svenshah 's review for:

Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

5.0

---

One of the best books on Led Zeppelin I've read, and a book that has instantly leapt to one of my favorite on any topic. It was finished so quickly that there was no time to add it to the Currently Reading list. That's not to say it is light reading. Just the opposite. So informative and entertaining was the 170 page pocket-sized essay, that it's bedside location inspired numerous early nights, and at least one slow-to-rise rainy Saturday morning to reach the right-hand cover in a week's time. A thoroughly Campbellesque analysis shedding light on something so familiar that it seemed almost impossible to reveal anything further. Davis both confirmed private suspicions, and revealed concepts never before considered. Citing Joseph Campbell himself, along with Aleister Crowley, William S. Burroughs, Cameron Crowe, Langston Hughes, Austin Osman Spare, poets Robert Duncan and Lord Dunsany, The Hermetic Library, Mike D., J.R.R. Tolkein (of course), Peter Jackson, Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs, Lorrie Maddox, and Christian fundamentalists, Davis constructs a narrative from an album rarely, if ever, thought to be conceptual. So compelling is this narrative, in fact, that suddenly it seems a screenplay could be devised from it. Although Zeppelin's swagger will never hold as much appeal in Japan as Deep Purple's straight ahead martial drive, and quite possibly the spectre of black magick being all too real on an island where animistic spirit worship can be taken quite seriously, if there were one book I'd want to use my language skill to translate into Japanese, this is it. The post-modern self-referential pop-culture that has crept into the English idiom would make it a difficult task to stylistically recreate the offhand double entendre that punctuate in-depth passages, but there was an overwhelming sense that /everyone/ should be reading this. The synchronicity of the book arriving on John Bonham's birthday signified the connection that was about to unfold.