pulsed through the room. The crowd was on top of it. They were ready.

The Tea Party wasn't the most conventional place to showcase a band like this one. It was hard to get past its house-of-worship layout. The stage was a former pulpit with the legend praise ye the lord chiseled above the altar; the ballroom floor was pockmarked where pews had been removed; and a huge stained-glass window sported the Star of David. If the music piped over the PA system wasn't exactly liturgical, the psychedelic light show beaming liquid designs from the overhead balcony was downright profane. No service had ever packed in a congregation like the one thronging the hall. The club was legally outfitted to hold seven hundred, but the audience had long ago exceeded that number. The crowd was back to back, belly to belly.

The band had soldiered through a solid three-night warm-up. The Thursday-, Friday-, and Saturday-night shows had gone pretty much as they'd hoped, delivering hard-hitting sets that, as a reviewer noted, "lived up to [their] advance billing as a group of exceptional power and drive." For the most part, Led Zeppelin ran through the highlights of their debut album, slipping in the occasional Yardbirds or Chuck Berry number. Long, discursive solos conjured up improvisational fragments of R&B or blues favorites. Was that "Mockingbird" tucked into "I Can't Quit You Baby"? A few bars of "Duke of Earl"? The familiar riff of "Cat's Squirrel"? Jimmy Page's playing, especially, was loose and luxurious. He felt at home at the Tea Party, having appeared there only nine months earlier during a Yardbirds tour. Then, in June 1968, a few months later, Page and his manager, Peter Grant, had turned up to check out the latest incarnation of another of Grant's acts, the Jeff Beck Group, with a lineup featuring Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart.

Don Law recalls how Grant arrived before Beck had gone on that day, cradling an acetate as though it were a precious artifact. "This is a new band called the New Yardbirds," he said, as the three men settled in a funky little office at the back of the stage. Listening to the test pressing while Grant and Page exchanged subtle glances, Law knew immediately he had to book the act before a canny competitor snatched them. And Grant talked him into a four-night stand.

He hoped this Sunday-night show on January 26 would give Boston something to talk about.

Law spent a few minutes backstage an hour before showtime that night, chatting with Page, a delicate, almost wraithlike creature who radiated rock-star heat. Law had street cred with Page, owing to his father, also named Don Law, who, in Texas in the mid-1930s, had produced the only known recordings-a mere twenty-nine songs-attributed to blues legend Robert Johnson. Page was as hooked on the influence of Johnson's music as his pals Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, and he interrogated Law, practically browbeat him, for any unexplored Johnson morsel that would give him more insight into the music. Eavesdropping on their conversation was Zeppelin's feline vocalist, Robert Plant, himself a huge Johnson fan.

"One of the things I picked up from Robert Johnson when I started singing was the liaison between the guitar playing and his voice," Plant noted years later. "It was so sympathetic. It almost seemed as if the guitar was his vocal cords."

Plant was a blues aficionado who had been plumbing arcane Chicago-based anthologies, listening to tracks he could co-opt, since he was fourteen years old. Muddy Waters, Skip James, Son House, Snooks Eaglin-they were all part of Plant's education. Just that Thursday afternoon, a young fan helping the roadies had slipped him a tape copy of King of the Delta Blues Singers Vol. 1, with a pair of Johnson ballads on it. Plant considered Robert Johnson the musician "to whom we all owe more or less our very existence." He strained to overhear Law and Page's exchange, but there was too much noise, and instead Plant contented himself with sipping his hot tea, prepping his vocal cords, while his bandmates, bass player John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham, each clutching a pint of Watney's Red Barrel, stationed themselves across the room, in a huddle with a BCN disc jockey named J. J. Jackson.

There was a perceptible distance, even an awkwardness, among the band members that precluded more intimacy. They were still in the dating phase, still getting to know one another, still developing a camaraderie. They'd only been a unit for slightly more than four months, assembled by Jimmy Page, the way a cook might choose ingredients for a recipe. Page and John Paul Jones had known each other as journeymen session players on the London studio circuit; Robert Plant and John Bonham were mates from the Midlands. Though no one would admit it, a whiff of the North-South divide lingered in the air.

Their shows had blown hot and cold since they'd landed in the States at the close of 1968. Debuts in Los Angeles and San Francisco were star-is-born type affairs. Delirious critics in those cities sized up Led Zeppelin as phenoms who "were jamming as if they had been playing together for years" and "ranked in the company of the Who, Rolling Stones, and the late Cream." The Toronto reviewer said, "Several critics, myself included, had suggested Led Zeppelin just might be the next so-called supergroup." Jimmy Page felt the lift-off. "After the San Francisco gig, it was just-bang!" he said.

But often the venues Zeppelin played were ill equipped, the PA systems Paleolithic, and arrangements sounded about as polished as high school recitals. In Detroit, in front of an audience of local luminaries like MC5 and the Amboy Dukes, a reviewer in the very first issue of Creem noted, "Each member of the group was on a separate riff, not at all together. . . . They were playing different things simultaneously." It was cringeworthy but forgivable. Growing pains were a common symptom of new bands. Led Zeppelin was no exception. "We got better each day and found ourselves making things up as we went along," Jimmy Page explained not long afterward. The band ached to knock a show out of the park.

A lot depended on the audience. A band draws on the energy in the hall, and the Tea Party was revving up.

When disc jockey Charlie Daniels ambled onstage as the lights came down, the cheers in that old tabernacle sent a chill up the spine of the hitchhiker, posted along the back wall near the door. He took in the scene with a sense of awe. He hoped this band was as good as the hype.

At the back of the hall, a door flung open, and the four musicians marched theatrically through the crowd-"like kings, like conquering heroes parting the masses"-to the front of the stage.

"Here they are," Daniels roared, riding the wave of the buildup. "From England-let's give a warm Boston welcome to Leddddddd Zeppelin!"

A sound like a siren cut through the darkness before the spot came up and found Robert Plant contorted, Gumby-like, over the mic, his hand cupped around a harmonica. His bluesy plaint was mimicked by a sinewy guitar line from Jimmy Page's Les Paul as they launched into "The Train Kept a-Rollin'," an old Yardbirds standby, but on steroids and at a pitch that could restore hearing to the deaf. The version, rollicking and capable, served to get the crowd's attention.

Then a wounded-animal cry growled out: "I . . . I . . . I can't quit you baby. Wooooo-man, I'm gonna put you down a little while."

It was the voice of someone who'd experienced despair and heartbreak and had seen the inside of a Southern prison. But somehow it was coming out of the mouth of a skinny, twenty-year-old white guy with hair that would make Goldilocks envious. Plant had stolen the motif out from under generations of immortal Negro minstrels, yet it was more than a cultural appropriation. It was heartfelt. There was a rawness to his delivery that spoke more to the future than to the past, sparked by instrumentation that turned the blues idiom on its head. The playing wasn't indicative of a juke joint so much as a garage. It was loud and aggressive. Page attached jumper cables to the solo break, playing it as if Buddy Guy had gone berserk. His fingers flew up and down the frets as if they were too hot for him to linger on any one for too long. The bass, which John Paul Jones-known as Jonesy by his mates-had cranked as high as his amp could withstand, sent tremors through the crowd. "The vibrations," said an observer in the crowd, "hit your chest with physical force." And the drummer, John Bonham, didn't play the drums-he attacked them "like a runaway freight train." The snare beats were so sharp they sounded like gunfire strafing the room.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press; 1st edition (11 Nov. 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0399562427
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0399562426
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.31 x 3.71 x 24.16 cm
• 1,719 in Rock & Pop Musician Biographies
• 2,032 in Rock Music

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Led Zeppelin Gets Into Your Soul

By James Wood

How on earth did my mother know that Led Zeppelin was composed of satanists? Specifically, how did she know that Jimmy Page had “a great interest in the occult,” and owned a bookshop “somewhere down in London” dedicated to these pursuits? Presumably, some furtive Christian network or back channel had provided the information. It was more than I or my elder brother knew, and gave her a sinister advantage over us. In my memory, she looms as a column of judgment in the doorway of the sitting room, as Angus and I watch the closing frames of the concert film “The Song Remains the Same” on television. It was 1979, I think. Angus, five years older than me and provider of all musical contraband, was eighteen. He may have lost his soul already; mine was still in the balance.

Our evangelical parents always managed to materialize while something awkward was on the TV, but our mother, who could find inappropriately suggestive moments in “Doctor Who,” had surpassed herself this time. On the screen, the stage at Madison Square Garden had become a diabolical altar: half naked, Led Zeppelin’s lead singer, Robert Plant, was screaming and writhing like a downed angel, and its drummer, John Bonham, was stolidly abusing what appeared to be a flaming gong. And surely Jimmy Page was a bit suspect? We had watched him during “Stairway to Heaven,” grimacing in bliss, dazed in ecstasy, leaning back as he throttled his dark, double-necked guitar, like a man wrestling with some giant shrieking bird of the night. My brother was involved in his own spiritual struggle. A school friend of his had tickets to a Led Zeppelin summer show, at Knebworth; he was desperate to go. Stairway to Heaven? Chute to Hell, more like. Our parents had told him that if he went to Knebworth he would cease to be a Christian. Watching from the wings, learning how to deceive, I was mainly impressed by his honesty—why hadn’t he just told them he was going to see Peter, Paul and Mary?

