Robert Plant: Led Zeppelin, Jimmy Page and the Solo Years [Paperback]

The book is riddled with inaccuracies.

Consider these passages... Daniels goes through a sentence-long analysis of the tracks on Zeppelin's albums. For the first album, there is this gem: "Black Mountain Side is an accurate demonstration of Page's musical expertise rather than Plant's talent yet Plant is still in fine vocal shape." Umm... isn't the song an instrumental? Doesn't this sentence imply that Plant is singing this track? The roots of How Many More Times? Well, Daniels says that the lyrics contain references to "Howlin' Wolf's 'How Many More Tears." I always thought the song was How Many More Years. I understand the Y and T are next to each other, so let's chalk that one up to the editor.

How about Houses of the Holy... check this out: "Plant enjoys himself
on the last track 'No Quarter' and thus closes an imaginative and curious album." Perhaps Neil Daniels has obtained that rare copy of Houses of the Holy that is devoid of The Ocean?

Let's examine the acknowledgements. The author thanks Al Atkins (former lead singer of Judas Priest), Frankie Banali and Kevin DuBrow of Quiet Riot, Ernie Chataway of Judas Priest (whose sole contribution to the book seems to be telling the author that he doesn't like Plant and never did), John Ellis and Brian 'Bruno' Stapenhill (again, from Judas Priest), and... I think I'll stop there.

It really seems like the guy wrote a book on Judas Priest and then
discovered that some of the guys knew Plant, so then he figured maybe
he could write a book on Plant. He could use a lot of the same interviews (a fact he covers in the acknowledgements) and sell some
more books. Here's a quote: "In many ways, this book is a complementary companion piece to my first book - The Story of Judas Priest: Defenders of the Faith - because the earlier careers of both artists overlap in obvious ways: Robert Plant and Judas Priest came from the same area of England and both artists began gigging in the same era prior to finding success in the 1970s, onwards."

Yeah... because when I think of Judas Priest, I think of Robert Plant. Oh wait... no, no I don't. The book essentially begins with a
narration of the Soundstage performance available now on DVD of Plant
with Strange Sensation from September of 2005, and right away, Daniels
is quoting some guy I've never heard of - "perhaps the American melodic rock singer and Led Zeppelin fan Tony Harnell says it better..." WHO?! What the hell is this?! ... at least that's what I keep thinking while I'm reading this.

In addition, he refers to the "mammoth Achilles Last Stand" twice in three pages using the same adjective, but manages to say that Plant wrote the song at two different times, in two different places, with two different sets of inspiration in the same range of pages. Not sure you can do that without explaining yourself, and Daniels does not.

This book was a big disappointment for a big fan of Robert Plant.

Full of typos and repetitive phrases, which is understandable considering the rush they must have put on the book in order to jump on the Led Zeppelin gravy train at the time of publishing. But the author made it seem as if Robert's creative genius was stifled by Jimmy Page and could only be truly realized without him. That his solo work was the true reflection of his brilliance. If you buy that premise then this book is for you, otherwise, meh, not worth it.

This book is quite dry, not especially well written, or insightful, and would have been much more interesting if the author had actually interviewed or better yet collaborated with Mr. Plant.
Perhaps it is this lack of material that prompts the author to actually give a "blow by blow" of videos that anyone can simply watch themselves.
I would much rather read a book with some input and insight by Robert Plant.....not something gleaned from past interviews that I have already read and in depth descriptions of videos I can very well pop into the dvd and watch myself....However the pictures are kind of interesting at any rate.

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