Jimmy Page: Magus, Musician, Man

As long as there are teenage boys in the world, there will be an audience for Led Zeppelin, the '70s-era hard rock legend whose "Stairway to Heaven" is still one of the most-ever-played songs in the history of American FM radio. Jimmy Page was the mastermind of the Zeppelin juggernaut, and as one of the three most influential British rock guitarists of the late '60s, he certainly deserves Case's detailed and informed look at his past and present work. In this unauthorized biography, freelance writer Case focuses on Page's music as much as he does on Zeppelin's lurid touring lifestyle, and he is good at reporting Page's early work playing on countless recording sessions (ranging from Tom Jones's "It's Not Unusual" to the Kinks' "You Really Got Me"), as well as detailing the formation of Zeppelin, where Page combined his blues-based rock with singer Robert Plant's "soaring tenor moan" to create a radically new sound. While his enthusiasm sometimes overwhelms his writing ("The Teutonic implications of the airship's family surname invested a gothic sensibility to the ensemble's work"), Case successfully shows how Page and his Zeppelin's musical influence became "so broad and so established that even players who had never consciously emulated his techniques had been affected by them." (May)