From Stephen Davis's Hammer Of The Gods to Richard Cole's exposé Stairway To Heaven, few groups have drawn as many biographers as Led Zeppelin.
The London-based writer Barney Hoskyns is well-placed to shed new light, however. As founder of the online music-journalism library Rock's Backpages, Hoskyns has decades worth of pertinent column-inches to hand. As a former US correspondent for Mojo magazine, he also has the requisite contacts and a relevant stash of vintage, self-conducted interviews.
The author's 2010 biography of Tom Waits was lengthy and meticulous, and the similarly unauthorised, 624-page Trampled Under Foot is no slight undertaking, either. Hoskyns says it was the sheer number of fresh interviews he conducted – almost 200 – that compelled him to hatch his book as a multi-voiced oral history in direct quotes, but there's another advantage to that approach. As those in and around Zeppelin voice the more unsavoury aspects of the band's story, Hoskyns can probe and illuminate with "don't shoot the messenger" impunity.
Mapping Zeppelin's journey from their 1968 birth as a supergroup masterminded by the guitarist Jimmy Page through to their one-off reunion show in London in 2007, the book offers many revelations.
We learn that Elvis Presley sent a wreath when the Zeppelin singer Robert Plant's six-year-old son Karac died of a viral infection in 1977, that Cadillac motors paid circa $10 million (Dh36.7m) to use Rock and Roll in an advert as recently as 2002, and that the band's masterful drummer John Bonham thought nothing of beating up roadie Mick Hinton.
This is no hagiography, then, but if the late Bonham's reputation is further tarnished, Page fares little better. Though Trampled Under Foot acknowledges his genius as a guitarist and producer, Hoskyns' interviewees variously describe Page as "Machiavellian", tight-fisted and "not a very nice person". Band associate Babe Buell, meanwhile, says that both The Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger and the guitarist and producer Todd Rundgren warned her of Page's dark side, the latter suggesting: "You go there, you're going to get sucked into something nasty and terrible." This seems to be an allusion to Page's interest in the occult, but it's a more mundane kind of darkness that sometimes makes Trampled Under Foot a troubling read.
Accounts of violent acts perpetrated by members of Zeppelin's inner-circle are too numerous to discount, and while Peter Grant, the group's formidable manager, was clearly an able businessman, all agree that his hiring of the thuggish minder John "Biffo" Bindon was a huge mistake. You can understand why the bassist and keyboardist John Paul Jones considered quitting to become choirmaster at Winchester Cathedral.
Over time, Hoskyns also shows how the complex power dynamic between Page and Plant switched polarity. Page, once puppet-master, has become the relatively inactive custodian of Zeppelin's past glories, while Plant, whose 2007 album with Alison Krauss Raising Sand won a Grammy, has moved on and continues to thwart any further Zeppelin reunions.
The lasting impression is of a brilliant but operationally flawed band. Hoskyns' deftly woven narrative pulls no punches, however, so if you're a fan, be prepared to hear their music a little differently.
