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Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page


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I got my pre-order of the book in the mail today! Looks very thorough and I'm excited to read it. Has anyone else gotten theirs yet?

Got mine a while back. Big disappointment. 99% rehash that I'd read elsewhere or from the original interviews; and that's from someone who is far from an expert.

I found "Trampled Underfoot" -even amid its limitations- much more compelling.

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Got mine a while back. Big disappointment. 99% rehash that I'd read elsewhere or from the original interviews; and that's from someone who is far from an expert.

I found "Trampled Underfoot" -even amid its limitations- much more compelling.

Aw, that's disheartening :(

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Mine will reach me 25th or 26th. Before it, I’ve already checked some contents of it on amazon.com as always. Personally I think the value of this book is that above all Jimmy is OK.

There are no other books like that and this book is much different from many other tabloid-like books.

According to the author Brad Tolinski, all info is from Jimmy himself.

The author mainly did focus on Jimmy's musical achievements and at the same time pulled his honest feelings in respective eras too.

I love Jimmy's interviews from Guitar World magazines though I did not read all of them.

Some of them remind me of old interviews of Jimmy from Japanese rock magazine "MUSIC LIFE".

Jimmy answered so honestly and certainly they had a mutual respect.

Tolinski writes this way on the Overture section,

Most writers just wanted to know about his alleged drug use, weird groupie sex, or whether it was true that he’d made a pact with Satan. Truth is, few journalist treated him or his band with the respect they accorded his peers John Lennon, Keith Richards and Pete Townshend. In the long run, none of it really mattered. Jimmy turned his obsession with privacy into an essential part of his mystique. He became rock’s greatest enigma. This is where I come in.

Edited by Alice75
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Mine will reach me 25th or 26th. Before it, I’ve already checked some contents of it on amazon.com as always. Personally I think the value of this book is that above all Jimmy is OK.

There are no other books like that and this book is much different from many other tabloid-like books.

According to the author Brad Tolinski, all info is from Jimmy himself.

The author mainly did focus on Jimmy's musical achievements and at the same time pulled his honest feelings in respective eras too.

I love Jimmy's interviews from Guitar World magazines though I did not read all of them.

Some of them remind me of old interviews of Jimmy from Japanese rock magazine "MUSIC LIFE".

Jimmy answered so honestly and certainly they had a mutual respect.

Tolinski writes this way on the Overture section,

Most writers just wanted to know about his alleged drug use, weird groupie sex, or whether it was true that he’d made a pact with Satan. Truth is, few journalist treated him or his band with the respect they accorded his peers John Lennon, Keith Richards and Pete Townshend. In the long run, none of it really mattered. Jimmy turned his obsession with privacy into an essential part of his mystique. He became rock’s greatest enigma. This is where I come in.

I just finished the first chapter and I agree. Brad seems like a very noble and sincere interviewer. I don't find myself hoping he's going to say something that will put Jimmy on the defense like most interviewers do.

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I notice that though some interviews I have the orginals in the magazines, I don't have everything. I am enjoying it very much. Brad is very good writer and he seems very respectful of Jimmy. I have also been reading Trampled Underfoot and love it. There is so much background from people we rarely have heard from before, living and gone.

Edited by aen27
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Brad Tolinski has been a trusted confidant of Jimmy's for many years. On one hand, this has afforded Tolinski unequalled access resulting in several interviews thru the years. On the other hand, so as not to risk his access Tolinski deliberately steers well clear of anything remotely controversial or unpleasant for Jimmy, leading to vanilla interviews that compiled as a book present a sanitized summation of Jimmy's life.

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Brad Tolinski has been a trusted confidant of Jimmy's for many years. On one hand, this has afforded Tolinski unequalled access resulting in several interviews thru the years. On the other hand, so as not to risk his access Tolinski deliberately steers well clear of anything remotely controversial or unpleasant for Jimmy, leading to vanilla interviews that compiled as a book present a sanitized summation of Jimmy's life.

I notice how careful he is. :)

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Rather than saying a sanitize summmation lets here from Brad himseld has say

I had my first conversation with guitar icon Jimmy Page in the spring of 1993. As editor-in-chief of Guitar World magazine, I assigned myself the job of interviewing him for a story on his recent, and controversial, collaboration with Whitesnake’s David Coverdale. But my real interest was far more personal. As a child of the ‘70s, I grew up with Page’s work with the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin deeply embedded in my DNA. I had always admired his innovations as a guitarist, composer and arranger. As a producer, I believe, he ranked up there with true innovators like Phil Spector and George Martin.

