Forthcoming LZ Book Releases

[kenog]

Here are a few of the LZ related books which will be published over the coming months in the UK. I have already posted about the forthcoming Barney Hoskyns book on another thread.

Get the Led Out: How Led Zeppelin Became the Biggest Band in the World [Hardcover] Carol Miller (Foreword), Denny Somach (Author) ( 6 November 2012)

From A Whisper To A Scream: The Complete Guide to the Music of Led Zeppelin [Paperback] Mick Middles (Author) 16 JULY 2012

The indispensable consumers' guide to the music of Led Zeppelin. An album by album, track by track, run-down of every song released by Led Zeppelin, from their classic first album to their best selling albums of the seventies and beyond. Also includes details of their remastered recordings, compilation albums, live albums and Led Zeppelin on DVD. Features include... *An album by album, track by track analysis *Information on when and where the music was recorded *A track index for easy reference *16 pages of colour pictures

Forever Young: The Rock and Roll Photography of Chuck Boyd - Foreword by Jimmy Page (August 2012)

[DAS]

http://www.amazon.com/Light-Shade-Conversations-Jimmy-Page/dp/0307985717

[PlanetPage]

http://www.amazon.co...e/dp/0307985717

Release Date October 23, 2012:

Vigintitresology: The Web of 23

The principle of the Number 23, or Vigintitriplicity, to coin a term — a corollary to C.G. Jung's Principle of Syncronicity — has an uncanny tendency to cluster seeingly unrelated "facts:" into strangely beautiful and meaningful patterns. For some reson, as yet undetermined, there operates in the human unconscious an ordering principle which manifests itself through the number 23. As proof of this assertion is offered a vigintitresological analysis of the life of Aleister Crowley. But to properly set the stage for the daemonic set of "coincedences" uncovered, we must go back to the year 1666 and briefly consider Sir Isaac Newton's interest in Alchemy.

1666 was Newton's 23rd year and historians of science have designated it as hs annus mirabilis. This was the year in which his genius as a physical scientist first flowered. But Isaac Newton was a many-sided genius, and not the least of his interests was numerology. For him the number 23 took on an unusual significance.

In Newton's private library was found a heavily annotated copy of Introitus Apertus, or The Open Entrance by Eirenaeus Philalethes; the marginalia are in Sir Isaac's own hand. But what seems to have fascinated Newton about this work, to the point of fanaticism, was Philalethes' claim or boast that he had attained to the Philosopher's Stone at the age of 23! Newton was not a little vain about his own achievements and was obviously irked that he could not make the same claim. But he was somewhat placated by the fact that 23 had been his annus mirabilis and drew a parallel between his and Philalethes' attainments. So, in Sir Isaac's honor is proposed The Law of Alchemical Initiation. Such a law would recognize the importance of the 23rd year in the alchemical adept's quest for the Philosopher's Stone — the age of Initiation in any adept's life.

If anyone's life should be the example which proves the "law", certainly it should be Aleister Crowley's, one of the most advanced adepts of the occult sciences in the twentieth century. It was not with a little excitement that all the basic evidence needed was furnished in Chapter 6 of Kennth Grant's "Cults of the Shadow".

Crowley was born in October, 1875; his 23rd birthday was in October of 1898; on November 18, 1898, Crowley was Initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn!

In his Magickal Record, however, Crowley reveals that he took the Oath of Ipsissimus on May 23, 1921 and that this Great Initiation ran its course for the following three years. — Here we hava a clear case of 23 to the third power: May is the 5th month (2 + 3), the 23rd day of the month, and a series of three years which includes 1923.

The question now remaining was whether the entire life of Crowley could be viewed sub specie XXIII. Here is what was discovered:

...cont'd

http://www.simoniff.com/203/vigintitresology.html

[kenog]

This title was released at the beginning of April 2012.

