“Jimmy Page Was My Co-Pilot”

Jimmy Page Was My Co-Pilot
“My English teacher’s assignment was an oral report on a book of our choice. I had no trouble selecting a book, because I had just read the definitive work on one of my favorite topics: Led Zeppelin. Stephen Davis’s cheesy Led Zep biography, Hammer of the Gods, had just been published, and I probably read it front to back the day it came out.”

I loved Led Zeppelin myself. Loved them. I know they didn’t define Rock Star Excess, but they practiced it and burnished it to an excessive gleam that virtually no other band has been able to touch. Despite this and innumerable other flaws, I revere some of their early power blues, and some of the great stuff on Physical Grafitti still makes me drive fast. From Panopticist: Cultural Surveillance.