When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin

The good: One of the only well researched complete biographies on the band. The author had band access and in particular spoke a lot with Jimmy Page. The crazy stories are there as well as good details of recording and touring. Overall it is a very entertaining book in some ways. Unfortunately for me it has one deep very odd flaw.The bad: The author appears to take the occult very seriously. Not just a handful of pages but rather over fifty are dedicated to Page and the occult. Long sections are presented on Aleister Crowley well beyond what is necessary or desired. The author also gave far too much time to occultic fringe associates of Page, who in retrospect may have influenced Page's private life, but had nothing to do with the band. Not a single hint of scepticism is applied to the occult sections. Other books including Case's bio of Page demonstrates that since the 1970's Page has pretty much disowned occult practices and likely views his past belief in the occult and magic with at minimum great skepticism. I tend to think think that Wall's possible personal sympathies towards the occult may have caused him to make it seem more important for Zeppelin than it ever was.Overall a decent book but one flawed by an unequal over length treatment of the occult in relation to Jimmy Page. Wall unfortunately takes something tangential to the story and makes it far more central than necessary. Still at $9.99 on kindle it is worth a read for a fan.

I have a pretty extensive Zeppelin library of books and most of them are rehashes of the same old story. Not to say this book doesn't cover some of the same stories, history is history, no escaping that. With that said I couldn't put this book down and was sorry for it to end. One thing unique about this book is the italicized sections, which were likened to a movie taking liberties on a true story. Mick Wall never went into fantasyland, the sections were interspersed with enough facts to keep them real, and interesting. The book was well researched and Mr. Wall took just the right amount from other sources to make it not read like a rehash. He also includes the right amount of mud sharks, Crowley, occult, etc. without sensationalizing those events. Lastly Mr. Wall calls a spade a spade, if he's a fan you would never know it ... he calls it the way he feels it and is able to back his feelings up with common sense and facts. Another thing I came away with is a new sense of Robert Plant's perspective in the whole story. Good read, I highly recommend it.

This book is so atrocious on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. There was obviously no editor whatsoever, substantively or stylistically. Wall is prone to endless run-on, syntactically awkward, paragraph-long sentences set off by dashes, containing a jumble of ideas and subjects. A sentence will start off being about one thing and end up being about something completely different, as if he has literary ADD. Dangling modifiers abound. It’s brutal to try to read. It actually took me four months to finish this book, no exaggeration. I could only stand a few pages at a time before I had to put it down out of sheer exhaustion—call it dazed and confused. As far as those silly passages where he “gets in the heads” of the subjects, I just skipped over them entirely.The substance is little better. I never thought I’d defend Hammer of the Gods, but that book runs circles around this drivel. Stephen Davis may be a hack, but he knows how to write an entertaining read. And although he is accused of sensationalism, he actually put a lot in there about the music-making, and most of all, the Zeppelin live experience. There is little of that here. Wall drones on and on about things nobody cares about except him, like the album artwork, or Aleister Crowley and occult secret societies, or Black Sabbath, mostly everything except Led Zeppelin and their music. These things are part of the Zeppelin story and are discussed in HOTG, but not in such unnecessary detail. His biggest sin, in my book, is his failure to put us (especially those of us too young to remember) front and center at a Zeppelin concert at their zenith to experience it the way a concertgoer would have in 1972 or 1975. Davis, to his credit, did that. Even when Wall does talk about the music-making process, he gets bogged down in “this was taken from so-and-so, who took it from so-and-so, who took it…” Who cares that Jimmy Page wasn’t the first rock guitarist to use the violin bow? Does he claim to be? (One pearl, which I give him props for, is a passage where he details all the music Bob Dylan ripped off in his early career; since Zep is constantly bashed for this it was enlightening to read.)But there was very little in here that was new to me. He borrows from HOTG and various tell-alls, rehashing all the lurid, tired tales. The only revelation was that John Paul Jones considered quitting the band in the mid-70s. I learned some things about Peter Grant and John Bonham I didn’t know (and would rather not). The only redeeming, distinguishing feature of this book is Wall’s interviews with the band and manager and insights into them post-Zeppelin. But even then, he bends over backwards to show he can still write critically about his subjects despite having personally befriended them. Okay we get it, you’re objective. For some unfathomable reason he devotes an entire chapter to the Knebworth concerts. Wall seems to see them as both an omen of Zeppelin’s demise, and an indicator of what he views as the band’s declining popularity because they couldn’t sell out the shows. This is one of many places where the book suffers from its Brit-centeredness. He doesn't seem to get (or doesn’t care) that if those concerts had been in America they would have been blowouts. Zeppelin’s popularity never declined in America, which is the country that “made” them and the only one that matters when it comes to any discussion of their impact.I won’t even get into how obnoxiously annoying Wall’s final chapters are. There’s interesting detail about the reunion shows and failed attempts to stage a comeback tour (Wall seemed to be the only person in attendance who was unimpressed by the O2 show), but absolutely nothing about Zeppelin’s overarching legacy and influence on popular music. How do you author a biography of Led Zeppelin and not discuss this? (Instead, Wall bizarrely sees fit to allot space in the “epilogue” to an inconsequential anti-Zeppelin rant by Jack Bruce of Cream—huh???) HOTG, for all its sleaze, gave me a sense of where Zeppelin stood in the pantheon of rock music; there is no sense of that here. Wall could have been writing about any band. He curiously titled his book “When Giants Walked the Earth,” yet doesn’t explore what made them giants but rather gets bogged down in personality conflicts and various minutiae. Wall clearly wrote about what he wanted to write about, not what readers—especially American fans--would want to read about. I hate to keep coming back to HOTG, but this book really suffers by comparison, and that’s no easy feat. It’s just a self-indulgent mess masquerading as a “serious” biography by an “insider.”

Can't say I absolutely loved this bio about Led Zeppelin, but it more or less did the trick in terms of getting me familiar with the band. I thought a lot more could have been written about who each band member was before forming Led Zeppelin, but once the author gets into following the hype of the band while it was performing, I felt better about reading this book. Additionally, the author does a good job following what happens to the members after the break up, up till about 2009.On a deeper level, Page was clearly the genius of the group and unfortunately is very reserved and evasive, but I would have appreciated more of an attempt to understand him, but the author only goes with what's already known about him. I feel that I have little understanding of what makes him tick. Plant seems a little more available, and Jones, even more so, but not much there, either.I'm not sure if there is a better book about the band out there, or will be, but, as I mentioned, the book does convey the basics.It read easily, which helps.