In those days, stuck in provincial northern England as we were, musical information seemed to reach us years late, like news from panting messengers of wars that had already fizzled out. New to Led Zeppelin’s music, I had no idea that the group had become a ponderous joke, that Knebworth was to be its last gasp. Having an older brother was a mixed blessing in this regard. He both curated and retarded my education. The thirteen-year-old pupil was not expected to show any independence of taste. “Listen to this”—said as he flipped the LP onto the turntable—was a command more than an invitation. The stylus lay down in the groove, and wrote the law.

And, as my mother intuited, this law was a potent rival dominion, a law of negation, out to invert everything held sacred and respectable by parents, churches, principalities. Alice Cooper, who played alongside an equally uncelebrated Led Zeppelin at an early gig in Los Angeles, in January, 1969, voiced the essential rebellion with perfect ingenuousness in “I’m Eighteen”: “I’m eighteen / And I don’t know what I want / Eighteen / I just don’t know what I want / Eighteen / I gotta get away / I gotta get out of this place / I’ll go runnin’ in outer space.”

The Sex Pistols turned the screw more precisely six years later: “Don’t know what I want / But I know how to get it.” Not knowing what to want but knowing how to get it: rock music is this pure enablement, this conduit of the how over the what. I wasn’t eighteen, but I didn’t have to be, because I saw how it went for eighteen-year-olds: Go to Knebworth and lose your soul . Cardinal Newman had called Christianity “a great remedy for a great evil”; thus, in my mind, the size of the negation would have to match the size of that which had to be negated. Great forces of repression demanded great forces of rebellion.

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But I didn’t need punk’s rebelliousness, since I had at hand the punk energies of two almost opposed but strangely overlapping English bands, the Who and Led Zeppelin, mods and rockers, respectively. The Who was English to the core, and the songs were hard, quick fights—struggles with class, inheritance, sex, the hypocrisies of power. Driven by Pete Townshend’s scything chords and Keith Moon’s boyishly linear drumming, the band offered Cockney swagger and music-hall one-liners: “I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth”; “My mum got drunk on stout. / My dad couldn’t stand on two feet / As he lectured about morality”; “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss.” The songs were tuneful and the lyrics told stories. The members of the Who were excellent musicians but not great ones: Moon was all over the place, in good ways and bad, and Townshend tended to collapse when tasked with a solo. They were pleasingly familiar.

Led Zeppelin was uncanny. My brother dropped the needle onto the rustling vinyl, and something very weird began: “Hey, hey, mama, said the way you move / Gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove.” Where was Robert Plant’s voice from ? This bluesy banshee sounded like no other white man in rock and roll. Decades later, it’s still one of those voices—like Lou Reed’s, James Brown’s, David Byrne’s, Kate Bush’s—which encode a whole strange world. If the voice was meaningful, though, the lyrics were mostly gibberish: the bandmates seemed quite content to get on with their fantastic musical particulars, as long as Plant, somewhere above them, was intermittently moaning “woman” or “babe.” When you could decipher any sense, you’d find scraps borrowed from the more misogynistic blues formulas (“Wanted a woman, never bargained for you . . . / Soul of a woman was created below”); basic sex demands (“Squeeze me, babe, till the juice runs down my leg . . . / The way you squeeze my lemon / I’m gonna fall right outta bed”); and swirls of Tolkien, one of Plant’s favorite authors (“ ’Twas in the darkest depths of Mordor / I met a girl so fair”). The band seemed uninterested in politics, in the state of the nation, or in the traditional patricidal revolt of most rock and roll. In fact, its members didn’t even seem to have much of an investment in being young. They were strangers to irony and levity; they would never have rhymed, say, “Lola” with “cola.” Oddly classless and placeless, they were less angry rockers than nerdy but cool transatlantic archivists, cleverly raiding the blues and folk traditions to patch together some of their own best songs—“Rock and Roll” (the famous drum intro was inspired by a Little Richard song), “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” (they got it from Joan Baez), “I Can’t Quit You Baby” (from Willie Dixon), “Whole Lotta Love” (Dixon again), “The Lemon Song” (from Howlin’ Wolf), “When the Levee Breaks” (from Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy).

It didn’t really matter that the lyrics didn’t matter. In the manner of an opera with a nonsensical libretto, the violence and the power were all musical. In “ Led Zeppelin: The Biography ,” a gossipy, readable new account, the music journalist Bob Spitz reminds us that Jimmy Page hated the term “heavy metal”; he derided it as “riff-bashing.” Led Zeppelin’s talent and daring went way beyond the capabilities of the headbanging deadweights who hung off the group’s example in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Yes, Led Zeppelin was “heavy”—to hear “Communication Breakdown” or “Good Times Bad Times” or “Rock and Roll” or “Black Dog” or “Dazed and Confused” for the first time was to hear danger, perilous boundaries, the dirty roar on the other side of music. Page got extraordinary kinds of distortion and fuzz from his guitar, and Bonham hit his snare and his gigantic bass drum killingly. But I liked the fact that Led Zeppelin’s members were, above all, heavy musicians; their talents as virtuoso performers made sense in the largely classical musical world that had shaped me.

Like most middle-class adolescents, I wanted to witness danger rather than actually experience it. My bets were comfortably hedged. As a teen-ager, I used to fall asleep at night to Led Zep—specifically, to the lovely blues ballad “Since I’ve Been Loving You.” It soothed me; it still does. If half the group’s energy was proto-punk destruction, the other half was musically refined restoration: it was the world’s most brilliantly belated blues band. Its violence tore things apart which its musicianship put back together. In this respect, Led Zeppelin was the opposite of punk, whose anarchic negation was premised on not being able to play one’s instrument well, or, in some cases, at all. But Page was already one of London’s most successful session guitarists, and a member of the group the Yardbirds, when, in the summer of 1968, he began to pick the members of his new group, aiming for a declaration of musical supremacy. Led Zeppelin, that is, functioned first and foremost as a collection of great musicians.

Page, then twenty-four, chose a fellow session player, John Paul Jones, as the group’s bassist (after toying with the idea of poaching the Who’s John Entwistle). Jones, who grew up in Kent, was one of the few bassists in London who, in his own words, could “play a Motown feel convincingly in those days.” Dexterous, imaginative, mobile, Jones is always sharking around at the bottom of the score, hunting for rhythmic tension and tonal complexity. His parts, in songs like “Ramble On” and “What Is and What Should Never Be,” are pungent melodies in their own right.

John Bonham, like Robert Plant, was from farther north, near Birmingham. When Page came calling, Bonham and Plant were jobbing musicians, barely out of their teens, doing the circuits at provincial pubs and halls. On July 20, 1968, Page was in the audience when Plant performed at a teachers’ training college in Walsall with a group of little distinction called Obs-Tweedle. Ambitious and calculating, Page surely understood what he had found in his singer and his drummer, though even he couldn’t know that in a few short years Bonham would establish himself as one of the world’s greatest drummers, perhaps the greatest in rock history. He had a comprehensive collection of percussive talents: speed and complexity rendered with a forbiddingly flawless technique; an instantly identifiable and original sound (best I can tell, the celebrated Bonham snare makes a dry bark in part because he seems to have hit the more resonant edge of the skin rather than the buzzier center); a wonderful feel for the groove of a song.

Bonham was Led Zeppelin, in this ability to land heavily and lightly at once. Listen again to “Rock and Roll” and you can hear how he swings—he’s swiping his sloshy hi-hats back and forth and bouncing the beat forward, less like the archetypal heavy-metal player than like the elegant mid-century big-band drummers he admired. In “Good Times Bad Times,” the opening song on the group’s first album, Bonham makes funky use of his cowbell, and introduces something that, it would seem, hadn’t featured before in rock—a series of fast triplets on the bass drum, but with the first strike of the triplet merely implied, so that the beat falls more heavily on the second and third strikes. That’s the technical explanation. Most listeners simply hear the staggered staccato of the bass drum worrying away at the beat in an interesting manner. That swift right foot is everywhere in the early albums. It’s a joy to hear bassist and drummer working together in the fast instrumental choruses of “The Lemon Song,” for instance. While Jones runs syncopatedly up and down the scales, Bonham supports the fidgety bass line with quick repeated double kicks. The song has a wicked velocity.

Spitz’s biography situates Led Zeppelin’s formation in the context of the nineteen-sixties English scene. Those skinny white boys with big heads and dead eyes were obsessed with American music, and with the blues above all. It was difficult to get hold of blues albums in England. You might wait a month for something to arrive from the States. Mick Jagger hung around the basement annex at Dobell’s Record Shop, on the Charing Cross Road, waiting for shipments. Jagger, Page, Keith Richards, and Brian Jones eagerly travelled from London to Manchester, in October, 1962, to see John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim, and Willie Dixon play on the same stage: the adoration of the Magi. Four years later, Jimi Hendrix’s London gig, in a Soho club, had an enormous impact; Eric Clapton, Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck, Eric Burdon, Donovan, Ray Davies, and Paul McCartney all attended. London was a busy little world. Everyone knew one another, and all these performers were, in various ways, chronically indebted to a music that originated somewhere else—the English journalist Nik Cohn called London the “Dagenham Delta.”