From: Amazon.com

Led Zeppelin Guitar Method: Immerse Yourself in the Music and Mythology of Led Zeppelin as You Learn to Play Guitar (Book & Enhanced CD) [Paperback]

Ron Manus (Author), L. C. Harnsberger (Author)

Through the years Jimmy Page's guitar playing has inspired countless music fans to play guitar. The Led Zeppelin Guitar Method, the first method to feature Led Zeppelin songs, teaches you everything you need to know to get started playing---even if you have never touched a guitar before. Start by learning the basics like how to hold the guitar and how to read standard music notation and TAB. By the time you complete the book, you will be playing authentic arrangements of classic Led Zeppelin songs. This easy-to-use beginning course will prepare you to play from sheet music and get you ready to play in a band. Historical facts and photos of Led Zeppelin are featured throughout to keep you inspired. The included enhanced CD demonstrates all the songs and exercises in the book and the Tone N Tempo Changer is an invaluable tool in your journey to learn the guitar.

· Babe I'm Gonna Leave You

* The Battle of Evermore

* Boogie with Stu

* Bring It on Home

* Bron-Y-Aur Stomp

* Communication Breakdown

* Dazed and Confused

* Going to California

* Good Times Bad Times

* Heartbreaker

* How Many More Times

* Immigrant Song

* The Lemon Song

* Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman)

* Misty Mountain Hop

* Moby Dick

* Out on the Tiles

* Over the Hills and Far Away

* Rock and Roll

* Stairway to Heaven

* Thank You

* What Is and What Should Never Be

* When the Levee Breaks

* Whole Lotta Love

* You Shook Me.

[Nutrocker]

The "From A Whisper To A Scream" book sounds like a Zeppelin version of "Revolution In The Head", the classic Beatles song by song analysis book...could be a good 'un...

IMO as it stands right now the Keith Shadwick book is still the Zeppelin book to own...fuck the seedy biographies like "Hammer Of The Gods" or Mick Wall's terribly written tome

[Joe Bloggs]

Heads up. One title to avoid is Celebration Day: The Led Zeppelin Encyclopedia by Malcolm Dome and Jerry Ewing. 99% of the content was ripped wholesale from wikipedia verbatim (including vandalism, spelling mistakes, and factual errors). It even makes the same mistake of listing many of the Thai releases as official singles. The copy I have also has an unforgiveable boo boo - there is no article on the fourth album. It lists all other albums except Led Zeppelin IV,/ZoSo/Four Symbols/Untitled/whatever you want to call it. Incredible. This is extremely disappointing considering Malcolm Dome is a very experienced music journalist. Don't waste your money on it. You can get all of the info straight off the internet as is.

[DAS]

^ Yet I'm constantly in an argument with someone who thinks Wikipedia is infallible.

[dazedjeffy]

Heads up. One title to avoid is Celebration Day: The Led Zeppelin Encyclopedia by Malcolm Dome and Jerry Ewing. 99% of the content was ripped wholesale from wikipedia verbatim (including vandalism, spelling mistakes, and factual errors). It even makes the same mistake of listing many of the Thai releases as official singles. The copy I have also has an unforgiveable boo boo - there is no article on the fourth album. It lists all other albums except Led Zeppelin IV,/ZoSo/Four Symbols/Untitled/whatever you want to call it. Incredible. This is extremely disappointing considering Malcolm Dome is a very experienced music journalist. Don't waste your money on it. You can get all of the info straight off the internet as is.

I'm in agreement with the review above. George Case's Led Zeppelin FAQ is a much better alternative.

[mrledhed]

How many copies do you think books about LZ like these are sold?

[Joe Bloggs]

^ Yet I'm constantly in an argument with someone who thinks Wikipedia is infallible.

Someone on here or on wikipedia itself?

[DAS]

Someone on here or on wikipedia itself?

Just people I meet or know in real life. You'd be shocked how many people swear by it.

[kenog]

This is a review from Publishers' Weekly on the Tolinski book which is due out in October 2012.

www.publishersweekly.com

Over the past decade, the enigmatic Page has been sitting down with Tolinski, the editor-in-chief of Guitar World and author of Classic Hendrix and The Faces: 196975, to discuss everything from Pages early years as a session guitarist and member of the Yardbirds to his heyday with Led Zeppelin and his more recent post-Zep projects and plans. The interviews Page gives to Tolinski are enlightening, and while he doesnt completely open the vault about Zeppelins party lifestyle or his interest in the occult, he does speak freely on guitar technique. Sometimes even more informative than the interviews are the pre-q&a introductions, which set up the topics of discussion and allow Tolinski to demonstrate his encyclopedic knowledge of classic rock and guitar history in his fluid prose. Further expanding the books scope are the Musical Interludes that follow each chapter and feature entertaining asides like an inventory of Pages guitars; he also conducts interviews with some of Pages former bandmates like John Paul Jones and Paul Rodgers. By shining a light on the shadowy Page, Tolinski has created a must-have for any Led Zeppelin fan or guitar player. 21 b&w photos. (Oct.)

