Criticism
Many reviewers took note of the sensationalist and sordid 'tell-all' style of Cole's account. A review Publishers Weekly stated:
Alcohol, cocaine and heroin abuse, shameless groupies and perverse pranks figure largely in the saga. Cole boasts of his and the band's phenomenal appetites for liquor, drugs and sex while denouncing those who say Led Zeppelin harmed the international legions of teenage girls who routinely sought rock-star notches in their bedposts.
However, despite the fact that he was also credited with "celebrat the band's innumerable musical accomplishments", Cole's book was criticised by members of Led Zeppelin, who accused him of fabrication and dishonesty. Guitarist Jimmy Page once commented:
There's a book written by our former road manager, Richard Cole that has made me completely ill. I'm so mad about it that I can't even bring myself to read the whole thing. The two bits that I have read are so ridiculously false, that I'm sure if I read the rest I'd be able to sue Cole and the publishers. But it would be so painful to read that it wouldn't be worth it.
Bass player John Paul Jones has expressed similar views about Cole's reliability, stating in a magazine interview that Cole's accounts are "a mish-mash of several stories put together, usually with the wrong endings and making us look miserable bastards rather than the funsters we were." Jones was so incensed at the depiction of John Bonham in Cole's book that he decided never to speak to him again. In another interview, Jones claimed when he asked Cole about why he'd exaggerated the group's behaviour for the book, Cole explained that "he'd been a drug addict who needed the money".
Read more about this topic: Stairway To Heaven: Led Zeppelin Uncensored
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“... criticism ... makes very little dent upon me, unless I think there is some real justification and something should be done.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)