In the summer of 1968, when Plant first visited Page to discuss joining his band, he brought his precious records with him, each one a kind of borrowed identity card—Howlin’ Wolf’s rocking-chair album, “Joan Baez in Concert,” and, as Plant recalled, “my gatefold Robert Johnson album on Philips, which I bought while I was working at Woolworth’s.” In reply, Page played him Muddy Waters’s “You Shook Me.” Woolworth’s and the Chicago-blues sound—that pretty much sums up English musical life at the time. Listen to Eric Burdon and the Animals performing their 1968 slow blues song “As the Years Go Passing By,” and you’ll hear Burdon, born not in Mississippi but in Newcastle Upon Tyne, in 1941, solemnly intoning, “Ah, the blues, the ball and chain that is round every English musician’s leg.”

Page—who wrote most of the group’s music, as Plant wrote most of the lyrics—had no intention of being imprisoned by the blues. He wanted to treat them with a strange and never previously attempted alloy of hard rock and acoustic folk. Acoustic alternating with electric; quiet verses and hard choruses—many of the best-known Led Zeppelin songs, like “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” “Ramble On,” and “Stairway to Heaven,” adhere to a sort of velvet-followed-by-fist form. Some of the gentler ones, such as the sweet-natured “Thank You,” a favorite of mine, or the lovely Joni Mitchell tribute “Going to California,” are all velvet. Spitz puts it well when he says that Led Zeppelin “claimed new musical territory by narrowing the distance between genres.”

Already experienced in the studio, Page seems to have known precisely what sounds he wanted, and he worked fast. The band recorded its first album, untitled and known as “Led Zeppelin I,” in September, 1968, in London. Page paid for the sessions, and the whole album was recorded in thirty-six hours. Speed is the dominant motif of Spitz’s early pages. Astonishingly, the first four albums were released in a little under three years. The band’s second album, which came out on both sides of the Atlantic in October, 1969, became the top-selling record in the U.S. by the end of the year, with three million copies sold by April. In Britain, it knocked “Abbey Road” off the No. 1 perch. In August, 1970, Led Zeppelin embarked on its sixth American tour in two years. In a Los Angeles studio, the band recorded “The Lemon Song” live, and in one take. And so on.

On those first four albums are most of the band’s major songs, the ones that have dominated the past fifty years, including “Black Dog,” “Stairway to Heaven,” “Whole Lotta Love,” and “Dazed and Confused.” Listeners clamored for this music; by 1973, Spitz tells us, the band’s revenue constituted thirty per cent of the turnover of its label, Atlantic Records. The professionals were harder to convince. Mick Jagger and George Harrison hated the début album. At Rolling Stone , a young critic named John Mendelsohn, who loved the Who, mauled Led Zeppelin in piece after piece. In “Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom” (1972), a tartly opinionated account of the quick rise and fall of pop music in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, Nik Cohn—also a fan of the Who—excoriated Led Zeppelin for reducing blues-playing “to its lowest, most ham-fisted level ever.” Pete Townshend seems never to have liked the band’s music.

Nowadays, skeptics are likely to judge Page’s project of “narrowing the distance between genres” as entitled cultural appropriation, or even plagiarism. Extending its traditional hostility, Rolling Stone has accused the band of having a “catalog full of blatant musical swipes.” Words like “plunder” and “stolen” are thrown about online. Spitz prefers the gentler phrase “suspiciously close.” Through the years, the band has been sued or petitioned by Willie Dixon (“Whole Lotta Love” took words from Dixon’s “You Need Love”), Howlin’ Wolf (“The Lemon Song” borrowed its opening riff and some lyrics from his “Killing Floor”), Anne Bredon (who wrote the original song that Joan Baez, and then Led Zeppelin, made famous as “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”), and the band Spirit, whose “Taurus” contains a passage that indeed sounds “suspiciously close” to the opening chords of “Stairway to Heaven” (though Spirit lost a lawsuit it brought in 2016).

Page has certainly been parsimonious with credit-sharing, and, in at least one case, shabbily slow to do the right thing—he should have credited the American performer Jake Holmes, who created the musical basis for “Dazed and Confused,” on “Led Zeppelin I.” (Holmes sued and won a settlement in 2011.) But the blues evolved as an ecosystem of borrowing and recycling. The musical form cleaves to the twelve-bar template of I-IV-I-V-IV-I. Musically, you need some or all of this chord progression to cook up anything that feels bluesy, as a roux demands flour and fat, or a whodunnit a murder; originality in this regard would be something of a category error. In the Delta-blues or country-blues tradition that flourished before the Second World War, words tended to drift Homerically free of their makers. Performers might write a couple of their own verses and then finish with lines of a borrowed formula—so-called floating verses, or, the scholar Elijah Wald writes, “rhymed couplets that could be inserted more or less at random.” In fact, the postwar Chicago blues musicians who excited a generation of English performers—Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf—were themselves nostalgically repurposing, partly for a white crossover market, the Delta sound of lost prewar giants like Robert Johnson, who died in 1938. As early as 1949, the music industry cannily decided to baptize this modernized, electrified blues sound as “rhythm and blues.” In this sense, you could say that English players like Clapton and Page were double nostalgics, copiers of copiers.

Robert Plant’s tendency to lift words and formulas from old songs should be seen in this light. Plagiarism is private subterfuge made haplessly public. But to take Willie Dixon’s “You’ve got yearnin’ and I got burnin’ ” and put the words into “Whole Lotta Love” as “You need cooling / Baby, I’m not fooling”; to reverse the opening lines of Moby Grape’s 1968 song “Never,” from “Working from eleven / To seven every night / Ought to make life a drag,” and put them into “Since I’ve Been Loving You” as “Workin’ from seven to eleven every night / Really makes life a drag”; to punctuate “The Lemon Song,” which is obviously indebted to Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killing Floor,” with the repeated allusion “down on this killing floor,” while guilelessly referring to Roosevelt Sykes’s “She Squeezed My Lemon” (1937)—to make these moves, in a musical community that was utterly familiar with all the source material, testifies not to the anxiety of plagiarism but to the relaxedness of homage.

Plagiarists do what they do out of weakness, because they need stolen assistance. Does that sound like Led Zeppelin? The genius of “Whole Lotta Love” lies in its opening five-note riff, which has no obvious musical connection to Dixon’s song. “The Lemon Song” makes of “Killing Floor” something entirely new. “Since I’ve Been Loving You” is a better and richer song than Moby Grape’s “Never.” “When the Levee Breaks” is astonishingly different from Memphis Minnie’s. (It isn’t a blues song, for starters.) And, yes, “Stairway to Heaven” has more spirit, along with a few other dynamics, than Spirit’s “Taurus.” Besides, Led Zeppelin did credit many of its sources. The first album names Willie Dixon as the composer of “You Shook Me” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby.” Generally, on the matter of homage and appropriation, I agree with Jean-Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin, who, in “ Led Zeppelin: All the Songs ,” call the band’s version of the latter song “one of the most beautiful and moving tributes ever paid by a British group to its African American elders.”

Still, such indebtedness can rub pride thin. It was always a bit embarrassing, if you grew up in Britain in the nineteen-seventies, that the local rock stars one so admired seemed compelled to sing with fake American accents. Why was this guy even singing about a levee? Sometimes I used to catch myself thinking, Do they really have to sound like that? It turned out that they didn’t really have to; native help was coming. A movement of punk and New Wave bands was marshalling pallid performers who would spit and stutter in various regional accents: “They smelled of pubs, and Wormwood Scrubs / And too many right-wing meetings.” Led Zep simply had to shuffle off and die. The Who paved the way for British punk, or for a great new mod band like the Jam, not just because Townshend smashed up his guitars but because his lyrics were armed with a social mission: the Sex Pistols covered the Who’s “Substitute.” But Led Zeppelin made punk dialectically inevitable. The cloudy unimportance of the band’s lyrics, the devoted belatedness of its musical tribute, the reliance on American sources, American markets, American reverence, invited punk’s slashing nativist retort.

It had to be the States. Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin’s thuggish, gargantuan manager, knew that the money and the stadiums and the FM radio stations were all in America. But also America was the only temple vast enough for a properly oblivious performance of the rites that went with being a “rock god.” Britain is a bitterly humorous little island. It’s hard to imagine Robert Plant shinning up a tree in Kent and announcing—as he famously did at a pool in the Hollywood Hills—“I am the golden god!” Back home, he would have been laughed at, possibly by his mum. Tellingly, we learn that the band behaved much better in Britain than in America. At home, Page said, “your family” would come along to the shows. “But when we went out to the States, we didn’t give a fuck and became total showoffs.” It was 1973, and they had reached the high altar. Referring to Plant, Spitz breathlessly annotates the American moment: “What a life! He was the lead singer of the most successful rock ’n’ roll band in the world. He had all the money he’d ever need, a loving family back home, unlimited girls on the road. Every need, every whim taken care of. Not a care in the world. The city of Los Angeles stretched out before him like a magic carpet.”

