Young rock enthusiasts of the 21st century, those of you who listen to your music on a little shiny thing with earphones and who read only on an LCD screen, come near and we your grandparents shall tell you of a long-ago time when men with Gibsons were the knights errant of the land, striding across stages shrouded in mist, soloing at great length! What’s that? You don’t really know what Led Zeppelin is or was? And you’ve never read that salacious earlier biography, Stephen Davis’s “Hammer of the Gods”? Well, do I have a story for you. Or at least this Mick Wall does, this fellow from England who has also written or co-written definitive biographies of Ozzy, Bono and Iron Maiden. The back story is like this: A hot session guitarist named Jimmy Page kills some time in a band called the Yardbirds (“Shapes of Things,” etc.) until he decides he can do better by assembling the New Yardbirds — except that he is unable to lure away the Who’s rhythm section, which he devoutly wishes to steal, or Steve Marriott of Small Faces, a singer of note. He settles instead for a couple of country yokels, Robert Plant and John Bonham, vocals and drums respectively, and another somewhat frustrated session dude, John Paul Jones, who plays the bass. Of these, Page is most happy about Bonham, who hits the drums as if he is trying to affect seismic activity in the British Isles. About the singer, who is very good looking, he’s not sure. Page doesn’t pay much attention to the bass player at all.

The band performs its first gig within weeks of its initial rehearsal and books time in the studio not long after. Mostly they borrow their material, in Wall’s account, which means they take other people’s songs and change them very little. If this were literature, young rock enthusiasts, these songs would amount to instances of plagiarism, but since this narrative takes place not long after the folk revival and some of these Zeppelin songs were trad, adopted from earlier folk and blues pieces, the band somehow, at least initially, escapes with changing a couple of lines and giving the song a new title — “Black Mountain Side” instead of “Black Water Side,” and so forth. Turns out that a lot of Led Zeppelin stuff was “borrowed” to one degree or another, including “Dazed and Confused,” “Whole Lotta Love,” “When the Levee Breaks” and even (yikes!) their biggest, most gargantuan hit, a track called “Stairway to Heaven” that most of us have now heard so many times we would rather die than hear it again. Some people, according to Mick Wall, believe the opening guitar lines of “Stairway” were filched from the band Spirit.

Notwithstanding their compositional deficits, Zeppelin has that elusive band chemistry, and so they make some more albums, which sell really shocking numbers of copies, tens of millions, and between albums they tour the United States a lot, and do really horrible, morally offensive things to young women who offer themselves up for delectation. We used to think, young rock enthusiasts, that this behavior was somehow marginally explicable, and that is the big difference between this book about Led Zeppelin and earlier books. For example: included herein is the famous story of the groupie and the shark, which has been dealt with elsewhere at some length. This bit of lore is now so upsetting and so repellent that it makes you never want to listen to the band again. Nor do the band’s demurrals on the groupie issue convince you otherwise. (Robert Plant: “The thing people forget when they tut-tut about this stuff is what a laugh we were having. People have a tendency to look back on the band as this dark force spreading its wings when we were just young guys, having a good time. The main thing I remember most about those days now is the laughter.”)

And then there is the Aleister Crowley part of the story. Back then, you see, people had their alternative spiritual systems. This inspired them to create, I suppose, and so this guy Page, he went in search and came up with a very recondite philosophical backwater. He got into this necromancer, Crowley. How did the Crowley program work exactly? Wall, in perhaps the very best and most cogently argued section of his account (which often manages elsewhere to feel both rushed and repetitious), does include a great deal on exactly what Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis stood for, among which was, “heterosexual magickal acts (adoration of the phallus as the microcosmic counterpart to the sun)” and “masturbatory and autosexual techniques (referred to as the Lesser Work of Sol).”