Reviewed on: 07/02/2012 Other Formats Hardcover - 288 pages - 978-0-7710-8420-1

[DAS]

This title was released at the beginning of April 2012.

From: Amazon.com

Led Zeppelin Guitar Method: Immerse Yourself in the Music and Mythology of Led Zeppelin as You Learn to Play Guitar (Book & Enhanced CD) [Paperback]

Ron Manus (Author), L. C. Harnsberger (Author)

Through the years Jimmy Page's guitar playing has inspired countless music fans to play guitar. The Led Zeppelin Guitar Method, the first method to feature Led Zeppelin songs, teaches you everything you need to know to get started playing---even if you have never touched a guitar before. Start by learning the basics like how to hold the guitar and how to read standard music notation and TAB. By the time you complete the book, you will be playing authentic arrangements of classic Led Zeppelin songs. This easy-to-use beginning course will prepare you to play from sheet music and get you ready to play in a band. Historical facts and photos of Led Zeppelin are featured throughout to keep you inspired. The included enhanced CD demonstrates all the songs and exercises in the book and the Tone N Tempo Changer is an invaluable tool in your journey to learn the guitar.

· Babe I'm Gonna Leave You

* The Battle of Evermore

* Boogie with Stu

* Bring It on Home

* Bron-Y-Aur Stomp

* Communication Breakdown

* Dazed and Confused

* Going to California

* Good Times Bad Times

* Heartbreaker

* How Many More Times

* Immigrant Song

* The Lemon Song

* Living Loving Maid (She's Just a Woman)

* Misty Mountain Hop

* Moby Dick

* Out on the Tiles

* Over the Hills and Far Away

* Rock and Roll

* Stairway to Heaven

* Thank You

* What Is and What Should Never Be

* When the Levee Breaks

* Whole Lotta Love

* You Shook Me.

I checked this out and this is a book about learning how to play the guitar. The difference between this and normal learn guitar books is this one uses Led Zeppelin songs for teaching about playing and for practice and so forth. If you already play it's no good for you. If you are teaching someone or learning yourself this book could help.

[Janvier]

If You Like Led Zeppelin Here Are Over 200 Bands, Films, Records, and Other Oddities That You Will Love, by Dave Thompson, to be released on October 1st, 2012, Backbeat Books, 170 pages.

[Jahfin]

Here's the cover of Denny Somach's book. He's a frequent guest on The Allan Handelman Show and was just on the program over the weekend. Allan archives his programs via podcasts on his YouTube channel but this show doesn't appear to have been archived yet.

[DE12]

I'm not LZ expert so this might be redundant with other more frequent posters but - seems there is another one about to be published from this article in The Irish Times by Kevin Courtney. (According to Amazon: to be published Sept 4, 2012)

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2012/0825/1224322936935.html

Trampled Under Foot: The Power and Excess of Led Zeppelin By Barney Hoskyns, Faber and Faber, 571pp. £20

LED ZEPPELIN have left us a hatful of earth-shakingly great albums, and their story has inspired some suitably riotous biographies, from Stephen Davis’s Hammer of the Gods (1985) to Mick Wall’s When Giants Walked the Earth (2009). When a new Zep book is laid out on the table, it feels like being offered another line of some class-A substance, when you’re already burnt out from the tales of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. But you’re not gonna say no to another ride on the rollercoaster, now, are you?

In When Giants Walked the Earth, Wall tried to get inside the heads of Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Bonham and John Paul Jones. In Trampled Under Foot, rock writer Barney Hoskyns lets the people in and around Zep do the talking, creating an oral history of the band by the people who survived this almost perfect rock’n’roll storm. This method gives a good peripheral view of the band, and a few new insights. These “chronological conversations” get right down to the details, and allow the speakers to offer their own, sometimes unflattering, opinions.

