The last person a reader expects to learn about in a Stephen Davis rock book is the author himself. Davis is known for revealing shocking tales about the behavior of rock stars, but what may be even more surprising is the bittersweet personal love story that emerges in his new Led Zeppelin book, “LZ-’75.”
The title comes from three notebooks Davis kept while touring with the band in their private airplane for their “Physical Graffiti” album. In addition to observations about the band and their struggles, triumphs and depravities that year, a clear narrative thread of the author’s life as a 25-year-old journalist steps into the spotlight for a few solos.
“I never did that before. It was a gas,” says the author. “I’ve used the first-person a lot, but I think it’s stupid to do in a book about a band, because the obsessives don’t want to know about you. … But the whole point of ‘LZ-’75’ was transcribing these notebooks, which I hadn’t seen in, like, 30 years.”
The notebooks had eluded Davis for decades, and their absence frustrated the author when he was writing his first Zep book, the 1985 best-seller, “Hammer of the Gods.” He also searched for them fruitlessly when Aerosmith’s Joe Perry asked Davis to write his speech inducting Led Zeppelin into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But while he was working on a Guns N’ Roses book a few years ago, he stumbled across them.
“The thing that blew my mind when I read the notebooks was how violent the storms on the plane were,” he says. “First of all my handwriting is paralytic, because we were bumping so much, and [Zeppelin singer] Robert Plant is screaming at the top of his lungs and the soundtrack is playing Elvis Presley, and Robert is yelling, ‘God, we’re landing in the supermarket!’”
