When the Levee Breaks (Book)
When the Levee Breaks is a book about the making of Led Zepplin IV. That’s an entire book, albeit small, about the making of one album. What sets out to be a great 200 page blog post about the making of Zep IV was found by some critics to be lacking in the fundamentals. One Amazon.com reviewer states:
“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?”
I found the book at a book warehouse for 4.00 and decided to pick it up. It just intrigued me that someone would write a book about a single album. I suppose if everything’s wrong in the book, well, that’s not cool. I’ll still give it a go and read it, it’s fairly short.
The company who published When the Levee Breaks also published books on these albums:
- Jimi Hendrix and the Making of Are You Experienced Sean Egan
- Never Break the Chain: Fleetwood Mac and the Making of Rumours by Cath Carroll
- Revolution: The Making of the Beatles’ White Album by David Quantick
- Wouldn’t It Be Nice : Brian Wilson and the Making of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Charles L. Granata
- Joy Division and the Making of Unknown Pleasures by Jake Kennedy
- Red Hot Chili Peppers and the making of Blood Sugar Sex Magic by Joel McIver
- Vinyl Frontier: The Making of Stone Roses by Nigel Cawthorne
- Not Necessarily Stoned, But Beautiful: The Making of “Are You Experienced?” by Sean Egan
- Rolling Stones and the Making of Let It Bleed by Sean Egan
- The Who and the Making of Tommy by Nigel Cawthorn
- The Making of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon by Lucian Randall
Looking at the reviews of these books on Amazon and other sites, I saw a recurring theme. ” The author didn’t do his research…” “Hire a proofreader…” “What I thought would be an interesting microscopic book about a great album ended up being like a High School Term-paper…” So, it looks as if the publisher, whom I cannot find on the internet, hired some trade writers to write a long article on a single album and call it a book. The articles/books aren’t very well thought out, researched, or written, and sell based on the title and included pictures alone. The bibliography for Levee is only 9 long at least 3 of them are not about Led Zepplin at all. It’s really too bad, because the publisher suckered me into buying the book based solely on, of course, the title and included pictures. It’s really too bad, too, if the publisher would have sought out some really top-notch writers, these could have been really excellent books, they did choose the right albums!
great post as usual!