Mick Wall - When Giants Walked the Earth: a biography of Led-Zeppelin

So this is the big one: a fat, juicy biography of the biggest band ever Mick Wall, the veteran rock journalist, lays it all bare in a book that can only be described as definitive.

Daily Telegraph

As well as being the most complete account yet of a great British rock band, When Giants Walked the Earth is, as its name implies, a document of a bygone age. Wall has done his subject proud.

The Sunday Times

That Wall can add so much fresh detail to the Led Zep story is in itself an extraordinary achievement. That he manages to humanise these planet-striding giants while doing so puts this book into the definitive category

Classic Rock magazine

It deftly strikes the balance between lofty authority and finding a way to get inside the heads of its subjects

Guardian

The very best and most cogently argued account of a long-ago time when men with Gibsons were the knights errant of the land, striding across stages shrouded in mist, soloing at great length!

New York Times

As Zeppelins success skyrocketed in the 1970s, Page and Plant openly courted an unearthly, occult identity for the band. There seemed to be an obscure system of symbolism and ritual at work that seeped into the albums and performances, creating for Page an energy that the audience picked up on and sent back to us. Really powerful stuff.

LA Times

This fantastic account of Led Zeppelins wild and decadent heyday is as detailed and definitive as music biographies can get

London Lite

An essential source for anyone eager to learn about the era when rock stars ruled the world

Publishers Weekly

The definitive account of rock legends Led Zeppelin

Daily Record

When Giants
Walked the Earth

A BIOGRAPHY OF

LED-ZEPPELIN

MICK WALL

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For Linda, Evie, Mollie and Michael always

It could happen anywhere but it always happened best in America. Land of milk and honey, world of infinite possibility. Home of rocknfuck-inroll. It could happen anywhere but it never quite happened for you like it did there, those nights when you could actually feel the sparks fly, actually see the light shooting out at them, pulsing like the neon ooze of Sunset Boulevard after dark. It could happen anywhere but it never quite happened for you or them like it did in America.

From New York to LA, baby the Garden the Riot House somewhere under the table at the back of the Rainbow weed and wine and coke and pussy smack, baby, smack if God or the devil made something better, they must have kept it for themselves.

Looking out at them from the stage, thousands of them, heads nodding, breasts exposed, hands aloft, a great dark mass of writhing, yearning, grasping humanity, all waiting for your signal, for the ritual to reach its dizzy peak, to spill over and engulf them, to choke and make them gasp for more. Ascension! Into the light! Learning to fly on your hands and knees

That was the whole idea, you would tell the author years later, to create something hypnotic, hypnotic, hypnotic . Dragging the violin bow across the guitar strings, making them ache and howl with the pain that burned way down inside. Then raising your arm and pointing the bow up there down there straight at them lashing it like a whip as the sound of the guitar bounced off their shining upturned faces like a well-aimed stone skimming across the surface of a pond. Hurting them with it, stabbing them, caressing, drawing them in then blowing them apart a devil taking breath, in out, in out. Giving them a taste of what it was like, what it was really all about.

Did the others know what was going on? What you were really doing? It was possible. Standing so close to the flames though, how would they be able to tell? All they really knew was the heat and the light and the smell of it. But if they had been able to stand far enough away, theyd have been able to look into the shadows and then they might have seen. Seen the shadows within the shadows, the greys that lay entangled with the blacks, the spectral figures without face or form that looked back out at them

You would drag the bow against the guitar strings, hurling your curses, and they loved you for it, fucking loved you, your right arm raised, the wand, your body bent towards them like a hook, your whole being at one with the column of light emanating from the stage, spiralling up and out and all around, a grand swirl of deep, dark colours that turned into a tower of steps, which you bade them all to take, one by one, just you, the piper, to follow. Up, up, up the stairway to

To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof!

They shall not harm thee at all.

Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

Saturday night in New York: 30 March 1968 the summer of hate almost upon us. Five nights later Martin Luther King Jr. will be shot and killed in Memphis. Two months later Bobby Kennedy will be similarly assassinated. By the end of the year Richard Milhous Nixon will be elected 37th President of the United States. Hey Jude by The Beatles may be the biggest-selling single of the year but its the records B-side, Revolution, that speaks loudest to the generation of longhairs and head-trippers lining up outside the Anderson Theatre on 66 Second Avenue this cold spring night. Here to see The Yardbirds Britains grooviest band. Or whats left of them. Three dates into their eighth US tour in four years, though guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist Chris Dreja dont know it yet, this will be the last tour the band will ever do.

We lost enthusiasm for it, says Yardbirds drummer and co-founder Jim McCarty now, speaking from his home in France. We couldnt really we just didnt have the energy for it. If wed had a long break and sat down and had a rest and taken time to think of new songs, it might have been an idea. But everything back then was based on working, playing every night. He sighs. They thought if you had six months off no one would recognise you any more.

Nevertheless, it seemed a strange time to call a halt to what had been one of the most inventive, famous and influential bands of the Swinging Sixties. The world may have been going to hell aka Vietnams Mekong Delta but rock music was fast approaching its apotheosis. When serious music fans werent out on a Magical Mystery Tour in chase of an under-clad Mrs Robinson, they were tripping in a White Room listening to Janis screaming for them to take another Piece Of My Heart, or leaning over wide-eyed at innocent passers-by telling them Hello, I Love You, while all the while Two Riders Were Approaching.

The Yardbirds famous for proto-psyche hits like For Your Love, Shapes Of Things and Over, Under, Sideways, Down had also been home to the three best guitarists in England: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and, now, Jimmy Page. The Yardbirds had appeared in seminal art-house flicks like Antonios