: Barney Hoskyns
: Trampled Under Foot The Power and Excess of Led Zeppelin [contains audio interviews]
: Faber& Faber
: 9780571300150
: 1
: CHF 8.60
:
: Pop, Rock
: English
: 624
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
This edition contains over two and a half hours of audio interviews with members of Led Zeppelin. A unique look at the history, adventures, myths and realities of this most legendary and powerful of bands, Trampled Under Foot is a labour of love based on hours of first-hand and original interviews. What emerges is a compelling portrait of the four musicians themselves, as well as a fresh insight into the close-knit entourage that protected them, from Peter Grant to Richard Cole to Ahmet Ertegun, giant figures from the long-vanished world of 1970s rock. Featuring many rare and never before seen photographs, it is also the first book on Led Zeppelin to cover such recent events as their triumphant 2007 O2 Arena gig and Robert Plant's Grammy-winning resurgence of recent years.

Barney Hoskyns is the co-founder and editorial director of online rock-journalism library Rock's Backpages (www.rocksbackpages.com), and author of several books including Across the Great Divide: The Band& America (1993), Waiting for the Sun: Strange Days, Weird Scenes,& the Sound of Los Angeles (1996), Hotel California: Singer-Songwriters& Cocaine Cowboys in the LA Canyons (2005), Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits (2009) and Trampled Under Foot: The Power and Excess of Led Zeppelin. A former US correspondent for MOJO, Hoskyns writes for Uncut and other UK publications, and has contributed to Vogue, Rolling Stone and GQ.

Led Zeppelin was unobtainable and unattainable and we very seldom talked about it. Basically, the myth propagated itself.

ROBERT PLANT TO THE AUTHOR, MAY 2003

ON A WHITE-HOT MORNING in Twentynine Palms – the Mojave desert town namechecked on Robert Plant’s 1993 albumFate of Nations – I can see a number of the strangely shaped Joshua trees that lend their name to the nearby national park; the same place where, on Cap Rock in 1969, Gram Parsons dropped acid with Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg.

Ever since Parsons OD’d and died in Joshua Tree itself –twenty-five miles east along Route 62 – the whole area has become one of California’s holy rock sites. So it’s fitting that, as I fill up my rental compact in a Twentynine Palms gas station, I hear the booming strains of a rock song approaching. Within seconds I know it as a staple of classic-rock radio – an evergreen ofeasy-riding highway rock – and the pop snob in me groans. Pulling up next to me is a mirror-shaded dude astride a black beast of a motorcycle, its wheels flanked by vast speaker bins that punch out the song I know so well:“Babe babe babe babe babe babe ’m bayeebee I’m gonna LEEEEAVE you …”

The owner of the song’s strangulated male voiceain’t joking, woman, he’sreally got to ramble – rather like this man in his sunglasses. The voice soundtracks the guy’s chrome-horse freedom on a song recorded almost four decades ago, and he is making sure we all know it. I look at him and want to dismiss him as an idiot. He’s at least as old as the song, and if he took the shades off he might be old enough to have seen Led Zeppelin in their pomp, maybe at the LA Forum, possibly at the Long Beach Arena or the San Diego Sports Arena – the huge venues where the west was won. Perhaps he saw Zep’s last US show, which remains shrouded in mystery, at the Oakland Coliseum in the summer of ’7