In fact, the devil’s bargain was already calling in its debts. The ledger of dissipation, first recounted at length in Stephen Davis’s “ Hammer of the Gods ” (1985), was alternately horrifying and comic. At the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard, which became the band’s go-to den of instant iniquity, guests who complained about Bonham’s playing music at four in the morning would find themselves relocated. What was it like to trash a room like a rock star? The desk manager at the Edgewater Hotel in Seattle, Spitz tells us, wanted to “go bonkers in a room himself.” So Grant led him to an empty suite, peeled off six hundred and seventy dollars in cash, and said, “Have this room on Led Zeppelin.” The funniest boys-gone-wild detail in the book may be that, in the first year and a half of the band’s existence, Bonham bought twenty-eight cars.

But violence and addiction were stalking the tours. Grant was a former bouncer, with connections in the London underworld, who, as Spitz says, “brought a gangster mentality to the game.” He and his vicious sidekick Richard Cole threatened the press and attacked audience members they didn’t like the look of. Cole concealed small weights in his gloves, for heavier blows. Crowd control was nastily martial. Cole would hide under the front of the stage and, when fans got too close to the band, begin “smashing them on the kneecaps with a hammer.” Money lay around like silt. By 1972, as the band was filling stadiums and selling millions of records, Grant had essentially bullied exceptionally favorable terms from promoters, who were commanded to pay in cash, partly to avoid punitive British taxes. The band journeyed throughout the United States accompanied by sacks stuffed with hundreds of thousands of dollars. Drugs followed the money. Grant was a coke addict by 1972; he helped himself to bags of the stuff. Jimmy Page soon caught up, and eventually added heroin. Although Page’s addiction appears to have turned him sleepy and sloppy—benignly vampiric, he slept during the day and palely loitered at night—drugs and alcohol made Bonham, seemingly sweet-natured when sober, an energetic monster. At one point, he bit a woman’s finger for no apparent reason, drawing blood. The reader of Spitz’s book becomes inured to the horrors that “Bonzo” would inflict, including near-rapes of women, random assaults, repellent practical jokes: “On the overnight train to Osaka, he drank himself silly again, and while Jimmy and his Japanese girlfriend were in the dining car, Bonzo found her handbag and shit in it.”

Then there were the underage groupies. Girls who made themselves available for sex got to hang out with the increasingly wasted golden gods. “We were young, and we were growing up,” Page says in self-defense. But they were not as young as the groupies. Spitz calls the girls in L.A. “shockingly young”—thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. When Plant sang, in “Dazed and Confused,” “I wanna make love to you, little girl,” he wasn’t being figurative. Some people thought that these girls could handle themselves. We can try to be tough-minded, in an Eve Babitz kind of way, and coolly appraise the twisted seventies scene. Still, it’s unsettling when Page, at twenty-nine, takes up with a fourteen-year-old named Lori Mattix. “He was the rock-god prince to me,” she recalled, “a magical, mystical person. . . . It was no secret he liked young girls.” Page phoned Mattix’s mother to get the O.K., in what he seems to have imagined was an act of gallantry, whereupon Betty Iannaci, a receptionist at Atlantic Records, was tasked with collecting Mattix from a Westwood motel room. Iannaci recounts, “It was clear that her mother was grooming her for a night out with Jimmy Page. And I knew he was mixing it up with heroin.”

It all went properly rancid during the tours of 1975 and 1977. Page was lost to drugs; Bonham was uncontrollable. The shows were hazardous, gigantic, brilliant, careless. Page seemed not to notice or care that his guitar was out of tune. In 1975, Bonham played the drums with a bag of coke between his legs; in 1977, he fell asleep over his kit. Crowds became riotous. The Detroit Free Press called the fans “the most violent, unruly crowds ever to inflict themselves upon a concert hall.” In Oakland, in July, 1977, Bonham, Cole, and Grant seriously assaulted a colleague of the promoter Bill Graham, and were arrested. Led Zeppelin never played in America again.

Meanwhile, the recorded music was in decline. Listen to “Custard Pie,” or “The Wanton Song,” from the band’s 1975 album, “Physical Graffiti.” Compared with the nervous heavy swing, the brutish dance of the early music, these are monotonous, grounded stomps. “Kashmir,” from the same record, has an interesting enough chord progression, but no one ever wished it longer. The starship had crashed to earth. The band’s last proper album, “In Through the Out Door,” was released in 1979, and, although it was an immense commercial success, offered little of musical value. “In the Evening,” apparently intended to announce the return of the group’s “hardness,” achieves the distinction of sounding like anyone but Led Zeppelin. Bonham had been the crucial reagent; as had been the case with Keith Moon’s spiralling alcoholism, the increasing unreliability of the drummer closely tracked the decline of the band. Spitz reminds us that 1979 was a richly transitional year. “In Through the Out Door” had to compete, musically, with the Clash’s “London Calling,” the Police’s “Reggatta de Blanc,” Talking Heads’ “Fear of Music,” Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” and Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures.” Of Led Zeppelin’s effort, the British publication Sounds declared, “The dinosaur is finally extinct.” It is painful to read about how, as the August concerts that year at Knebworth approached, Page and Grant bandied the names of people they wanted as supporting acts—Dire Straits, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Aerosmith, Roxy Music. Everyone turned them down. Dire Straits’ manager told them that his band wasn’t ready for such a major show, “but in truth he didn’t want them sharing a stage with Led Zeppelin.” A year later, John Bonham died in his sleep, after drinking forty shots of vodka, and Led Zeppelin promptly died with him.

Still, listen again to the opening of “Black Dog,” or to Plant’s forlorn wail at the start of “I Can’t Quit You Baby,” or Page’s fingers in full flow in “No Quarter,” or the violent precision of Bonham’s beat in “When the Levee Breaks.” It’s like listening to atheism: the charge is still there, ready to be picked up, ready to release lives. The anti-religious religious power of rock was exactly what my mother feared. I don’t think it was the obvious mimicry of religious worship—the sweaty congregants, the stairways to Heaven, and all the rest of it—that worried her. I think she feared rock’s inversion of religious power: the insidious power to enter one’s soul. There were many postwar households where a confession of interest in rock and roll was received rather as a young Victorian’s crisis of faith had been in the nineteenth century. Spitz tells us that listening to pop music in the Plant home was “akin to a declaration of war,” producing an “irreparable” rift between Plant and his parents. In my own adolescence, I can’t clearly separate atheism’s power from rock and roll’s. My mother was right to be fearful. There was something a little “satanic” about Led Zeppelin. You can feel it, perhaps, in the music’s deep uncanniness; in Plant’s unsexed keening; in the band’s weird addiction to downward or upward chromatic progressions—the sound of horror-film scores—in songs like “Dazed and Confused,” “Kashmir,” “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You,” and even “Stairway to Heaven.” It’s in the terrifying, spectral, semi-tonal shriek of “Immigrant Song,” the creepy scratching chords that open “Dancing Days,” the dirgelike liturgies of “Friends” and “Black Dog.”

That’s the good satanism. What about the actual diabolical activity—the violence, the rape, the pillage, the sheer wastage of lives? Jimmy Page was a devoted follower of the satanic “magick” of Aleister Crowley, whose Sadean permissions can be reduced to one decree: “There is no law beyond do what thou wilt.” If the predetermined task of rock gods and goddesses is to sacrifice themselves on the Dionysian altar of excess so that gentle teen-agers the world over don’t have to do it themselves—which seems to be the basic rock-and-roll contract—then the lives of these deities are never exactly wasted, especially when they are foreshortened. Their atrocious human deeds are, to paraphrase a famous fictional atheist, the manure for our future harmony. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, they died young (or otherwise ruined their health), so that we could persist in the fantasy that there’s nothing worse than growing old.

In this sense, it would seem as if the music can’t easily be separated from its darkest energies. But it would be nice if the sacrifice were limited only to self-sacrifice and didn’t involve less willing partners. And surely all kinds of demonic and powerful art, including many varieties of music, both classical and popular, have been created by people who didn’t live demonically. What about Flaubert’s mantra about living like a bourgeois in order to create wild art? In Led Zeppelin’s case, the great music, the stuff that is still violently radical, was made early in the band’s career, when its members were most sober. The closer the band got to actual violence, the tamer the music became. So perhaps the music can be separated from its darker energies.