The band’s excesses are well documented, from the mudshark incident to the occult dabblings, but hearing it from those who witnessed it all first-hand cuts through the rock-god mystique and brings it all to a very human, personal level. There’s nothing godlike about the monstrous behaviour of drummer John Bonham or the puerile horn-locking of Page and Plant, each wanting control of the band’s destiny.

As the founder, overlord and self-appointed curator of the Zep legacy, Page is particularly paranoid about maintaining the band’s mystique even to this day. He wouldn’t be happy with anything that might undermine the mythology, which might explain why he refused to give Hoskyns’s book his blessing.

There are lots of quotes from the three surviving members, Page, Plant and Jones, taken from interviews conducted with the author in 2003. Also, other rock writers have shared their interview notes with Hoskyns, allowing him to build up a timeline stretching from Page’s puberty, when he was already the hottest guitarist on the block, to Plant’s latterday resurgence as the Grammy-winning eminence gris of country, blues, folk and what-have-you.

But the real meat of the matter is in the exhaustive interviews Hoskyns conducts with the people around the band: the tour managers, roadies, record label execs, lawyers, wives, girlfriends, groupies, drinking buddies and musical contemporaries. They watched from the wings as Zep conquered the world, laid waste to rival bands and cast dark spells over all and sundry. Not for nothing have they been called the rock’n’roll equivalent of marauding Vikings.

The story begins with 12-year-old Jimmy Page growing up in Epsom (just a stone’s throw away from two other young guitar prodigies, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck), playing in skiffle groups, and gaining enough of a reputation to be offered work as a session guitarist. “Maybe there was something in the water, I don’t know,” says Glyn Johns, who was the engineer on Led Zeppelin’s debut album. “It was strange, the three best British rock guitarists, Clapton, Beck and Page, all coming out of this one little area.”

As a session player, Page laid down guitar lines on records by Lulu, Them, Val Doonican and The Kinks (he fumed when Dave Davies wouldn’t let him do the guitar part for All Day and All of the Night). He often teamed up with another young sessioneer, John Baldwin, who changed his name to John Paul Jones at the suggestion of Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham.

Meanwhile, in Birmingham, Robert Plant and John Bonham were playing the “Ma Regan circuit” in various blues-influenced bands. While they struggled to make ends meet, Page was earning top dollar as a session man, and getting his first taste of rock stardom as a member of The Yardbirds, with Jeff Beck. When the band broke up, Page was left with the name and a tour commitment to fulfil. He also had a canny manager, Peter Grant, who would steer Page’s new band to superstardom (the larger-than-life Grant really warrants a separate biography). Page recruited his session buddy John Paul Jones and, at the suggestion of singer Terry Reid, went “oop north” to check out Band of Joy, which featured Plant and Bonham. Soon The New Yardbirds had become Led Zeppelin, and a new chapter in rock history was opening.

From the off, the fans – particularly teenage boys – were in thrall to the new young gods of rock. Zep were hard, heavy and oozed sexual energy. “It was driven by testosterone,” recalls rock chick Bebe Buell, who was Page’s girlfriend during the band’s most flagrantly excessive period in the mid-1970s. “I don’t know if the music was designed to give boys power and sexual prowess, but I do know that when boys listened to it they would become extremely cocky and full of themselves.”

“Zeppelin was like a freight train on steroids, a huge machine coming at you. And it had a lot of funk to it. I went, ‘holy fuck!’,” recalls Chicago blues guitarist Joe “Jammer” Wright, who became the band’s roadie.

Would-be rock critics, take heed: the music press of the time was laughably wide of the mark when writing about the new Fab Four. While Zep were blowing headline acts off the stage with their awesome power and musicianship and topping the album charts without even bothering to release singles, rock journalists refused to acknowledge that they were anything more than a hyped-up act, and were seemingly deaf to the evident brilliance of Good Times, Bad Times, Dazed and Confused, Whole Lotta Love and Heartbreaker.

Another listener wasn’t too thrilled, either. Willie Dixon, who had written You Shook Me and You Need Love (which became Whole Lotta Love), was one of several blues giants left unimpressed when Page and Plant’s name replaced theirs in the songwriting credits.

