Bring It On Home: Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin and Beyond: The Story of Rock's Greatest Manager

Description

Bring it on Home is a celebration, a cautionary tale and a compelling human drama. Written with the full co-operation of the Grant family and with access to Grant's private correspondence, business contracts and photographs, this biography features interviews with the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin, and examines Grant's remarkably close (and some suggest unhealthy) relationship with Jimmy Page, his troubled relationship with Robert Plant and his great friendship with the late drummer John Bonham. Stories about how Grant intimidated the producers of The Song Remains the Same and the drug-related excess surrounding Swan Song Records and Grant's relationship with John Bindon and his extended coterie of Kings Road criminals are told with great candour, while the details of a plot to kidnap Led Zeppelin's band members' children by Jamaican gangsters are revealed for the first time. It also tells the dramatic and bleakly humorous family story of how Grant's estranged wife, and two children, Helen and Warren, dealt with this unusual and often tumultuous life. Warren Grant discusses, with unflinching honesty, an often-dangerous adolescence spent with a drug-addicted father, surrounded by groupies and dealers, in a house filled with shotguns. The narrative also features walk-on parts from Bob Dylan, Stanley Kubrick, Freddie Mercury, Elizabeth Taylor, Keith Moon, Elvis Presley, Elvis's father Vernon and Pope John XIII. As Warren Grant says now: 'My dad knew everyone'.

Mark Blake is a long-time contributor to Q and Mojo, and has also been published in The Times, Classic Rock, Daily Telegraph and Rolling Stone. He is the author of three previous books, including the bestselling Pigs Might Fly: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd.

It's tempting to dismiss Grant as a supremely unappetising figure, so it is a credit to this enthralling and rigorously researched book that we get a sufficiently three-dimensional portrait to be able to understand what drove him * Sunday Times * A juicy saga of excess all areas, Mark Blake's biography of Led Zeppelin's notoriously combative manager, Peter Grant, reads at times like an all-you-can-eat buffet of guilty pleasures . . . a riotous rollercoaster ride full of larger-than-life characters . . . the first authorised in-depth portrait . . . an entertaining journey into a lost epoch of unchecked superstar excess * The Times * Exhaustive and detailed resume . . . the detail is priceless . . . Blake has talked to everyone, and the stories are both lurid and melancholy * Mail on Sunday * Meticulous always entertaining . . . never shies away from its subject's belligerent reputation . . . Naturally, this is a book about Zeppelin as well as Grant, but their story, as told through a Peter Grant-shaped lens, is magnified and augmented . . . A tale as expansive and complex as the man himself -- James McNair * Mojo * The incredible inside story of Led Zeppelin's fabled hardman manager . . . forensically-researched . . . the volume of other new stories unearthed here is impressive . . . To say Bring It On Home is a rambunctious page-turner is an understatement; but despite all the violence and weirdness, you can't help liking the 'real' Peter Grant who emerges here * Planet Rock * Grimly entertaining . . . richly anecdotal . . . insight into a thankfully lost world * Q magazine * Glimpses of this former wrestler and doorman's life have made him a legend, but this is the first time it has been revealed in depth. With a wealth of unseen pics and detail, Bring It On Home is like Grant himself - awesome * Weekend Sport * In this entertaining, sympathetic biography, music journalist Mark Blake . . . provides a fresh perspective on the Zeppelin story * Observer * Of the many Led Zeppelin biographies marking the band's 50th anniversary, this is the most illuminating -- Will Hodgkinson * The Times * [Grant] is captured vividly by Mark Blake, who paints a compelling, warts-and-all portrait of a figure who was as much a gangster as a Svengali, equal parts visionary and monster -- Dan Cairns * Sunday Times * Well-researched . . . at once amusing, candid, guarded, vague, clever and occasionally contradictory . . . Blake has written a pleasantly humane portrayal of a much-mythologised man -- John Perry * Record Collector * Shed[s] new light on how excess and tragedy tore this amazing band apart * The Sun *