I think that anyone who’s heard Led Zeppelin has very particular memories associated with the band. I was born a year after John Bonham died and the band dissolved, so I didn’t have the pleasure of dropping a needle on a brand new Zep album and feeling it in context. The LPs floated around my house when I discovered the family turntable in junior high, but by then, I was more about 80s music and 70s prog rock.
At the ripe old age of 26, however, the planets aligned and I found Zeppelin. For me, Zep was the potential beginning of a new life. I had just started teaching an art class at a high school near NYC, and I was nervous as hell. Somehow, Zeppelin found its way onto my iPod, and blasting albums I through IV became the soundtrack that ramped me up enough to show art to a bunch of jaded teenagers, and the soundtrack on the long ride home along the Taconic, winding down from days that were alternately successful and total failures. Either way, Zeppelin made it all feel okay.
I only taught art for a year, but I fell in love with the band. My late introduction meant that I’d missed a lot of details about the legendary group, and when I get into something, I want to absorb every possible detail. Enter Jon Bream’s ‘Whole Lotta Led Zeppelin’, the recently published biography of the band, which reads like a very entertaining encyclopedia, in the best possible way.
The 287 page book is a colorful, exhaustive collection of everything Zeppelin, detailing every aspect of the band : their personalities and how they joined the band, their music, their debauchery, a complete listing of tour dates, circumstances surrounding every album and song, first-person anecdotes, quotes, and hundreds upon hundreds of rare photos and tour posters. It pretty much replaces any other Zeppelin book that’s every been published, and it’s handsome as hell. As a collector, I can really appreciate a book that is a collection unto itself.
It’s mostly chronological, peppered with sub-articles and tales of the band as told by friends and associates, every page completely different from the last, but always coherent and engaging. You know, the kind of thing to leave on a coffee table – if your company doesn’t mind reading about romantic encounters between groupies and cephalopods. It’s not a fawning account either, despite the respectfully grandiose presentation, and it offers up opinions on albums amid the pure facts, whether they’re positive or negative. The contents of the book span until 2007’s brief reunion concert.
I take a lot of pride in the breadth of my music collection, which ranges from turn-of-the-century blues to Bjork, stopping over at Neutral Milk Hotel and The Darkness, and spending a whole lot of time in 1950s jazz, but there’s a certain sense of community that comes with Zeppelin, because it’s almost a universal language among the musically informed. I don’t care what they say about Stairway – I’m still a few hundred listens away from getting tired of it. Venture Brothers references don’t hurt, either.
In short : a great, informative, and attractive book, and a solid part of any music collection.
