01-25-2011, 12:00 AM
Since I was recently reminded of Hammer of the Gods, I decided to look it up on Wiki.
I found this interesting, especially what Robert wrote, because honestly, I read that book when I was abotu 15 and it made Robert Plant out into a MAJOR womanizer, and I mean major...like he needed 5 groupies a night every night. So I had this image of him in my head of being this sex maniac and it never donned on me he may have spent many nights in hotel alone, lol. You know, like a real person. The book did not damage my liking him as a person, it just shaded my view of him in a way that was exaggerated. I'm sure he's been with lots of women in his time and especially since his career makes that so easy to do, and the songs they wrote pretty much reveal this. But the way the book was written made the band members appear super human but not a in very good way (and not just about sex but in how they dealt with each other and tour people etc). and they come off as not like real people with real feelings and struggles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_of_ ... Daniloff-1
Criticism
The book has been the subject of much criticism. All three surviving members of the band have cast doubts on its accuracy,[3] with one article summarising their collective view of the book as a "catalogue of error and distortion."[4]
Guitarist Jimmy Page has stated:
I think I opened [the book] up in the middle somewhere and started to read it, and I just threw it out the window. I was living by a river then, so it actually found its way to the bottom of the sea.[5]
According to the band's vocalist Robert Plant:
The guy who wrote that book knew nothing about the band. I think he'd hung around us once. He got all his information from a guy who had a heroin problem who happened to be associated with us. The only thing I read was the "After Zeppelin" part, because I was eager to get on with the music and stop living in a dream state.[6]
One of the author's primary sources of information was Richard Cole, the band's tour manager. As Plant explained
He (Davis) did a lot of investigations with a guy who used to work with Led Zeppelin, Richard Cole, who, over the years, had shown deep frustration at not being in a position to have any authority at all. He was tour manager, and he had a problem which could have been easily solved if he’d been given something intelligent to do rather than check the hotels, and I think it embittered him greatly. He became progressively unreliable and, sadly, became a millstone around the neck of the group.
These stories would filter out from girls who’d supposedly been in my room when in fact they’d been in his. That sort of atmosphere was being created, and we were quite tired of it. So eventually we relieved him of his position … And in the meantime he got paid a lot of money for talking ****. A lot of the time he wasn’t completely …well. And so his view of things was permanently distorted one way or another.[7]
Cole subsequently published his own biography of the band, entitled Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored.
Davis has responded to these criticisms in interviews,[8] maintaining that Hammer of the Gods "was a book that outed members of Led Zeppelin as heroin addicts, and as people that brutalized other people."[2]
I found this interesting, especially what Robert wrote, because honestly, I read that book when I was abotu 15 and it made Robert Plant out into a MAJOR womanizer, and I mean major...like he needed 5 groupies a night every night. So I had this image of him in my head of being this sex maniac and it never donned on me he may have spent many nights in hotel alone, lol. You know, like a real person. The book did not damage my liking him as a person, it just shaded my view of him in a way that was exaggerated. I'm sure he's been with lots of women in his time and especially since his career makes that so easy to do, and the songs they wrote pretty much reveal this. But the way the book was written made the band members appear super human but not a in very good way (and not just about sex but in how they dealt with each other and tour people etc). and they come off as not like real people with real feelings and struggles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer_of_ ... Daniloff-1
Criticism
The book has been the subject of much criticism. All three surviving members of the band have cast doubts on its accuracy,[3] with one article summarising their collective view of the book as a "catalogue of error and distortion."[4]
Guitarist Jimmy Page has stated:
I think I opened [the book] up in the middle somewhere and started to read it, and I just threw it out the window. I was living by a river then, so it actually found its way to the bottom of the sea.[5]
According to the band's vocalist Robert Plant:
The guy who wrote that book knew nothing about the band. I think he'd hung around us once. He got all his information from a guy who had a heroin problem who happened to be associated with us. The only thing I read was the "After Zeppelin" part, because I was eager to get on with the music and stop living in a dream state.[6]
One of the author's primary sources of information was Richard Cole, the band's tour manager. As Plant explained
He (Davis) did a lot of investigations with a guy who used to work with Led Zeppelin, Richard Cole, who, over the years, had shown deep frustration at not being in a position to have any authority at all. He was tour manager, and he had a problem which could have been easily solved if he’d been given something intelligent to do rather than check the hotels, and I think it embittered him greatly. He became progressively unreliable and, sadly, became a millstone around the neck of the group.
These stories would filter out from girls who’d supposedly been in my room when in fact they’d been in his. That sort of atmosphere was being created, and we were quite tired of it. So eventually we relieved him of his position … And in the meantime he got paid a lot of money for talking ****. A lot of the time he wasn’t completely …well. And so his view of things was permanently distorted one way or another.[7]
Cole subsequently published his own biography of the band, entitled Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored.
Davis has responded to these criticisms in interviews,[8] maintaining that Hammer of the Gods "was a book that outed members of Led Zeppelin as heroin addicts, and as people that brutalized other people."[2]