Barney Hoskyns on Led Zeppelin
And his 2012 book on the band
DM: Why did you choose Led Zeppelin?
BH: I chose Zeppelin because I love them. The mission really was not to preach to the converted, if you like, it was to an extent to preach to the unconverted. Obviously, I hope that the Led Zeppelin community will read it and take to it, and embrace it. But I think I wanted to pitch it at as much skeptics, to say look a) Zeppelin’s music was incredible and b) the story is extraordinary.
And I think there was an opportunity to demystify the story a little bit, just to sort of get away from glorifying the usual larks and antics, and Hell-raising, and to make the story a bit more real. I think, was the mission, and that’s kind of how the book mutated into an oral history. Because it didn’t start out like that, but the more interviews I did, I ended up doing over 130, the more it became clear to me there was an opportunity to tell the story in a different way, with the kind of immediacy you get from people just talking quite openly and candidly. And I thought let’s see if we can tell the story in a kind of continuous way, from start to finish. That was the mission and that was the methodology.
DM: How did Led Zeppelin achieve such incredible levels of excessive?
BH: I think they got away with it because they were so huge. But that’s hardly unique to them. People when they achieve enough success, they attain enough power to essentially get away with murder. And that had a lot to do with the Peter Grant mentality.
In the end, it’s hard for us now, and certainly for any young music fan now to imagine how huge Zeppelin were. When they were in America, they really were above the law. When they arrived in a city, they got into a fleet of limousines, and just sailed through every light between the airport and their hotel. And that didn’t happen for anybody other than the President of the United States.
So, essentially, they had everyone in their pocket – the DA in their pocket, the security service in their pocket. They were literally above the law. And there were some messy incidents, with the likes of Swan Song [Led Zeppelin’s own record label] acts, Bad Company, that just got hushed-up.
The havoc and mayhem Bonham caused, you know, it was paid for. You know, it was just: ‘We can pay our way out of any trouble, any scandal’, and that’s what they did. It’s fairly corrupt. It’s like a corrupt politician, you just buy your way out of trouble and they were able to do that. They were making huge amounts of money, not just from the tours but from the record sales, which were enormous. The records generated millions.
DM: Do you think Led zeppelin were as much trampled underfoot by the juggernaut of their fame as those around them?
BH: I do. I think fame and success on that level trampled most people. It’s rare to emerge unscathed from that. John Paul Jones was unscathed, but I think Robert having survived the terrible tragedy of his son’s death, and then the loss of Bonzo, I think Robert has made a good job of surviving Led Zeppelin’s legacy. He’s found a place for himself in the world, he’s not fucked-up by it, he’s able to step back and not take it that seriously. He can kind of smile at it, and that’s rare, that is very rare. Because most people, who get into any kind of show business, get into it because of something they lack. You know, something psychologically lacking in them, and I don’t think Robert did,* I don’t think Robert got into it, because, as Danny Goldberg called him “the happy warrior”. Robert’s happy in his own skin.
DM: There are moments in Hoskyns’ excellent book, where voices contradict each other, but this isn’t a problem as it adds to the richness of the material Hoskyns has expertly woven together. More importantly, as he points out, Trampled Underfoot is not just a story about Led Zepelin, but about everyone around the band.
BH: This is what happened, this is how people saw it, nobody is saying any person’s version of this is the gospel truth as everyone saw it in different ways.
‘Trampled Under Foot’: Barney Hoskyns’ brilliant oral history of Led Zeppelin, by Paul Gallagher, Dangerous Minds, 17 September 2012 | Full interview here
Did you seek the remaining band members’ approval of your project? Did they all participate and contribute new interviews? Are you aware of any of them having read or commented on the book yet?
BH: I did seek it and they did not participate, other than in the form of my spending a wonderful evening with Robert Plant in Tucson in August 2010. Plant is also the only member who – via a friend of his – has indicated that he likes the book. But I don’t know how easy it is for him to say that publicly at a time when he has to put his promotional shoulder to the wheel that is CELEBRATION DAY. I would imagine that diplomacy has to be the order of the day right now.
Did you encounter any roadblocks or reticence in breaking through what Swan Song employee Sam Aizer referred to as the ‘secret society’ of the band’s entourage and machinery? Or had some kind of unspoken ‘statute of limitations’ passed at this point?
BH: I think enough time has passed, and most of the scary villains of the piece are no longer with us. Any loyalty anyone felt to Jimmy Page in particular has probably evaporated. People get long in the tooth and want to have their say. And the greater the number of people that talk, the more OTHER people want to be heard too…
Sproutology, 29 August 2015
This comment was posted on the Led Zeppelin Forum:
Robert Plant reportedly told a mutual of friend of himself and Barney Hoskyns that the latter's Trampled Under Foot oral bio was the most accurate account of all of them.
Make of that what you will…
*Robert himself has admitted this does apply to him.
RP: Well, don’t forget that the reason people dress up and become rock ‘n’ roll stars is because I think we have something wrong with us anyway. We have something missing. Some kind of personality deficiency if you like, which we have to compensate for by being the centre of attention.
London, February 1988, first published in Details Magazine in July 1988
RP: No matter what we say, entertainers are usually quite insecure, wobbly characters underneath, and maybe that bit of glory or that bit of expression or whatever it is compensates in some area.
