Led Zeppelin on Led Zeppelin: Interviews and Encounters (7)

by Hank Bordowitz (Editor)

There are lots of wild stories about Led Zeppelin—some true, some false. Led Zeppelin on Led Zeppelin dishes up the facts, in the band’s own words, as they saw them. It shoots down the folklore and assumptions about Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham and presents the band’s full history, from when Jimmy Page was playing skiffle to the day the band was honored by the Kennedy Center for their contribution to American and global culture. Any band is an amalgam of the players, but in very special cases, those players form an entity unto itself. Led Zeppelin on Led Zeppelin captures the ideas of all of the band’s members at the time they created classics like “Whole Lotta Love,” “Stairway to Heaven,” and “Kashmir” but also encapsulates the idea of the band itself as it crafted the music that changed pop culture. In the process, the book offers insight into what made Led Zeppelin tick—and what made it the most popular band in the world. In a series of over fifty interviews from 1957 to 2012, many never before seen in print, this is the story of Led Zeppelin, as it happened, told by the people who knew it best—the members of the band.

Genres: Music

480 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2014

Reviews

[Randall Wallace · Rating 2 out of 5]

John Paul Jones: “People in bands these days always listen to the same music. They all start a band because they all like U2 or they all like Pearl Jam. Consequently, their field of reference is very narrow. Our field of reference was huge; Page and I were very hard-working session musicians, and when you walk into a session it can be absolutely anything. It was just a huge range of influences, you could go here or there or this way of that.” “I loved having women at our concerts because they’d dance. [laughing] It’s great because the guys just stand there with their arms folded and the girls are dancing.”

Great band, but not many stories inside that give great insight, or comments worth underlining and remembering. If you transcribed a Led Zeppelin song for two hours instead reading this, you might come out ahead. I read every interview with JPJ or JP I see just in case there’s something important inside I can learn from, however these interviews are not music-based, these interviews are more fan-based. There’s only one article in this book that gets into musical stuff like altered tunings used, or using a Fender Tonemaster as the amp head on a certain track.

[Cindy Nix · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the candid interviews from a multitude of people who worked with or knew the band.

[Cindy J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed the candid interviews from a multitude of people who worked with or knew the band.

[Roy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not bad, over 400 pages, but just a collection of already published magazine and radio interviews.

[xtine]

A good one for Led Zeppelin fans (and how can you not be one?!)