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Becoming Led Zeppelin Isn’t Trying to Tell the Whole Story
A thoroughly researched documentary blessed by control freaks who still can’t, or won’t, wrestle with the less flattering parts of the band’s history.
It’s the condensed, PG version of Hammer of the Gods, Stephen Davis’s 1985 biography in which Zeppelin’s infamous tour manager, Richard Cole, mentioned here briefly only in passing, shared many juicy and contentious stories that helped crystallize the most devilish parts of the band’s legacy. In Hammer of the Gods alone, in which even Davis questions some of the rumors relayed to him yet nevertheless printing them, we read about how the band sustained their vigorous touring by drinking vaginal secretions, Jimmy Page’s “prowess” with a whip, “tumescent girls immersed in tubs of warm baked beans before coitus,” and more. We watch Zeppelin in real-time evolve from shaggy and confounding noisemakers — the first couple of shows feature several stone-faced audience members plugging their fingers into their ears — into an impossibly confident and tight unit, where the loudness was the point.
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