I don’t know what to think. I can say only that my brother didn’t, in the end, go to Knebworth. Did he save his soul? Perhaps. I’m pretty sure Led Zeppelin saved mine. ♦

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Led Zeppelin: The Biography

From the author of the definitive  New York Times  bestselling history of the Beatles comes the authoritative account of the group many call the greatest rock band of all time, arguably the most successful, and certainly one of the most notorious

Rock star. Whatever that term means to you, chances are it owes a debt to Led Zeppelin. No one before or since has lived the dream quite like Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham. In  Led Zeppelin , Bob Spitz takes their full measure, separating the myth from the reality with his trademark connoisseurship and storytelling flair. From the opening notes of their first album, the band announced itself as something different, a collision of grand artistic ambition and brute primal force, of English folk music and African American blues. That record sold over 10 million copies, and it was just the beginning; Led Zeppelin’s albums have sold over 300 million certified copies worldwide, and the dust has never settled.  The band is notoriously guarded, and previous books provided more heat than light. But Spitz’s authority is undeniable and irresistible. His feel for the atmosphere, the context—the music, the business, the recording studios, the touring life, the whole ecosystem of popular music—is unparalleled. His account of the melding of Page and Jones, the virtuosic London sophisticates, with Plant and Bonham, the wild men from the Midlands, in a scene dominated by the Beatles and the Stones but changing fast, is in itself a revelation. Spitz takes the music seriously and brings the band’s artistic journey to full and vivid life. The music, however, is only part of the legend:  Led Zeppelin  is also the story of how the sixties became the seventies, of how playing clubs became playing stadiums, of how innocence became decadence. Led Zeppelin wasn’t the first rock band to let loose on the road, but as with everything else, they took it to an entirely new level. Not all the legends are true, but in Spitz’s careful accounting, what is true is astonishing and sometimes disturbing. Led Zeppelin gave no quarter, and neither has Bob Spitz.  Led Zeppelin  is the full and honest reckoning the band has long awaited, and richly deserves.

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Led Zeppelin: The Definitive Biography Paperback – January 1, 1994

• Print length 342 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Underwood Books
• Publication date January 1, 1994
• Dimensions 6 x 0.75 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 0887331777
• ISBN-13 978-0887331770
• See all details

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From library journal, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Underwood Books; Revised, Subsequent edition (January 1, 1994)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 342 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0887331777
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0887331770
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.75 x 9.25 inches
• #1,814 in Popular Music (Books)
• #5,141 in Rock Music (Books)

About the author

Ritchie yorke.

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Led Zeppelin: The Biography

• By Bob Spitz
• Penguin Press
• Reviewed by Daniel de Visé
• November 11, 2021

This gimlet-eyed chronicle reveals the rock gods to be sadly (and sickeningly) human.

With Led Zeppelin , a revelatory new book by Bob Spitz, the legend becomes fact. I almost wish he’d printed the legend.

History has anointed Led Zeppelin as the greatest hard-rock band of the 1970s. The quartet emerged from a crowded field with the era’s biggest sales, several of its finest LPs, and arguably its signature song, “Stairway to Heaven.”

At its best, early on, Led Zeppelin gave mesmerizing concerts. But the band’s records are its legacy. It’s not for everyone: To modern ears, singer Robert Plant’s lyrics sound frequently vulgar and occasionally misogynistic. He and chord-smith Jimmy Page nicked entire songs from great Black blues artists. Fifty years on, the entire Zeppelin oeuvre resonates with the distant echo of smoky adolescent bedrooms.

Within this exhaustively researched account, Spitz unearths a trove of caustic reviews and bitter reflections to remind us how very often the world’s greatest live-rock band played dreadful gigs, and how thoroughly Led Zeppelin was reviled — by critics, adult music fans, and even fellow pop stars — for the better part of its life.

When George Harrison first heard a test pressing of Led Zeppelin I, released in 1969, “It wasn’t just that he didn’t get it,” a friend recalled. “He thought it was awful.” Rolling Stone, the bible of American rock ‘n’ roll, declared the album an “avalanche of drums and shouting.” The Los Angeles Times greeted an early show as “an exhibition of incredible self-indulgence.” The band grew to loathe the press.

Here, I think, lay the problem: From the beginning, Led Zeppelin appealed primarily to teenage boys. Juvenile delinquents, essentially, drove its album and concert sales. And nothing repulsed slightly older fans and critics like a band that courted adolescents. Rolling Stone heaped similar scorn on contemporary acts as far-flung as Jethro Tull and Black Sabbath for their pimply minions. Yet, writes Spitz:

“The music took audiences to a place they’d never been before, a place similar to the hysteria-induced level where, years earlier, the Beatles had transported hordes of thirteen-year-old girls. Led Zeppelin’s audiences were different, older…somewhat. Mostly boys between the ages of fifteen and twenty thronged the area in front of the stage, where Jimmy and Robert, aided by an army of Marshall stacks, whipped them into delirium.”

Led Zeppelin aged along with its fans, and the ice gradually thawed. But then punk hit, and critics pivoted from dismissing the Zep as sophomoric to interring the band as prog-metal dinosaurs. Led Zeppelin couldn’t catch a break — except with record buyers and concert patrons, who made its members some of the wealthiest pop stars on the planet.

The band disintegrated in 1980 following the untimely death of John Bonham, one of the great rock drummers, whose drinking had eclipsed his playing. In the years that followed, Led Zeppelin’s reputation gradually rose. I recall them, in my own 1980s adolescence, as one of the two great stoner-rock bands of the 1970s, alongside Pink Floyd. Arthouses staged double features of “The Song Remains the Same,” the band’s cheesy cult-classic concert film, and Floyd’s dystopian acid trip, “The Wall.”

Nowadays, Led Zeppelin seems to stand alone, its recordings ensconced as the crown jewels of hard rock. The first two masterful LPs, thoughtfully titled I and II , show Led Zeppelin bursting forth and rocking harder than anyone else, and blessed with a leader, Page, who could write great songs adorned with brilliant guitar figures. The third album revealed the full breadth of Page’s ambition: He sought to bridge heavy metal, progressive rock, and folk.

Those impulses reached full flower on the untitled fourth album, which, across its first side, wrestles with King Crimson-sized time signatures on “Black Dog,” rocks harder than ever on the aptly named “Rock and Roll,” and unfurls a full-sail folk epic on “The Battle of Evermore” before concluding with that multi-sectioned masterpiece, “Stairway to Heaven.” Spitz told me IV might be his favorite Zeppelin album, and I won’t argue.

The author smartly builds his narrative around Page, a wunderkind London session guitarist who reinvented himself as a blues-rock star in the legendary Yardbirds. As that band lost steam, Page seized control, cleaned house, and reinvented the ensemble as an instrumental power trio, with fellow session whiz John Paul Jones on bass and keys and a pair of Midlands unknowns on drums and vocals. Bonham drummed with unmatched fury and intuitive rhythm. Plant sang with a potent, growling tenor that soared above the din.

Across six splendid albums, Page revealed himself as a front-rank songwriter and a canny producer, particularly in the way he captured Bonham’s hammer-of-the-gods percussion with microphones strategically placed in drafty British manors. Yet Page could not improvise like Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck, his fellow Yardbird alumni; to my ears, many of his solos never really get off the ground. But his distinctive sound, bracing as a cold wind from Valhalla, captivated the rolling-papers crowd. And his scripted notes — the dizzying call-and-response with Plant on “Black Dog,” the chromatic progression on “Kashmir,” the octaval assault of “Immigrant Song” — endure as epic, timeless riffs.

Led Zeppelin is an excellent book. Spitz tells his story masterfully. He seems not to have scored fresh interviews with surviving band members, but he tapped dozens of friends, roadies, fellow musicians, and groupies and amassed a busload of archival clips.

Still, many of his revelations sadden the soul.

By the early 1970s, drugs, drink, and debauchery began to drag the Zeppelin down. The typical concert started late, stalled on endless, indulgent solos, and drew justifiably scathing reviews. Led Zeppelin frequently sucked.

Offstage, Spitz unspools story after blood-curdling story of unimaginable, inexcusable excess. At the height of their fame, these spoiled men-children dismantled hotel rooms and hurled furniture from windows from sheer boredom. Their handlers meted out brutal beatings to anyone who looked at them funny. The band and their entourage exploited an endless procession of underage girls, passing them around like party favors, tying them to drainpipes, humiliating them with human filth. No one seemed to care. Writes Spitz:

“I set out to tell the full story of the band. Their behavior on the road was no secret. I was determined to portray it straightforwardly, without pulling any punches. For me, it was important to let the actions of the musicians and their rationalization speak for themselves. I also let the women who were caught up in the scene speak for themselves. Look, it was often an ugly scene. That’s part of the Led Zeppelin story.” 

Led Zeppelin is a compelling work, but one that may dim the Led Zeppelin legend. Gauzy Rolling Stone retrospectives and nostalgia-hued books and films would have us remember the arena-rock era as a pot-scented Eden, an unending singalong on a boozy tour bus. Bob Spitz gives us the facts, and they tell a darker story.

Daniel de Visé is the author, most recently, of King of the Blues: The Rise and Reign of B.B. King .

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Led Zeppelin: The Biography Paperback – March 5 2024

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• Print length 688 pages
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• Publisher Penguin Books
• Publication date March 5 2024
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Sunday, January 26, 1969

They had been playing the band throughout the week. Entire sides of the album. FM radio, the underground free-form pipeline, was a godsend. He'd been tuned in to WNEW-FM, New York's preeminent alternative outlet, when it started: "Dazed and Confused," "Communication Breakdown," "You Shook Me," even "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You," a Joan Baez number that had been hot-wired and jacked. Scott Muni, the station's afternoon deejay, couldn't help himself. He played the grooves off that record. Alison Steele, NEW's Nightbird, programmed it as though it were on a loop.

