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Virgin Books will be rocking out with a new biography of Led Zeppelin lead guitarist Jimmy Page after acquiring the title in a joint deal with Crown Publishers in the US.

Publishing director Ed Faulkner bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Linda Kaplan at Crown Publishers in New York to Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page.

Written by editor-in-chief of Guitar World magazine, Brad Tolinski, its draws on more than 50 hours of conversation with Page.

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Back when Syd Barrett led Pink Floyd , the band recorded its first album at Abbey Road Studios at the same time as The Beatles recorded Sergeant Pepper’s there and The Pretty Things were recording S F Sorrow. They called it, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Flash forward to this century and a habit I picked up in Amsterdam and can’t seem to shake. The habit is listening to the World Service on the radio all night. It’s the CBC All Night Radio here, the BBC World Service there (I think). A lot of countries contribute reports to the World Service. I don’t really understand how it works but there’s nothing quite like laying snug in your bed, free to fall asleep or listen to Holland, Sweden, Korea or Poland talk about their news. For instance, the other night there was a report from somewhere near Alice Springs, Australia about a race they held between honey bees and homing pigeons. The bees won.
Of course, it you’re tired and working and need to get up early in the morning, it’s unwise to indulge this habit. You lose too much sleep. At the moment, though, I am indulging this habit and the other night I must have dozed off and awoke to a female voice with an English accent declaring that the seventh chapter of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows proved his hidden but genuine pantheism.
Kenneth Grahame was born in Scotland and spent all of his working life in a bank in London. According to Wikipedia he died in 1932 and The Wind in the Willows was published in 1908.
As I rolled around in the dark, it occurred to me that Van Morrison had included a song on The Healing Game cd called The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The chorus is “The wind in the willows and the piper at the gates of dawn”.
And Fred Armstrong out in Newfoundland actually talked on CBC radio about The Wind in the Willows. It was his opinion that the book was not a children’s book at all, that it was really written for adults. There was no script for the show but he said he went over the top a little when he called it, “Shakespeare with fur”.
It’s probably the combination of poetry and music in Van Morrison’s song that appeals to me so much. When I actually read chapter seven which is called The Piper at the Gates of Dawn in Grahame’s book, I discovered poetic language there too. In fact, Van used several phrases verbatim from the book or almost verbatim. When Grahame uses “the daybreak not so very far off”, Morrison uses “the daybreak not so very far away” and when Grahame writes “the light grew steadily stronger”, Morrison sings “grew steadily strong”.
And Fred, an old friend and veteran reporter (30 years) just published his first fictional novel, Happiness of Fish (Jesperson Publishing., 2007) in St John’s. He’s a creative soul, one who never gives up on his dreams. If he was interested in the book, there must be something to it.
So I asked him and here’s what he said, “Wind in the Willows is a deep little book about a rather Taoist bunch of beasties sitting around writing poems and banqueting between adventures....”
“Opinion seems to be split on the Pan chapter of WIW. People love it or hate it.... I think WIW is a comfortably sentimental look at nature as deity.
I think anyone who has been scared at sea or lost in the woods and come home can handle the balance between a nature that creates us and takes us away or maybe doesn’t. There’s also something appealing about a deity that performs a Men in Black mind wipe after you trip over him. Ratty and Mole don’t remember him when it’s all over. They take the little otter off to breakfast rather than sitting down and writing the Book of Revelation.”
The words in Van’s writing which are taken straight out of chapter seven are:” heavenly music” and “song-dream” though one doesn’t have a dash connecting them and the other does.
Graham writes “when the vision had vanished” and Morrison writ

An apparently pirated copy of the trailer for David Fincher‘s adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has materialized on YouTube. Above, we’ve embedded the shaky video.

According to Entertainment Weekly, the trailer features Trent Reznor and Karen O’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” in the background. We also see glimpses of Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as Lisbeth Salander.

The trailer calls it “the feel bad movie of Christmas”–what do you think?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Some Friday Afternoon Led (stats) for Your Head...

File this under apropos of nothing/just for fun, but I felt the need to share my IT professional brother's latest word research here on my CWIM blog.

My brother and my classic-rock-digging teenage niece were listening to Led Zeppelin in the car, he tells me, and they had their usual discussion about how a rock song can't be a true rock song without the word babe or baby in it, or a reference to a female. "So," says my bro, "I decided to find a way to count the frequency of each word in all Led Zep songs. I included the titles of the song in my search, and used a lyrics list compiled by an obsessed fan who painstakingly documented what Robert Plant actually sung in their songs."

Here are my brother's Led Zeppelin word counts. Should I set him to work on the Judy Blume catalog? On what three occasions does Plant sing "lollipop"? And why isn't Houses of the Holy on my iPod?

Click here for the online word frequency counter my brother used. Might be fun to apply to your WIP!

821 the
695 i
673 ah
632 you
603 oh
548 a
491 my
441 yeah
399 to
384 ooh
360 and
332 baby
313 me
291 it
234 love
231 of
202 know
193 on
193 la
189 your
181 all
177 in
166 that
161 now
155 i'm
148 it's
144 is
138 no
138 hey
129 gonna
128 so
128 do
123 ahh
119 down
111 ya
109 for
108 don't
107 whoa
104 be
103 when
98 time
94 way
93 just
90 got
89 but
88 go
87 come
82 babe
80 well
73 she
73 from
72 with
72 what
72 we
69 one
69 i've
69 good
68 woman
68 hoo
68 been
65 let
65 keep
65 can
64 if
64 have
62 tell
60 see
58 how
57 ain't
56 they
56 take
56 little
55 will
55 light
54 that's
54 her
54 gotta
53 feel
53 day
53 can't
53 back
52 said
52 bring
52 alright
51 wanna
50 away
49 night
49 home
49 get
48 really
46 mama
46 ha
45 woo
44 uh
44 as
43 was
43 never
43 are
42 she's
42 right
42 like
42 give
41 hear
40