Rating = 6

Hedonism. Stairway to Heaven is soaking in it. With all the sex and drugs in this story, it’s amazing that Led Zeppelin found time to create some of the most successful and influential albums in rock history. Although he is defiantly unapologetic for it, at least Richard Cole recognizes Led Zeppelin’s excessive, self-centered lifestyle for what it was.

Cole was the band’s tour manager for 12 years, a time that saw Zeppelin become the low-standard bearers for hedonistic rock-star behavior. Anyone looking for insight into the creation of LZ’s music should definitely look elsewhere; the music is incidental to other facets of the band members’ lives. What Cole does deliver is a first-hand view of relentless alcohol and drug binges, perverse sex, and scatological practical jokes. The best that can be said about episodes such as goading a groupie into having sex with a shark, John Bonham defecating in a woman’s shoe, or Cole kidnapping teenaged girls for a prank, is that they break up the arduous quest to score heroin.

While the book does seem to live up to its “uncensored” billing, Cole skirts one of the perennial questions surrounding the band. The closest Cole comes to exposing “the truth about Page’s dabbling in black magic”—per the back cover’s claim—is to say that Jimmy Page refused to discuss his interest in the occult with the others. While Cole is admirably frank about his own shortcomings, he shares the others’ appalling lack of concern for the victims of their freewheeling lifestyles. Admissions such as, “we treated girls like just another commodity,” do crop up, but overall, Cole takes a dismissive “boys will be boys” attitude to their behavior.

Like many show-business stories, Led Zeppelin’s is repulsive, not so much for what they did to succeed, as what they did with their success. That said, Stairway to Heaven is probably as authentic a document of the rock superstar lifestyle as there is. — James A. Gardner

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