DVDs & Books

PAN Stephen Davis

Excess all areas: inside look at Led Zep on the road, updated for Zep’s 50th anniversary year.

This is the textbook for rock mystique, a breathless yet controlled ride through America as Zeppelin transformed rock through sheer force of musical will, and raised its expectations of decadence.

Stephen Davis saw enough first‑hand as a journalist travelling in Zep’s Starship in 1975 to seek out the full story he published 10 years later. For better and worse, his key source is Richard Cole, the chief roadie who protected and effectively pimped for Zeppelin. This roadie’s‑eye view makes rock mythology profane, revealing the often crude reality of stars’ downtime. Only an English rock band in the 70s would be so determined to douse groupies in baked beans before sex. Cole frying bacon to entice a dog inside a woman further confuses Dionysian bacchanalia and motorway cafe.

The downside of Cole’s dominance is Davis’s happiness to print every yarn, however questionable. The perspective sometimes sharpens when it shifts to French label liaison Benoit Gautier, or Jimmy Page’s girlfriend Lori Maddox. “Kidnapped, man, at 14!” she exults of their unconventional first date.

“They wouldn’t steal from you,”

Cole says of Zeppelin’s groupies in a rare maudlin moment. “Most of them are dead now.”

Robert Greenfield’s classic report from the ’72 US tour by Zeppelin’s great rivals, Stones Touring Party, paid more attention to the psychic cost to young women in this often pitiless environment. Davis sympathises with Plant and co. as “their young minds snapped” in the face of Californian nubility, and Cole’s contention that once you got on Zeppelin’s train, you paid the price. John Bonham’s penchant for drunkenly assaulting women regularly repels, though, his savagery given the odd excuse that he was missing his wife.

What often gets missed in Hammer Of The Gods’ gaudiness is Davis’s strength as a music journalist. His account of the band in peacock clothes revelling in their prowess at a ‘steambath’ 1973 gig in Pittsburgh is one of a steady series of concert vignettes. Every album is also imaginatively explored. Excess and music flow in and out of each other at a rate that could only end one way.

Only six pages are added to the 2005 edition, in which Alison Krauss’s name is misspelled in the two lines given to Plant’s most acclaimed solo album. The Zep reunion gets a line less.