Discover Top Posts Tagged with #stephen davis

The first two concerts of the 1973 tour were at Atlanta Stadium and Tampa Stadium, both baseball parks.

I was sitting with the band in their dressing room in Atlanta, looking out the window watching the throngs of kids walk in, when John Paul Jones sarcastically quipped, “Come on, kiddies, and bring us your money.” Robert looked at him, genuinely shocked, and admonished him without a trace of cynicism, “Jonesy! Those are our fans.”

Zeppelin played a three-hour set without an opening act, and at some point during the middle Peter pointed to a window that overlooked a highway in which cars were speeding by. “Look at that,” he said to me with childlike excitement. “In here people are screaming and jumping around and having the time of their life, and out there those people in those cars don’t have the slightest idea what is going on.” I later told of this moment to Stephen Davis, who used it in his best-seller about the band, Hammer of the Gods, but in Stephen’s version Peter was making this observation to exhort me to make the band more famous. My actual interpretation was quite different. I felt that in the euphoria of the moment he was simply tripping out on the notion of parallel realities occurring so close to each other. Rock concerts at their best generated a tribal reality for the fans, in which they shared moments of all-consuming joy and later felt they shared a secret that nonfans could never understand.

—Danny Goldberg, from his 2008 memoir Bumping Into Geniuses: My Life Inside the Rock and Roll Business

#led zeppelin #robert plant #john paul jones #jimmy page #john bonham #danny goldberg #peter grant #hammer of the gods #stephen davis #atlanta #1973

#stephen davis #shirtless #armpits

Stephen Davis: Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga (1985)

When Hammer of the Gods was published in 1985, Led Zeppelin's hallowed status atop the rock 'n' roll pantheon was still unquestioned and dearly missed by their millions of orphaned fans ... uh, still is, I guess.

So author Stephen Davis' less-than-worshipful, often quite negative, even scandalous exploration into the band's greatness, hubris, and mythology -- aptly subtitled a 'saga' -- became an instant best-seller but left a sour taste in many mouths.

Promptly and publicly discredited by all three surviving band members -- Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, and John Paul Jones -- plus their larger-than-life manager Peter Grant, the book relied perhaps too heavily on the recollections of Zeppelin's former tour manager Richard Cole, who may have had his own axe to grind, and therefore added some verbal "cutlery" to Davis' drawer-full of sharpened knives.

Still, for all the doubt cast and "it wasn't quite like that" excuses made, many of the more controversial misadventures described within have seldom been disproven outright, and many have, instead, been corroborated by other sources.

So, while Hammer of the Gods may no longer be the consensus first choice of Led Zeppelin bios one can reach for, it's certainly not the last, and it's still probably the most compelling page-turner.

Featured Records:

Led Zeppelin: Led Zeppelin IV (1971)

Led Zeppelin: Led Zepelin II (1969)

Led Zeppelin: The Song Remains the Same (1976)

Buy from: Amazon

#led zeppelin #jimmy page #robert plant #john paul jones #john bonham #hard rock #classic rock #peter grant #stephen davis

Eurasian Bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula)

#eurasian bullfinch #pyrrhula pyrrhula #fringillidae #passeriformes #stephen davis #birds

"This is a song," she intones in a western drawl, "about an old Welsh witch." And then she lets Rhiannon cast her magic cathode-ray spell. The song lasts almost seven minutes. Stevie pushes the beat with an arm gesture, and Fleetwood kicks it.

Stephen Davis

#quotes #stephen davis #gold dust woman #stevie nicks #fleetwood mac #\m/#Rhiannon

Four Queer Movies About White Toxic Masculinity and Homophobia

Plenty of movies deal with the ways in which internalized homophobia hurts the gay and bisexual men who embody it. In Brokeback Mountain, Ennis is stuck in a mindset of toxic masculinity, and for the most part this manifests in his own misery as he's unable to really have a life with Jack Twist.

In contrast, the films below look at characters whose toxic masculinity and internalized homophobia manifest as violence against other people - namely, out gay men. And for some reason, this is a sub-genre of film that I find intriguing. So here are a list of 4 movies about toxic masculinity and homophobia, as explored through a queer lens.

All these movies have trigger warnings for: violence, blood, sexual violence, and homophobia.

In chronological order of US release:

Tom at the Farm (2013) (directed by Xavier Dolan, based on the play by Michel Marc Bouchard) - Tom at the Farm is a French-Canadian psychosexual thriller in which Tom (Xavier Dolan) travels to rural Canada to attend his boyfriend's funeral. While there, Tom finds out his boyfriend hadn't come out to his mom, Agathe (Lisa Roy) or his brother, Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal). The psychosexual aspect comes from the interaction between Francis and Tom. Francis is extremely homophobic and physically violent to Tom. Yet he's also clearly attracted to him. And Tom is drawn to Francis, as he deals with his grief at the loss of his boyfriend. (Additional trigger warning for choking).

Drown (2015) (directed by Dean Francis, based on the play by Stephen Davis) - Drown is an Australian sexual thriller/horror movie in which Phil (Jack Matthews), an out gay lifesaver (lifeguard), joins a new lifesaving club. Len (Matt Levett) and Meat (Harry Cook) are forced to contend with their own secrets and repression as Phil disrupts the status quo. The story is told through Len's perspective and there the camera depicts a really queer eye. Which is good, in that it ensures that the audience understands what's motivating Len from the outset. He's hiding himself from everyone around him, but the audience knows. The tension and horror aspect come from not knowing how queer Len will let himself be before breaking, and also not knowing how far Len's going to take his homophobic violence - will someone end up dead. (Additional trigger warnings for vomit, parental abuse, and sexual assault).

Beach Rats (2017) (written and directed by Eliza Hittman) - Beach Rats is an American movie that takes place in Brooklyn, New York. Frankie (Harris Dickinson) spends his summer days hanging out with his friends on the beach, doing drugs, and picking up girls on the pier. But he's also secretly going online to hook up with older men at night. This is more of a straight forward drama than the other movies on this list. The tension here comes from Frankie (and the audience) not knowing which life and choices he'll make. (Additional trigger warning for sexual assault).

Consequences (2018) (written and directed by Darko Stante) - Consequences is a Slovenian film about a teenager, Andrej (Matej Zemljič) who is sentenced to a youth detention center after committing some small crimes. While there, he ends up attracted to Željko (Timon Šturbej), the self-appointed leader of a group of boys at the detention center. The adults who run the center are largely incompetent, and so the boys largely do whatever they want - which means a whole lot of vying for status in their hierarchy. (It's been awhile since I've seen this film so I'm not sure if there are any additional trigger warnings).