Read What You Want Is In The Limo: On The Road With Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, And The Who In 1973, The Year The Sixties Died And The Modern Rock Star Was Born (2013)
What You Want Is In The Limo: On The Road With Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, And The Who In 1973, The Year The Sixties Died And The Modern Rock Star Was Born (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
3.5 stars. Fascinating slice of '70s history focusing, as the title indicates, on the 1973 tours of three of the time's biggest rock bands: Led Zeppelin, The Who, and Alice Cooper. Author Michael Walker has a fun, wry writing style that zips by easily enough, but annoyingly delivers much of the story in a rather breathless "you are there" present tense. The shifting verb tenses drove me nuts, especially considering that 1973 is IN THE PAST. Geez, there's nothing shameful about past tense - get over it.He includes numerous behind the scenes nuggets, both from the tours and, much more interesting to me, from the recording sessions - all the album creative, performance, and mixing work for the albums that preceded the tours to promote them. Not surprisingly much of actual tours history is rather disturbing. The bands' members may have made great music (personally, I'm really partial to Led Zeppelin, The Who to an extent, and Alice Cooper not at all), but man could they behave like utter assholes - there's just no other word for it. Still, if your formative years were the '70s, quibbles aside with the book and behaviors of many of the star players, this is a gripping read. If nothing else, it's a fresh reminder of how lucky we then youth are to have gotten out of the decade alive. This was a quick-and-easy read, not that there's anything inherently wrong with that. In a weird way the book subverts its own subtitle. I came away from it really feeling like the case had been made pretty conclusively that Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies album and tour created the modern (though now actually pretty dated) archetype of rock-star excess. It's as if the author threw in additional, extraneous information about Led Zeppelin and The Who because those bands have much more name/song recognition and more respectable legacies (and also to pad the book out to just barely crack 200 pages). Still, all in all, it's an interesting transitional moment in pop history examined from the perspective of two legendary English bands and one crazy American one.
What do You think about What You Want Is In The Limo: On The Road With Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, And The Who In 1973, The Year The Sixties Died And The Modern Rock Star Was Born (2013)?
A fascinating read. Lots of insight on the evolution of the modern rock band.
—scherell29
Really I don't want to know that any of my favourite musicians behaved badly.
—Sam
Liked it. Didn't love it. But did make me wish I was there.
—Saalihah
