get the led out

Is there a more mythic band than Led Zeppelin? At the pinnacle of their success, with Robert Plant's hair lighted by stadium lights, they looked like they'd just come down off Mt. Olympus. "Plant," writes Mick Wall in his new book "When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin," "was tall, blond and looked good enough to eat, a veritable golden god shaking what he'd got -- the perfect visual foil to [Jimmy] Page's darker, more slender, slightly effeminate persona." "When Giants Walked the Earth" devotes a lot of time to this mythic image of the band, telling us about Page's studies of magic and how this shaped their music -- maybe even contributed to the band's decline. It's a hoary cliche, but one has to ask, did Led Zeppelin sell its soul for rock 'n' roll?

more from Nick Owchar at the LAT here.