Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored by Richard Cole
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

"[...] they never allowed their offstage antics to overshadow their craftsmanship onstage and in the studio. They never lost sight of their fans and the debt they owed them. In nearly three decades in the music business, I have never seen anyone else like Led Zeppelin. They were indisputably the greatest rock and roll band in the world."

Indisputably the greatest? Well, maybe... Led Zeppelin was certainly one the most famous and influential bands in the history of rock music and their Stairway To Heaven always places high on various lists of "best songs of all time". I am not a particular fan of the group although I like their music more than most of the heavy-metal bands of which genre they may be considered precursors. My favorite piece is Whole Lotta Love, with its pseudo-free-jazz fragments and generally non-traditional, innovative structure, which - to me - sticks out positively from their mainstream repertoire.

Richard Cole, author of Stairway To Heaven. Led Zeppelin Uncensored (1992; the book is co-authored by a professional writer, Richard Trubo) is an ultimate insider in the band's affairs as he worked as a tour manager for Led Zeppelin throughout their entire existence (1968 - 1980). Unfortunately, being a tour manager means being privy to the social behavior of band members rather than to their creative process. Thus, instead of a serious biography of the band we have its "excessography."

The entire book is basically a meticulously detailed report of the never-ending stream of alcohol- and drug-fueled excesses of the band. I know there exist readers - I hope they constitute a small minority - who thrive on learning dirt about celebrities; this book is precisely for them. For instance, the author seems to be proud of finally telling the truth about the notorious "Shark Episode" that happened in The Edgewater Inn in Seattle. What's more, he seems to be proud of his role in the event.

The parade of gross behaviors, which range from juvenile pranks to acts that today would likely be considered criminal, obscures all the valuable contents of the book: I would love to read more about the music, about personalities of the band members, and more seriously, about the dynamic of relationships between them. What's worse, the events described in the book seem to happen outside of any particular cultural, social, and political background. Indeed the 1970s were not as turbulent as the 1960s but there was a lot of processes happening in the world, which are not in any way reflected in the band biography.

Since I sort of matured in my mid-sixties I have developed serious doubts about the nobleness of the human species. One passage in Stairway seems to confirm my doubts: the account of the evening when the author and John Paul Jones (the "quietest" member of Led Zeppelin) met with Elvis Presley and the meeting ended up in an "orgy of gift-giving that Elvis seemed to find exciting." Yuck!

I would estimate that almost one hundred pages in this 380-page book are devoted to detailing the "we got drunk and did stupid things, we got stoned and did even more stupid things" activities. Why do we need this repetitiveness? This is not a good book! A perfect example of how not to write books about popular musicians.

One-and-a-half stars.


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