A whole lotta pages (673!) on one of rock’s darkest stories
Young girls. Drug abuse. Satanic rituals. Do we really need another retelling of Led Zeppelin’s tawdry excesses?
Outsiders entering the sulphurous orbit of Led Zeppelin during the group’s 1970s pomp were presented with a written list of rules. The first two read: 1. Never talk to anyone in the band unless they first talk to you.
2. Do not make any kind of eye contact with John Bonham. This is for your own safety.
In 1969, while The Beatles were noodling around in Twickenham and Savile Row making Let It Be, the more abrasive sound of the coming decade was roaring up behind like muggers on a motorbike. Some kind of innocence was snatched away.
Bolstered by record-breaking album sales, sell-out stadium tours and an air of swaggering impunity, by the early 1970s Led Zeppelin were adhering to a code which mixed regal exceptionalism with gangland thuggery.
During the period when they were releasing classic songs such as Whole Lotta Love, Stairway To Heaven, Kashmir and Rock And Roll, Led Zep were more or less invincible. They occupy a more problematic position in
these enlightened times, however. Long acknowledged as the biggest, loudest, most unashamedly priapic rock group during the golden age of genre, they are also avatars of the kind of unreconstructed sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll excess that has fallen out of both fashion and favour.
This puts Bob Spitz, the American author of a bestselling history of The Beatles, in a bind. Spitz genuflects before the power and pomp of the music while tutting (not very loudly, it must be said) at their appalling behaviour – and then writing about it all, anyway.
The band’s misdeeds have been infamous since the publication of Stephen Davis’s lurid biography Hammer Of The Gods in 1985, but Spitz rehearses them again at prurient length. There are allegations of attempted rape of an air stewardess made against drummer John Bonham, whose alcoholrelated death in 1980 ended the band. Guitarist Jimmy Page enjoys the company of young girls.
Cocaine and heroin line almost every page, alongside satanic rituals, outrageous rip-offs and the monstrous violence of their manager Peter Grant.
The treatment of young women outlined here is not merely shameful but criminal. ‘There was no oversight, no accountability, no inclination to put the brakes on the pursuit,’ Spitz writes. ‘Rock and roll bands were given a pass.’
Janine Safer, publicist for the band’s own record label, says: ‘I adopted the band’s view that these girls weren’t quite human.’ Journalists were complicit, exchanging their silence for access to the band’s sanctum and a ticket to the circus.
The early days at least were less unsavoury
and Spitz colourfully conjures up the band’s origin story. Page and bass player John Paul Jones earn their stripes on the London session scene, while Robert Plant and John ‘Bonzo’ Bonham scrape around the West Midlands semi-pro circuit, finally coming to the attention of Page in 1968 while playing with the Band of Joy.
The account of Page creating Led Zep from the rubble of The Yardbirds is by far the best part of the book. Once the group hit their stride, however, the four principals become cartoons rather than three-dimensional characters.
Bonham is a violent, uncontrollable drunk on a grim death spiral. Plant, the self-described ‘Golden God’, preens with poetic superiority despite the fact that most of his lyrics are ripped-off blues songs stuffed with schoolboy innuendo.
Page is a shadow. Jones appears not to have a personality at all.
Spitz seems most interested in Grant, Led Zeppelin’s morbidly obese, borderline psychotic manager whose story has already been told, excellently, in Mark Blake’s recent biography. The author leans heavily not only on Blake’s book, but several others written about the group.
With a lack of significant new interviews – no band members and few in their inner circle talked to him – Spitz pulls his sources together competently but remains marooned from the heart of the story. Hearsay is presented as fact; myths and tall tales stand untested.
There is some insight into the creation of the band’s eight albums, but these 673 pages ultimately feel longer than a Bonzo drum solo, as they spiral around the same circular riff: new album, huge US tour and endless tales of excess, abuse and degradation – the latter offered up, disingenuously, for disapproval and titillation.
None of this is fun to read about. For all their immense success, the Led Zeppelin story is curiously joyless, male privilege gone rancid.
Four decades after the band’s demise, laid low by heroin, hooch and hubris, one feels it either needs to be told in a completely new way, or not told at all.