As the juggernaut rolls on through the 1970s, we follow Zep as they “get it together” in the country for their bucolic third album, then blow away every last vestige of resistance with their mighty fourth, known as the “four symbols” album, which featured the bands albatross-to-be, Stairway to Heaven.

From that moment on, the world was theirs, but as they swanned around in their private jet and indulged in vanity projects – such as the Swan Song record label and the self-indulgent concert movie The Song Remains the Same – there’s a definite sense of a band flying too close to the sun, and setting themselves up for a spectacular fall.

By the second half of the decade, Page had gone over to the dark side, and Bonham had become a nasty, drunken piece of work, assaulting women and starting fist-fights at the drop of a pint glass. Plant, bored with Page’s ever-lengthening onstage guitar solos, would regularly leave the stage to get a blow job. The final two albums, Presence and In Through the Out Door, are disappointing, directionless efforts from a band in disarray. Inevitably, Zep were written off as dinosaurs by a new generation of hipsters. They were seen as the antithesis of punk – even though they were all fans of The Damned, and Communication Breakdown was hailed as an MC5-type proto-punk classic.

Human tragedy ended it all – the death of Plant’s son Karac sapped his mojo, and he felt betrayed when neither Page nor Jones attended the funeral. John Bonham’s death finished Zep, but the band is still living a healthy afterlife, from the Page/Plant No Quarter project in the 1990s to the reunion gig at London’s O2 arena in 2007 in honour of the late Ahmet Ertegun, the head of Atlantic Records and the man who signed Zep. They still sell truckloads of records every year and have become one of a handful of “cross-generational” bands, retaining their dad-rocker fans but also appealing to their kids and grandkids.

Jack White of The White Stripes, who featured in the documentary film It Might Get Loud with Page and U2’s The Edge, is one young gun who wears his Zep influences proudly. “Songwriting-wise, I was coming from the same places that Jimmy and Robert were: Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson, Blind Willie McTell. We were feeding from the same trough,” says White.

The trough has long been drained, but the great music still remains, along with a backstory that is the essence of rock’n’roll. As Hoskyns says, it’s “light and shade”. But still the clamour for one more ascent of the stairway can be heard. Plant has resisted all offers to sign up for a Zep reunion tour (estimates of up to $300 million have been bandied about), preferring to produce more dignified work such as his Grammy award-winning album with Alison Krauss, Raising Sand, and his 21st-century incarnation of his Band of Joy. Being in Zep was, says Plant, a “young man’s job”.

“I don’t want to scream Immigrant Song every night for the rest of my life, and I’m not sure I could.”

Out of respect for Zep’s legacy, I think we should let sleeping dinosaurs lie.

[Joe Bloggs]

Trampled Under Foot: The Power and Excess of Led Zeppelin By Barney Hoskyns, Faber and Faber, 571pp. £20

If that's what's in the book, I'm not sure I want to buy it now. Seems to mine the same sensationalist vein ala Stephen Davis and Mick Wall. Doesn't cover new ground. Money would be better spent on Denny Somach's book.

[The Pagemeister]

Barney Hoskyns: I want to demystify the recycled tales of Led Zeppelin

Read more: http://www.metro.co....n#ixzz24wxNQDkP

[The Pagemeister]

John Wiley & Sons has set a November 6 release date for "Led Zeppelin: The Oral History Of The World's Greatest Rock Band", a new book by Barney Hoskyns, a contributing editor at British Vogue who is the author of the bestselling book "Hotel California" and the co-founder of online music-journalism library Rock's Backpages.

[aen27]

I have figured out that Trampled Underfoot and Oral History are probobly the same book. My copy of Trampled Underfoot came yesterday and I have not been able to stop reading it. It is mostly just filled with interviews with just about everybody, including old ones with Peter and Bonzo. It also has many new stories and a few very rare pictures I have never seen. It looks better than When Giants Walked the Earth. One was Jimmy who said Paul was hard to work with which made the Firm not an easy band to be in. And that's just one thing. Trampled Underfoot, I think must be the British verison that just came out this week.

[Texas Melanie]

Thank you for sharing aen27. This book along with the dvd and Brad Tolinski's book are making for a brilliant Autumn.

[dalsh327]

I've read Hoskyns' book on Tom Waits, he did a pretty good job trying to try to keep it straightforward and demystifying things a bit.

