Customer Reviews

When the Levee Breaks: The Making of Led Zeppelin IV (The Vinyl Frontier series)

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Nothing new or the slightest bit insightful can be found within these pages. Anyone who's read a decent book or two about Led Zeppelin (not counting the terrible Hammer of the Gods or Richard Cole's travesty) already knows everything supposedly "revealed" here. There's a lot left out, and Fyfe seems to attribute every good idea the band had to drugs. He keeps calling them "hippies," and has the nerve to claim that they never went on to release an album on par with the fourth. Excuse me?

He also mentions the ridiculous "deal with the devil" rubbish far too many times, giving the '70s media hacks more attention than they deserve and actually claiming that Zeppelin cared about what critics thought, designing their fourth album around media "respectability." He has the audacity to try defending the press's treatment of the band during the '70s, and says mean things like how Jimmy "ate his words" when he agreed to play with Plant again. This kind of unwarranted criticism can be found throughout the book.

One gets the idea that Fyfe was never much of a Zeppelin fan, but read a few books and stole their best bits for this assignment. His wording's often identical to that in other works. His grammar's not very good; it's full of run-on sentences and annoying word repetition.

There's so much good information left out from dozens of great interviews over the years, regarding the making of the fourth album alone (which is what this book's supposedly about, although you get a condensed bio of nearly everyone mentioned on the fringes of the band, which is unnecessary and tedious), that the book is unacceptably incomplete.

There's also a lot of erroneous information. For instance, Fyfe quotes John Paul Jones as stating that "Going to California" was recorded outside in the garden, and that a plane can be heard flying over. He's actually talking about "Black Country Woman," which is on an entirely different album! Fyfe quotes "In the Evening" by claiming that Robert sings "I'm in pain" (no, he doesn't) and says that hip-hop as we know it wouldn't exist without the Beastie Boys ripping off Bonzo (very wrong).

He also contradicts himself constantly -- stating, for instance, that Page and Plant arrived at Headley Grange with "Battle of Evermore" worked out, but then later telling the story we already know: Page picked up Jones' mandolin while staying at Grange and began writing the song based on his experiments with the instrument.

The book's full of things like this. Save your money.

The book isn't only about Led Zep IV - it provides a general history of the band and many of the author's own interpretations. It's arguable - very arguable - if anyone would agree that the title of the book "When the Levee Breaks" is the most essential rock track ever recorded after Stairway to Heaven...highly debatable! If you've read "Hammer of the Gods" or other Zep texts - this will seem somewhat superfluous. No real new observations. The portion on the making of Zep IV is good - but really wouldn't fill up a book. More like an article...

Loads of trivia packed in this lil' book.
Gives complete bio's of the players and reviews each song on the record in detail. Covers the ways and means of each recording as well. No footnotes but has a bibliography.
Made me break out that cd one more time.

This book would have been a lot more enjoyable if Fyfe didn't repeat himself endlessly. It read like the half-baked essay of a so-so college sophomore.

Some of the information was interesting however, and I did appreciate Fyfe's ability to contextualize the events of Led Zep's existence in the world of music and otherwise. He clearly knows a lot about the music industry.