That Led Zeppelin – The Biography 673 pages sets a confidence-inspiring precedent. Bob Spitz’s previous music book, dating back to 2005, was nearly 1,000 pages and remains the most complete and illuminating Beatles biography.
With this new book, the American writer and journalist once again delivers an impressive performance. Anyone wishing to write Led Zeppelin’s story faces a difficult task. This was a two-faced band; how do you keep one from overshadowing the other?
From their inception in late 1968 until the sudden death of drummer John Bonham in September 1980, Led Zeppelin were the biggest rock band on the planet, with six number one albums in the US and seven in the UK, where the group came from. And with a series of mega tours that smashed all audience records.
Excessive behavior
They mainly did those grueling concert series in America, at the time an inexhaustible gold mine for British rock bands. Led Zeppelin and their entourage always recovered in Los Angeles, where they could indulge their preference for young teenage girls without scruples. Guitarist Jimmy Page went the furthest with this, with a girl who was no older than 14 years. And in every city that Led Zeppelin visited, drummer John Bonham was ready, preferably with the help of one or more roadies, to beat anyone he didn’t like with extreme drunken violence. Excessive behavior by major rock bands was common at the time. But what Led Zeppelin allowed himself was beyond anything.
Bob Spitz charts all this in a sober, unobtrusive way and does not fall for attempts to make excuses afterwards, in the line of ‘then times were different’ and ‘we were all so young’. (Guitarist Jimmy Page was almost 30 at the time.) He also manages not to let it come at the expense of that other Led Zep story: that of music.
The four men who first appeared on stage as Led Zeppelin on October 25, 1968, were no novices. Lead guitarist, first songwriter and conductor Jimmy Page (1944) and bass guitarist John Paul Jones (1946) had many years of experience as in-demand session musicians, producers and arrangers. Drummer John Bonham and frontman Robert Plant, both from 1948, were a lot greener but very talented.
From the outdoor category
That is also a common thread in this new biography: once Led Zeppelin was seriously working in the studio or on the concert stage, they were four professionals of the highest class, each with their own musical drive and creativity. But they were also focused on working together, on getting the best out of each other.
Led Zeppelin also did not escape the mutual quarrels and jealousy that you see in all classic rock bands. But with Zeppelin these only emerged at the end, when the entire oeuvre was already there. The band’s coherence leaked out, mainly due to Jimmy’s heroin use, and Robert’s changed outlook on life after the death of his 5-year-old son in 1977.
But in their heyday, until the artistic triumph of their (sixth) LP Physical Graffiti, from the spring of 1975, the collective functioned in unassailable perfection. Song by song Bob Spitz makes clear how this went. How Jimmy came to the studio with some riffs that he had sometimes spent years refining. How John Paul and John effortlessly picked it up and each gave it their special twist. How Robert squeezed the lyrics out of his head in the meantime.
More than one kind of audience
It also becomes understandable how that musical harvest was able to conquer more than one type of audience. There was the Led Zeppelin of the tours: the band that played harder than anyone else, with a reputation as the inventors of heavy metal—despite their own dislike for the term. And there was the Led Zeppelin of the studio albums, which could never be summed up in one simple genre: a synthesis of not only classic rock (and roll) but also blues, folk, soul, funk and pop, not just electric. but also acoustically.
And decades after the sound of their performances has been silenced forever, Led Zeppelin’s studio music lives on, for aficionados with a different developed taste than the head-banging teenage crowds of the time – Bob Spitz himself emphatically included.
Bob Spitz: Led Zeppelin – The Biography. Penguin Press; 673 pages; €32.99.