Led Zeppelin.

The name alone had visceral power. Sure, it was incongruous. A lead zeppelin was the ultimate sick joke, but spelling it "Led" took nerve. It told you everything you needed to know about this band-it was dynamic, irreverent, subversive, extreme-primed to rock 'n roll, not a toady to Top 40 populism. Led Zeppelin wasn't gonna hold your hand or take your daddy's T-Bird away. They meant business. This was serious, meaty stuff.

He loved what he'd heard. All that was left was to see them for himself.

As luck would have it, his friend Henry Smith was humping Led Zeppelin's equipment into a club in Boston that weekend. If he could get himself to the gig, Smith had agreed to slip him into the show. But how? He was basically broke. They'd been crashing at his parents' apartment in Yonkers, where his band, Chain Reaction, had been scratching for work. If he was going to get to Boston, he'd have to hitch.

Sunday-afternoon traffic was sparse along the I-95 corridor. The weather hadn't cooperated. An area of low pressure in Oklahoma had been creeping its way eastward, dropping temperatures below the freezing point along the Atlantic coastline. The sky was grim. The forecast predicted a nor'easter would hit Boston later that night or tomorrow morning. With a little luck, he might beat it to the gig.

A ride . . . then another, as the succession of cars plowed up the interstate, stitching a seam from Stamford to Bridgeport to New Haven to Providence and beyond. The songs in his head carried him through dozens of miles. These days, you couldn't take a breath without inhaling a killer. "Jumpin' Jack Flash," "Dock of the Bay," "All Along the Watchtower," "White Room," "Hey Jude," "Heard It Through the Grapevine," "Hurdy Gurdy Man," "Fire." You could feast all day on those babies and never go hungry. But Led Zeppelin had thrown him an emotional curve. Their songs hit him deep. There was something dark and sensual about them, something strangely provocative in their nature. They rolled over him, allowing his imagination to run wild.

Small wonder that they'd erupted via Jimmy Page. He knew all about Page, a guitar virtuoso in the tradition of Clapton, Stills, and Jimmy's itchy alter ego Jeff Beck, with whom Page had served a brief but stormy stretch in the Yardbirds as that seminal band was coming apart at the seams. There was already a heady mystique about Page. He'd contributed uncredited licks to scores of hit records, not least on sessions with the Who, the Kinks, and Them. But Page had taken Led Zeppelin into another dimension, a province of rock 'n roll that was hard to define. Sometimes it was basic and bluesy, sometimes improvisational, other times a hybrid strain they were calling heavy metal, and all of it seasoned with enough folk, funk, and rockabilly elements to blur the lines. That was a lot to take in for a budding rock 'n roller. Seeing Page and his band would help to put things in perspective.

It was dark by the time he pulled up at the gig, a club called the Tea Party in a converted Unitarian meeting house-cum-synagogue that stood halfway along a solitary street. A hallucinatory gloom had fallen over the South End of Boston, casting East Berkeley Street in a desolate embrace. This was not the Boston of wealthy Brahmins, of culture and entitlement. "It was a tough neighborhood, a place you didn't want to hang out at night," says Don Law, who ran the joint. There was no sign of life in the surrounding tenements, aside from a bodega next door, whose light threw a waxy fluorescence across the pitted sidewalk. In the silhouette it projected, he could make out the outlines of heads, shoulders hunched against the cold, stretching down the street and around the corner. There must have been-what?-a couple hundred people waiting in line to get in. More.

Where the hell did everyone come from?

Led Zeppelin was hardly a household name. Until recently, they'd actually been billing themselves as the New Yardbirds. Their debut album had been released only two weeks earlier. Sure, he'd expected the freaks and the diehards, but this turnout was way off the chart. Obviously, word had rumbled out along the jungle drums. It wasn't unheard of. "We'd have a totally unknown British act open on Thursday," Don Law recalls, "and there'd be lines down the street by Saturday." He'd seen it with Jethro Tull, Humble Pie, and Ten Years After, all of whom had played the club during the past few months. Radio helped to a large degree. Boston's FM rock venue, WBCN, was still a novelty, in its infancy. Most of its broadcasts were piped right out of an anteroom at the Tea Party, its jocks a ragtag assortment of ex-college kids from the communications departments at Tufts and Emerson. Bands would come off the stage and do an on-the-spot interview. FM airplay of any good album had become one of the surefire weapons to launch a new act. With Led Zeppelin, the evidence was right there on the sidewalk.

Getting into the Tea Party for their final performance was going to take some doing. The lines looked daunting; the hitchhiker feared he'd arrived too late. Fortunately, Henry Smith had been on the lookout for him near the door, and the two men disappeared inside before management-or the fire department-could cut off admission.

You could tell from the vibe. An air of expectancy pulsed through the room. The crowd was on top of it. They were ready.

The Tea Party wasn't the most conventional place to showcase a band like this one. It was hard to get past its house-of-worship layout. The stage was a former pulpit with the legend praise ye the lord chiseled above the altar; the ballroom floor was pockmarked where pews had been removed; and a huge stained-glass window sported the Star of David. If the music piped over the PA system wasn't exactly liturgical, the psychedelic light show beaming liquid designs from the overhead balcony was downright profane. No service had ever packed in a congregation like the one thronging the hall. The club was legally outfitted to hold seven hundred, but the audience had long ago exceeded that number. The crowd was back to back, belly to belly.

The band had soldiered through a solid three-night warm-up. The Thursday-, Friday-, and Saturday-night shows had gone pretty much as they'd hoped, delivering hard-hitting sets that, as a reviewer noted, "lived up to [their] advance billing as a group of exceptional power and drive." For the most part, Led Zeppelin ran through the highlights of their debut album, slipping in the occasional Yardbirds or Chuck Berry number. Long, discursive solos conjured up improvisational fragments of R&B or blues favorites. Was that "Mockingbird" tucked into "I Can't Quit You Baby"? A few bars of "Duke of Earl"? The familiar riff of "Cat's Squirrel"? Jimmy Page's playing, especially, was loose and luxurious. He felt at home at the Tea Party, having appeared there only nine months earlier during a Yardbirds tour. Then, in June 1968, a few months later, Page and his manager, Peter Grant, had turned up to check out the latest incarnation of another of Grant's acts, the Jeff Beck Group, with a lineup featuring Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart.

Don Law recalls how Grant arrived before Beck had gone on that day, cradling an acetate as though it were a precious artifact. "This is a new band called the New Yardbirds," he said, as the three men settled in a funky little office at the back of the stage. Listening to the test pressing while Grant and Page exchanged subtle glances, Law knew immediately he had to book the act before a canny competitor snatched them. And Grant talked him into a four-night stand.

He hoped this Sunday-night show on January 26 would give Boston something to talk about.

Law spent a few minutes backstage an hour before showtime that night, chatting with Page, a delicate, almost wraithlike creature who radiated rock-star heat. Law had street cred with Page, owing to his father, also named Don Law, who, in Texas in the mid-1930s, had produced the only known recordings-a mere twenty-nine songs-attributed to blues legend Robert Johnson. Page was as hooked on the influence of Johnson's music as his pals Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, and he interrogated Law, practically browbeat him, for any unexplored Johnson morsel that would give him more insight into the music. Eavesdropping on their conversation was Zeppelin's feline vocalist, Robert Plant, himself a huge Johnson fan.

"One of the things I picked up from Robert Johnson when I started singing was the liaison between the guitar playing and his voice," Plant noted years later. "It was so sympathetic. It almost seemed as if the guitar was his vocal cords."

Plant was a blues aficionado who had been plumbing arcane Chicago-based anthologies, listening to tracks he could co-opt, since he was fourteen years old. Muddy Waters, Skip James, Son House, Snooks Eaglin-they were all part of Plant's education. Just that Thursday afternoon, a young fan helping the roadies had slipped him a tape copy of King of the Delta Blues Singers Vol. 1, with a pair of Johnson ballads on it. Plant considered Robert Johnson the musician "to whom we all owe more or less our very existence." He strained to overhear Law and Page's exchange, but there was too much noise, and instead Plant contented himself with sipping his hot tea, prepping his vocal cords, while his bandmates, bass player John Paul Jones and drummer John Bonham, each clutching a pint of Watney's Red Barrel, stationed themselves across the room, in a huddle with a BCN disc jockey named J. J. Jackson.

There was a perceptible distance, even an awkwardness, among the band members that precluded more intimacy. They were still in the dating phase, still getting to know one another, still developing a camaraderie. They'd only been a unit for slightly more than four months, assembled by Jimmy Page, the way a cook might choose ingredients for a recipe. Page and John Paul Jones had known each other as journeymen session players on the London studio circuit; Robert Plant and John Bonham were mates from the Midlands. Though no one would admit it, a whiff of the North-South divide lingered in the air.

