No one before or since has lived the dream quite like Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham.

For any fan of Led Zeppelin this is an essential record of the band, for rock fans in general its also a stunning book to trace the life of a foursome who had no peers during their tour of duty 1968 through to 1980 when the death of drummer John Bonham signalled the end of Led Zeppelin.

Robert Plant’s feckless pliancy throughout is hard to square with the exploratory nature of his later work.

One of the world’s most prolific bands is being broken down track by track, album by album—and you have tickets to the details, facts, and secrets in Led Zeppelin​. The only two fans quoted in the book to give their impression of a Led Zeppelin show are found in the book’s introduction. It comprises hundreds of carefully curated images and artworks personally selected by the band, from the iconic to the unseen. Popoff analyzes the circumstances that led to their creation, the recording processes, the historical contexts, and more. a 400-page time capsule into the bands exceptional career, and sequentially depicts artwork, illustrations and curated photographs personally chosen from the band's never before seen archives.Led Zeppelin by Led Zeppelin is the first and only official illustrated book to be produced in collaboration with the members of the band. When relying on these new interviews, Spitz’s book is at its best, with the author digging into well-known stories and asking witnesses what really went on. Sadly, this volume almost seems to represent a “cleaning out the vault” effort by the remaining band members .

Spitz twice refers to the London district of West Hampstead, although manages both times to misspell it as “West Hempstead. Spitz, whose previous subjects include The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Ronald Reagan, knows he needn’t exaggerate the band’s abhorrent behavior, from drummer John Bonham’s blind-drunk sexual assaults to guitarist Jimmy Page’s petulant entitlement.Anyone familiar with live Led Zeppelin recordings knows the album track is actually from a recording of the band’s January 9, 1970 show at the Royal Albert Hall in London, information that appears on recent releases of Coda. Offstage and performance photography, as well as images of rare memorabilia, bring the band’s story to vivid life. I notice that RP does tend to back off from much of what goes on in the world of LZ these days, and I must say that when I read his biography, I felt that much was held back and not much given away. The negativity of the book, along with other controversial music biographies by Davis, earned him the industry nickname "Stephen Salacious". Spitz goes deeper and sees more clearly than any previous biographer, and his storytelling powers make it spellbinding.

He follows Lori Mattix’s name repeatedly with “the fourteen year old,” so that even the most fervent Jimmy Page fan is hopefully forced to reckon with the guitarist’s relationship with a teen. But fans hoping for major revelations about Led Zeppelin, whether in the studio or on stage, are likely to be disappointed. That said, I admit that as a fan of Zep’s hey day, it was the naughty business written about in magazines that made their allure all the more powerful.Fans hoping for a book that examines Led Zeppelin’s on-stage musical development will be better served by reading Dave Lewis and Mike Tremaglio’s recently updated “Evenings With Led Zeppelin” book instead. Often described as “heavy,” any true fan will tell you that the band’s 9 studio albums and 81 tracks thereon are actually a complex amalgam of blues, psychedelia, rock, folk, and country that reveal the influences of Led Zeppelin’s four members.