So why did those 20 million people apply for tickets in 2007? The answer lies in the records to which this book sent me scurrying back: in the sinuous, thrilling interplay of instruments in " Nobody's Fault But Mine" the preposterous bombast of " Kashmir" the magnificent idiocy of " The Immigrant Song" ("The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands!") the brutal combination of 60s freakbeat and proto-metal in " Communication Breakdown". But still, across page after page, one can't help but think: he was there, why didn't he do something? It's a point made by someone present at one of the most notorious incidents in the band's history, when a security guard was twice badly beaten up backstage at a gig in Oakland: "Plant seemed like the only decent human being there, although there were no innocents. His discomfort with what the band became is evident, intensified after the death of his five-year-old son in July 1977. If there's a hero in Trampled Under Foot, it's Zeppelin's singer, Robert Plant, portrayed as the light to Page's darkness. 1A Do not make any sort of eye contact with John Bonham. Not that he was alone: one of Hoskyns's chapters opens with the instructions to journalists covering their 1977 US tour: "1 Never talk to anyone in the band unless they first talk to you. When your reputation is being defended by a former teenage groupie on the grounds that you did not actually laugh while she was being assaulted by another teenage groupie, you've probably lost all contact with normal levels of acceptable behaviour. But it seems less likely that Page's behaviour was caused by some sort of deal with Satan than him apparently being a fairly nasty piece of work, selfish and mean and manipulative. Rock mythology holds that Page was somehow a "dark" force: he collected occult books and artefacts, bought Aleister Crowley's old mansion and opened an occult shop. Peter and Jimmy were the most paranoid people I have ever met in my life, bar none." ![]() "There's a one-word answer: cocaine," says one of the band's press liaison people of the air of menace that surrounded them by 1977. Page authorised and trusted Grant to do anything to protect the group's interests, and as the pair got more and more heavily involved in drugs in the late 1970s, so the deeds so casually committed in Zeppelin's name – threats of violence, actual violence, near-blackmail of business associates – became more and more appalling. In the process of doing so, though, he became powerful himself, and was corrupted absolutely in the process. Grant was desperately protective of his band, and succeeded in altering the balance of the music industry in favour of artists, at least those powerful enough to wrest control from the promoters and labels who had previously made the lion's share of the money. The heart of Zeppelin's story is the relationship between Jimmy Page, the guitarist who formed the band in 1968, and their manager, Peter Grant. Where most bands can be reduced to guitarist, singer and supporting cast, all of Zeppelin's four members – as Hoskyns's 128 interviewees, including the band and intimates, as well as close observers, make clear – were crucial in making them extraordinary. It never forgets that behind the caricature was a wonderful band, lithe and limber, never the lumpen metal pioneers that they are sometimes branded. The band's reputation was further diminished by a disastrous, under-rehearsed appearance at Live Aid in 1985, which they did not allow to be included on the 2004 DVD release of the concerts.īarney Hoskyns's exhaustive history doesn't skimp on the horror – and by God, there's enough of it – but nor does it turn Led Zeppelin into a cartoon of decadence. Onstage, Nick Hornby recalls in his book 31 Songs a guitar solo so long he was able to leave Earl's Court arena, pop to the pub for a pint and a game of pool and return before the end of it. ![]() Offstage, one horrific tale holds that some combination of members of the band and their road crew whiled away an evening in a Seattle hotel inserting fish of disputed species into a woman's vagina. Critical orthodoxy held them to be dinosaurs, representatives of all that was worst about rock excess in both behaviour and music. Though they bestrode the world like a priapic, all-devouring monster of depravity in the 1970s, the years following their split in 1980 – caused by the death of drummer John Bonham – were not kind to them. I t seems scarcely credible that when the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin reunited for their one-off show in London in 2007, 20 million people applied for tickets.
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