The mystique was a big part of Led Zeppelin, and still is, and maybe Bonham and Grant were on the violent side, but there were a lot of thuggish types running the music business like Sharon Osbourne's dad, but apart from Bonham, none of them seemed like they'd be down for a brawl.

Plant might have been a bit of a diva, but he prob. could hold his own in a fight. They did play some rough places and we never hear about how they handled the jerks in the crowd. I doubt Peter Grant was handling it each and every time.

But when you get to that level of success and play in front of that many people, and play hard night after night, something's going to give. Drugs factor in, but usually people had problems with drink and drugs before they were in the band. It was just more accessible and easy to get with the fame. Enablers all around, too, people trying to be a part of their inner circle, kissing up to them, hoping to get something out of it for themselves. Grant went from protecting them from all of that, to being a part of it. Plant's heart wasn't in Led Zeppelin towards the last few years, even though the 77 and 80 tours went well.

How is "Song Remains the Same" any more self-indulgent than putting a bunch of Beyonce or Lady Gaga videos back to back? It was a long form music video before MTV existed. They didn't want to just make a concert film of them playing on stage, but it prob. should have been out before "Physical Graffiti" because the band was already on to "Presence" by then. My only problem is that they didn't have an acoustic set in the movie.

[Rock Historian]

Release Date October 23, 2012:

Vigintitresology: The Web of 23

The principle of the Number 23, or Vigintitriplicity, to coin a term — a corollary to C.G. Jung's Principle of Syncronicity — has an uncanny tendency to cluster seeingly unrelated "facts:" into strangely beautiful and meaningful patterns. For some reson, as yet undetermined, there operates in the human unconscious an ordering principle which manifests itself through the number 23. As proof of this assertion is offered a vigintitresological analysis of the life of Aleister Crowley. But to properly set the stage for the daemonic set of "coincedences" uncovered, we must go back to the year 1666 and briefly consider Sir Isaac Newton's interest in Alchemy.

1666 was Newton's 23rd year and historians of science have designated it as hs annus mirabilis. This was the year in which his genius as a physical scientist first flowered. But Isaac Newton was a many-sided genius, and not the least of his interests was numerology. For him the number 23 took on an unusual significance.

In Newton's private library was found a heavily annotated copy of Introitus Apertus, or The Open Entrance by Eirenaeus Philalethes; the marginalia are in Sir Isaac's own hand. But what seems to have fascinated Newton about this work, to the point of fanaticism, was Philalethes' claim or boast that he had attained to the Philosopher's Stone at the age of 23! Newton was not a little vain about his own achievements and was obviously irked that he could not make the same claim. But he was somewhat placated by the fact that 23 had been his annus mirabilis and drew a parallel between his and Philalethes' attainments. So, in Sir Isaac's honor is proposed The Law of Alchemical Initiation. Such a law would recognize the importance of the 23rd year in the alchemical adept's quest for the Philosopher's Stone — the age of Initiation in any adept's life.

If anyone's life should be the example which proves the "law", certainly it should be Aleister Crowley's, one of the most advanced adepts of the occult sciences in the twentieth century. It was not with a little excitement that all the basic evidence needed was furnished in Chapter 6 of Kennth Grant's "Cults of the Shadow".

Crowley was born in October, 1875; his 23rd birthday was in October of 1898; on November 18, 1898, Crowley was Initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn!

In his Magickal Record, however, Crowley reveals that he took the Oath of Ipsissimus on May 23, 1921 and that this Great Initiation ran its course for the following three years. — Here we hava a clear case of 23 to the third power: May is the 5th month (2 + 3), the 23rd day of the month, and a series of three years which includes 1923.

The question now remaining was whether the entire life of Crowley could be viewed sub specie XXIII. Here is what was discovered:

...cont'd

http://www.simoniff....itresology.html

My B-Day is Oct 23rd...always felt like there was something a little mysterious/special about that day.

[Cecil.]

It's about time someone started a Led Zeppelin book club topic, there seems to be quite a few in the works.

[Lee]

From A Whisper To A Scream: The Complete Guide to the Music of Led Zeppelin [Paperback] Mick Middles (Author) 16 JULY 2012

Mick Middles?

Dave Lewis, surely?