I became aware of Led Zeppelin fanfic in the late 1990s when the web exploded with archive sites. To say I was surprised would be an understatement. I’d known of Star Trek fanfic for years, and Buffy, X-files, and Xena fanfic sites were all over the place. But Zep fanfic was a new thing, especially …
Led Zeppelin: The Biography by Bob Spitz Penguin Press, 2021 When the first Led Zeppelin biography, Hammer of the Gods, by Stephen Davis, was published in 1985, it caused a sensation. Riding on the coattails of the equally sensationalistic No One Here Gets Out Alive, the Jim Morrison autobiography published in 1980 that caused a …
Led Zeppelin bass player/keyboardist John Paul Jones, at home, early 1970s.
If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow, don’t be alarmed now It’s just a spring clean for the May Queen
Cartoon by Nicola Rivka. I’ll post some more of her stuff when I get around to Zeptoons.
As in, why did the band pick that name anyway? Logic might tell you it comes from a long line of band names that change one or two letters of an ordinary word to become something wacky and eye-catching. As in The Beatles, The Monkees, The Byrds, Cyrcle, Def Leppard (a Led Zeppelin imitator if …
A foursome of Jimbert* portraits courtesy of Midjourney. After almost a year, I broke down and got a subscription for myself. The prompt: young jimmy page and young robert plant, sleeping, 1970, recording studio, muted colors, tan, blue, gray, cinematic lighting, pen and ink, intricate line drawings, by Yoshitaka Amano, Ruan Jia, Kentaro Miura, Artgerm, …
Oh Father of the Four Winds fill my sails… A young Robert Plant blows some gentle breezes in this evocative illustration by Morgan Rogers. Unfortunately her site is retired and not being updated, but the Zep artwork is still there. A scanned page from the artist’s sketchbook. There’s a quality to her work that is …
Not every band inspires a busy and passionate fandom. Using Archive of Our Own as a bellwether, I noticed several things by looking at the stats. One is the sheer amount of material. Excluding Elvis (450 stories) most of it dates from bands active from the early 1960s on. There’s no Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee …
When it comes to Led Zeppelin songs, their titles recall mostly about one thing: Blues, Blues, Blues. Unlike Beatles songs, they didn’t dabble in storytelling or psychedelia. This makes the song titles themselves not too interesting, but they’re also easy to recreate. Maybe there’s a bootleg of these around somewhere… Led Zeppelin Songs, what …