As a journalist, I always wondered why nobody ever asked him about that stuff, and I imagine Jimmy wondered the same thing. This is what I wanted to read and wanted to write.

Page’s prickly reputation with journalists was, of course, well known to me, so I prepared myself for a potentially difficult time. I won’t say we got on like two bustles in a hedgerow, but I could tell he enjoyed the fact that I was able to converse about his music in a relatively sophisticated and technically knowledgeable way. A couple of hours into our first interview we hit a small speed bump when he began to humorously feign exhaustion at the perhaps too forensic nature of my questioning. Undeterred, I pushed onward and, miraculously, he hung in there for another hour with absolutely no hint of rock legend attitude. You could sense that he was happy just to have a serious discussion about his music – not just Led Zeppelin but also his partnership with Coverdale, which had occupied him for more than a year.

Which brings me to the purpose of my new book, Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page. In many ways, this work is a natural extension of that first encounter. It is my belief that Page and many of his rock and roll peers, like Keith Richards, Peter Townshend, and others too numerous to mention, are overappreciated for their eccentricities and antics and underappreciated for their actual contributions to music, art and culture.

More often than not, our greatest rockers are reduced to a cartoon or a cheap punchline. Page is the mad occultist who sold his soul to the devil, Richards is the drug-addled reprobate with nine lives and Townshend a jumping, windmilling ball of sexual confusion.

While I’m the first to laugh and shake my head at a good rock and roll tale, there needs to be some balance. The same serious musical analysis given to groundbreaking jazz and blues artists such as Muddy Waters and Miles Davis – visionaries who also bridged the gap between artistic and commercial success – should be rendered to our classic rock contemporaries. The music of Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, The Who, and many others has clearly stood the test of time and continues to intrigue generations of music fans who were born years after they were formed, so what makes it tick?

Light & Shade is a serious attempt to answer that question. It is not a tell-all biography in the traditional sense, but rather (I hope) an enlightening and definitive look at the musical life of a rock genius, told in his own words. In the music documentary “It Might Get Loud,” Jimmy briefly touches on what the term “light and shade” means to him: “Dynamics … whisper to thunder; sounds that invite you in and intoxicate.” Think of this book as an expansion of those basic ideas, and a rare opportunity to actually hear a master artist explain his music.

http://www.wordandfilm.com/2012/10/how-to-interview-a-rock-legend-starring-jimmy-page/

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Brad Tolinski has been a trusted confidant of Jimmy's for many years. On one hand, this has afforded Tolinski unequalled access resulting in several interviews thru the years. On the other hand, so as not to risk his access Tolinski deliberately steers well clear of anything remotely controversial or unpleasant for Jimmy, leading to vanilla interviews that compiled as a book present a sanitized summation of Jimmy's life.

I've only just started reading this book and am looking forward to the rest. All credit to Brad Tolinski as a journalist for fostering a relationship with Jimmy which has enabled these interviews to take place and be published in Guitar World. He certainly captures the "light and shade", complexity and ambition of Jimmy's musical achievement. Unfortunately that contrasts with the lack of such complexity in his own writing and approach. What is laudable in journalism is weakened when it's presented as a book - unless there's an additional dimension/ambition added which it seems there is not. "Vanilla" does seem to be the word.

I'm glad to have bought it and appreciate the content. But royalties aside ( I'm sure they're considerable) , I wouldn't be so glad to have written it.

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Got mine 2 days ago along with the other new book 'Get the Led Out' and the new Barney Hoskyns book. I haven't delved into any of them yet. I have all the guitar worlds that Jimmy Page was in over the years so I hope there is something new in the book.

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I'm almost finished this book and I think it is very well done. Having read only bits & pieces of the interviews, over the years, it is very good to read them in a very well organized fashion. I'm so over reading about the tour antics and frankly I'm over reading anything negative about this band. So I love this book and I've learned a new thing or two about the music of Zep.

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I would say a disappointment... for those who have followed Jimmy's interviews through guitar magazine. The content that is not from the interviews is mostly bland pablum.

If you're not a guitar player, you might enjoy it.

Barney Hoskins' book is much much better.

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I would say a disappointment... for those who have followed Jimmy's interviews through guitar magazine. The content that is not from the interviews is mostly bland pablum.

If you're not a guitar player, you might enjoy it.

Barney Hoskins' book is much much better.

Agreed 100%.

This book doesn't give any insight to who he is as a man nor as a guitarist. Reading Hoskyns' book really puts it into perspective as to why Tolinski has to walk on eggshells around Page.

Edited by Texas Melanie
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