Their shows had blown hot and cold since they'd landed in the States at the close of 1968. Debuts in Los Angeles and San Francisco were star-is-born type affairs. Delirious critics in those cities sized up Led Zeppelin as phenoms who "were jamming as if they had been playing together for years" and "ranked in the company of the Who, Rolling Stones, and the late Cream." The Toronto reviewer said, "Several critics, myself included, had suggested Led Zeppelin just might be the next so-called supergroup." Jimmy Page felt the lift-off. "After the San Francisco gig, it was just-bang!" he said.

But often the venues Zeppelin played were ill equipped, the PA systems Paleolithic, and arrangements sounded about as polished as high school recitals. In Detroit, in front of an audience of local luminaries like MC5 and the Amboy Dukes, a reviewer in the very first issue of Creem noted, "Each member of the group was on a separate riff, not at all together. . . . They were playing different things simultaneously." It was cringeworthy but forgivable. Growing pains were a common symptom of new bands. Led Zeppelin was no exception. "We got better each day and found ourselves making things up as we went along," Jimmy Page explained not long afterward. The band ached to knock a show out of the park.

A lot depended on the audience. A band draws on the energy in the hall, and the Tea Party was revving up.

When disc jockey Charlie Daniels ambled onstage as the lights came down, the cheers in that old tabernacle sent a chill up the spine of the hitchhiker, posted along the back wall near the door. He took in the scene with a sense of awe. He hoped this band was as good as the hype.

At the back of the hall, a door flung open, and the four musicians marched theatrically through the crowd-"like kings, like conquering heroes parting the masses"-to the front of the stage.

"Here they are," Daniels roared, riding the wave of the buildup. "From England-let's give a warm Boston welcome to Leddddddd Zeppelin!"

A sound like a siren cut through the darkness before the spot came up and found Robert Plant contorted, Gumby-like, over the mic, his hand cupped around a harmonica. His bluesy plaint was mimicked by a sinewy guitar line from Jimmy Page's Les Paul as they launched into "The Train Kept a-Rollin'," an old Yardbirds standby, but on steroids and at a pitch that could restore hearing to the deaf. The version, rollicking and capable, served to get the crowd's attention.

Then a wounded-animal cry growled out: "I . . . I . . . I can't quit you baby. Wooooo-man, I'm gonna put you down a little while."

It was the voice of someone who'd experienced despair and heartbreak and had seen the inside of a Southern prison. But somehow it was coming out of the mouth of a skinny, twenty-year-old white guy with hair that would make Goldilocks envious. Plant had stolen the motif out from under generations of immortal Negro minstrels, yet it was more than a cultural appropriation. It was heartfelt. There was a rawness to his delivery that spoke more to the future than to the past, sparked by instrumentation that turned the blues idiom on its head. The playing wasn't indicative of a juke joint so much as a garage. It was loud and aggressive. Page attached jumper cables to the solo break, playing it as if Buddy Guy had gone berserk. His fingers flew up and down the frets as if they were too hot for him to linger on any one for too long. The bass, which John Paul Jones-known as Jonesy by his mates-had cranked as high as his amp could withstand, sent tremors through the crowd. "The vibrations," said an observer in the crowd, "hit your chest with physical force." And the drummer, John Bonham, didn't play the drums-he attacked them "like a runaway freight train." The snare beats were so sharp they sounded like gunfire strafing the room.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books (March 5 2024)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0399562443
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0399562440
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 601 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.89 x 4.06 x 21.26 cm
• #87 in Songwriting (Books)
• #222 in Musician Biographies
• #225 in Composer & Musician Biographies (Books)

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Led Zeppelin News

The latest unofficial led zeppelin news and rumours., review: ‘led zeppelin: the biography’ by bob spitz.

Posted By: ledzepnews 4th November 2021

Robert Plant sings on “Ramble On” that “mine’s a tale that can’t be told,” but over the years many authors have attempted to tell the story of Led Zeppelin, with varying levels of success.

The latest author to write a Led Zeppelin biography is Bob Spitz, a veteran American journalist best known for writing comprehensive and positively reviewed biographies of The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Ronald Reagan.

In the grandly titled “Led Zeppelin: The Biography,” due to be released on November 9 , Spitz charts a comprehensive course through Led Zeppelin’s career, relying on more than 50 interviews with associates of the band to build up a well-told story of their success.

But fans hoping for major revelations about Led Zeppelin, whether in the studio or on stage, are likely to be disappointed.

Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones declined to speak with Spitz, meaning he relies on previous interviews, existing books, and associates with differing levels of reliability and axes to grind to tell the story of Led Zeppelin.

A warts and all biography

If Page had his way, Led Zeppelin’s story would be told solely through the band’s music – whether studio albums or live recordings. This, he seems to feel, should be enough to satisfy curious fans.

In recent years, he appears to have relaxed this position, publishing an official photographic history of the band for its fiftieth anniversary in 2018 and co-operating with an authorised documentary film set to be released next year.

Previous proposals for a Led Zeppelin film “were pretty miserable,” Page said in September , “to the point where they would want to be concentrating on anything but the music.”

Reading “Led Zeppelin: The Biography,” one gets the distinct impression that Page is likely to also brand it “miserable” and consign it to the heap of existing unofficial biographies.

Spitz spends a significant proportion of the book discussing Led Zeppelin’s off-stage antics, examining their increasing drug consumption, the violence that surrounded them, and allegations of relations with underage groupies.

The book’s chapter titles give an early indication of the scope of Spitz’s interest: “Just Boys Having Fun,” “Flying Too Close to the Sun,” “The Year of Living Dangerously,” and “Their Own Private Sodom and Gomorrah” are particularly telling examples.

Fans hoping for a book that examines Led Zeppelin’s on-stage musical development will be better served by reading Dave Lewis and Mike Tremaglio’s recently updated “Evenings With Led Zeppelin” book instead.

Fascinating details from people who knew Led Zeppelin

Spitz’s book is a comprehensive, warts and all look at Led Zeppelin that runs to 688 pages. It’s a readable volume that doesn’t get bogged down or sidetracked for too long in individual performances or recording sessions.

The book’s prologue describes the band’s legendary January 26, 1969 Boston Tea Party show, explaining its significance and the impact it had on a young Steven Tyler in the audience.

From there, Spitz goes on to discuss the history of blues music in England, examining its influence on generations of young musicians. The first 100 pages of the book chart Page’s life from his childhood through to becoming a budding musician and session professional.

It’s here where the book shines thanks to Spitz’s interviews with Dave Williams, a childhood friend of Page who provides fascinating anecdotes about Page’s first forays into the musical world.

“​​Jimmy and I both fancied Anna,” Williams recalls in the book. “So we drew straws to see who would take her home. The other guy was responsible for getting the pianist into a taxi.” 

“Jimmy lost,” Spitz explains, “fifty-five years later, Williams is still married to Anna.”

Anna herself recalls travelling with a teenage Page to see Jerry Lee Lewis perform at Fairfield Hall in Croydon, presumably on May 9, 1963.

“We had seats in the front row of the balcony,” she says in the book. “Jim got so excited when Jerry Lee came on. He was standing up on his seat cheering and leaning dangerously over the balcony rail. I hung onto the back of his shirt so that he didn’t fall over into the stalls.”

When relying on these new interviews, Spitz’s book is at its best, with the author digging into well-known stories and asking witnesses what really went on.

Take the Drake Hotel robbery on July 29, 1973, for example, when Led Zeppelin was robbed of more than $200,000 in cash stored in the New York hotel’s safety deposit boxes. Spitz clearly intends to put the matter to bed for good.

“No less than five sources close to the band told this author that Grant had admitted spiriting the Drake money away,” Spitz writes.

Strange tales from the road

Spitz may not have had access to the three surviving Led Zeppelin band members, but his new interviews with associates including former Atlantic Records executive Phil Carson, Peter Grant’s former assistant Carole Brown, album cover designer Aubrey Powell and Plant’s PA Benji Le Fevre form a compelling narrative filled with recollections from people who were along for the ride as well.

Fairport Convention’s Dave Pegg’s recollection of a drink and drugs session with Bonham, featuring cameos from Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol, is a particularly entertaining highlight.

Credit should also be given to Spitz’s scholarly approach to explaining his sources. Every quotation is cited, allowing readers to trace the source of stories to new interviews or previous material.

Spitz was unfortunately unable to uncover any previously unreleased interviews that could have given readers fresh insights from the members of Led Zeppelin or its manager, Peter Grant.

The book mentions a 1988 Malcolm McLaren interview with Grant which took place for an unreleased documentary, raising hopes that Spitz has uncovered previously unreported comments.

However, all of the quotes Spitz uses from the interview were previously published in Mark Blake’s excellent 2018 Grant biography “Bring It On Home,” itself a source for several other quotes used in Spitz’s book.

A Me Too-era reassessment of Led Zeppelin’s off-stage behaviour

Spitz’s reassessment of groupie culture is likely to prove the book’s most divisive and headline-grabbing theme.

