From the author of the definitive New York Times bestselling history of the Beatles comes the
authoritative account of the group Jack Black and many others call the greatest rock band of
all time arguably the most successful and certainly one of the most notorious. Rock stars.
Whatever those words mean to you chances are they owe a debt to Led Zeppelin. No one before
or since has lived the dream quite like Jimmy Page Robert Plant John Paul Jones and John
Bonham. In Led Zeppelin Bob Spitz takes their full measure for good and sometimes for ill
separating the myth from the reality with the connoisseurship and storytelling flair that are
his trademarks. From the opening notes of their first album the band announced itself as
something different a collision of grand artistic ambition and brute primal force of delicate
English folk music and hard-driving African-American blues. That record sold over 10 million
copies and it was the merest beginning Led Zeppelin's albums have sold over 300 million
certified copies worldwide and the dust has never settled. Taken together Led Zeppelin's
discography has spent an almost incomprehensible ten-plus years on the album charts. The band
is notoriously guarded and previous books shine more heat than light. But Bob Spitz's
authority is undeniable and irresistible. His feel for the atmosphere the context-the music
the business the recording studios the touring life the radio stations the fans the whole
ecosystem of popular music-is unparalleled. His account of the melding of Page and Jones the
virtuosic London sophisticates with Plant and Bonham the wild men from the Midlands into a
band out of the ashes of the Yardbirds in a scene dominated by the Beatles and the Stones but
changing fast is in itself a revelation. Spitz takes the music seriously and brings the
band's artistic journey to full and vivid life. The music is only part of the legend however:
Led Zeppelin is also the story of how the 60's became the 70's of how playing in clubs became
playing in stadiums and flying your own jet of how innocence became decadence. Led Zeppelin
may not have invented the groupie and they weren't the first rock band to let loose on the
road but they took it to an entirely new level as with everything else. Not all the legends
are true but in Bob Spitz's careful accounting what is true is astonishing and sometimes
disturbing. Led Zeppelin gave no quarter and neither has Bob Spitz. Led Zeppelin is the full
and honest reckoning the band has long awaited and richly deserves.