Spitz clearly describes alleged acts, specifically accusing John Bonham of “attempted rape” of a flight attendant on a flight from Chicago to Los Angeles in 1975.

The book views Led Zeppelin through a post-Me Too lens. What has been dismissed for decades as typical indulgences befitting of the era is brought firmly into the light of 2021.

“On early tours with Led Zeppelin, there were many sexual encounters with underage girls,” Spitz alleges. “No one gave a thought to whether these girls were well below the age of consent. Some were eighteen, some were sixteen, some were fourteen—mostly no one bothered to ask,” he alleges elsewhere.

Representatives for Led Zeppelin and the band’s record label Rhino declined to comment to LedZepNews when approached about the book’s allegations of sexual misconduct.

Spitz leans heavily on critics’ opinions

The reader occasionally gets the impression that Spitz doesn’t particularly like Led Zeppelin’s music. He does explain the tracks on their studio albums, however, taking the time to give fresh and insightful analyses of what the band laid down on tape.

“There were few sounds more memorable than John Paul’s walking bass that lumbered along ominously like Lenny in Of Mice and Men,” Spitz writes about “Dazed And Confused.”

Concerning “Communication Breakdown,” Spitz writes that “the musicians sounded as if they weren’t in control of their instruments—a supernatural force had taken over and wired them directly into an atom smasher.”

But Spitz seems to treat Led Zeppelin’s live performances as a by-product, often hitting fast forward in his narrative so that he can spend more time discussing what went on backstage instead.

Instead of giving his own impression of shows based on recordings, or speaking to fans who attended these performances, Spitz frequently relies on what critics wrote at the time. As anyone who has researched Led Zeppelin knows, critical reception to the band’s shows varies wildly.

The book’s notes reference just four bootleg recordings that Spitz relied upon. His preference is to quote newspaper articles to reproduce their impressions of each show.

“Led Zeppelin played their hearts out, but the reviews didn’t reflect the crowds’ reactions. They got trashed by critics,” Spitz writes of the band’s 1972 US tour. This would have been an ideal opportunity for him to discard critics’ opinions, but they form the backbone of how he analyses the band’s live shows throughout the book.

“‘The audience was . . . bored,’ said the columnist for the Long Beach Independent,” Spitz writes to describe the band’s March 11, 1975 Long Beach show. The formula is repeated throughout the book, with Spitz quoting from four negative reviews of 1975 shows in quick succession at one point.

The only two fans quoted in the book to give their impression of a Led Zeppelin show are found in the book’s introduction. Spitz quotes from two different accounts of the show that were published on Led Zeppelin’s official website, although he manages to repeatedly misspell the name of one of the claimed attendees in his notes section.

We still don’t have an error-free Led Zeppelin book

It’s disappointing that Spitz included a number of errors in the book. A definitive biography of the band still seems to be unachievable.

For clarity, LedZepNews was provided with a digital copy of the book by Penguin Random House, not a final printed copy in which the errors may have been corrected.

Spitz claims in the book that “We’re Gonna Groove” on Coda was recorded in London in June 1969, seemingly sourcing the information from the album’s original liner notes.

Anyone familiar with live Led Zeppelin recordings knows the album track is actually from a recording of the band’s January 9, 1970 show at the Royal Albert Hall in London, information that appears on recent releases of Coda.

Spitz twice refers to the London district of West Hampstead, although manages both times to misspell it as “West Hempstead.” He also writes that the band rehearsed in Manticore Studios in London in November 1977 in preparation for their 1977 US tour – clearly he intended to write November 1976.

Chris Charlesworth writes in his review of the printed edition of the book that there are errors in the 16 pages of photographs included, a section of the book which LedZepNews was not able to review.

Anyone disappointed by the errors may seek solace in the fact that Beatles fans experienced similar issues with Spitz’s 2005 biography of that band. “You need an enema,” Spitz allegedly emailed to a Beatles magazine editor who pointed out errors in that book, before instructing her to “do something useful with your life.”

“Led Zeppelin: The Biography” is very much an American book written for an American audience, which may dissuade some English fans from reading it.

“It was like having a relief pitcher come in from the bullpen with the league’s best hitter up at the plate,” Spitz writes at one point to describe Page’s session work, a baseball reference that’s likely to be lost on many English readers.

Similarly, Holloway Prison is described as “a women’s correctional facility,” living rooms are called “front parlors”, and glandular fever is labelled an “obsolete term”.

Spitz is fond of piling on the metaphors and similes to hammer home points to the reader. They often make the book more readable, but can grate on occasion.

“It was like painting with sound,” he writes at one point to describe Page in the studio, “the canvas was still vast and open to possibilities; Jimmy had only scratched the surface.”

An enjoyable account of Led Zeppelin’s career that will please fans

Should Led Zeppelin fans read Spitz’s book? It very much depends on their appetite for new media about the band. Hardline fans unwilling to pay for anything that doesn’t include meaningful new information about the band’s music or career are unlikely to come away from the book feeling satisfied.

But Led Zeppelin fans keen to spend hours reliving the band’s career in a well-written book filled with colourful anecdotes will enjoy “Led Zeppelin: The Biography.” Spitz has spent years on this project and his dedication shows.

Fans hoping for a fan-produced, glowing account of Led Zeppelin’s ascendancy to rock stardom will find themselves reaching for other books. Instead, Spitz frankly reassesses Led Zeppelin’s life and paints their career as dramatic and ultimately tragic.

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12 comments on "review: ‘led zeppelin: the biography’ by bob spitz".

Thanks for the review of the Spitz book. Your effort to show a balanced consideration is appreciated.

The errors you mention & a focus on off stage behavior wont interest me.

My assumption is we will never have an error free bio of the band without the participation of Jones, Page & Plant. Something I don’t ever see them doing.

Thank you for what appears to be a fair and thoughtful response to Spitz’s book.I remain keen to read the thing when it is published next week with ‘When The Levee Breaks’ blasting on my headset.

I didn’t like the negative reviews then and I still don’t like them, even years later some of these same critics have since came forward and said their reviews were wrong. It’s weird that someone would choose to bring them up, when it has long since been revealed that they were the greatest band there ever was, when I saw them in 77′ I can tell you everyone loved them!

On Marc Maron’s podcast, Spitz says Ealing is in North London, Page put Crowley’s maxim not he vinyl of Led Zeppelin II etc etc. He said he never owned a Zeppelin record before he started writing the book. He came across as clueless to be honest and offered nothing new that wasn’t already in other books

No act as big as Zep wants to be remembered for the inevitable decadence associated with ALL of the music business , particularly of the 60s and 70s era. What I find distasteful is making money selling books about the dark side of human nature. Because just like all the other forms of Pop Entertainment , the underbelly is part of all animals. That said, I admit that as a fan of Zep’s hey day, it was the naughty business written about in magazines that made their allure all the more powerful. Surprised? No. Sex and bad behavior always sells.especially to young consumers. Nothing new here. The temptation to cash in on old War Stories is great. I’d probably sign on too! What I wouldn’t do is pretend that I wasn’t guilty of each and every inch of these “Tales Of Yore” the way the surviving band members do. So, no one gets a pass , imho.

there is a book by the bands tour manager, richard cole. it is lurid, funny, scandalous with some sadness. a lively read. most of the narrative is firsthand as he was there for most of the mayhem. the band members were quite pissed off and claimed there antics were greatly exaggerated , yet they didn’t sue him for libel… hmmm.

im sure bobs book will be good all the bad things you read about zep i believe are true i knew the likes of page would not comply with this sort of book hes always kepted is cards close to his chest

This book is no different from Richard Cole’s book…this guy didn’t see Zeppelin live in the 1970’s…they were THE Live Band in the 70’s…wish I didn’t spend my money on this book. There is nothing new here.

Judging by the reviews I had read, this book is just another attempt to cash in at the band’s expense. There is no truly definitive biography about Led Zeppelin out there. Of course, some of them are very good, but far from THE bio about the Greatest Band of All Times.

If you are going to publish photos at least Google the information. Led Zeppelin played their last US show in Oakland, CA on July 24, 1977 noy 1979.

Hi Dave, I’ve read Bob Spitz’s biography. I must admit, I did really enjoy it from the point of the fact that it didn’t get bogged down with anything in particular and covered a vast range of their whole career. I can understand that it is written for an American audience, which is sometimes annoying when reading mistakes about areas of the UK, and the usual ‘Americanisms’. However, overall, I felt that it was a good readable tome. I’m not what one may call a die-hard fan of Zep, but I am and always have been a massive fan dating back to the 1970s – in that I did see LZ on both weekends of Knebworth, and of course have all the the officially released albums etc., including some bootlegs too, but I’m not what one may call an expert by any means, so I guess that’s why I enjoyed this book. I notice that RP does tend to back off from much of what goes on in the world of LZ these days, and I must say that when I read his biography, I felt that much was held back and not much given away. In any case, LZ remains, to me, one of the greatest bands of all time, which of course everyone on here will disagree with me, saying they’re they’re ‘the greatest band of all time’! Brilliant that so many people are still so passionate about the band, and long may it continue to be so….

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