AP Features, May 21st, 2007
For rock'n'roll fans who like to travel, there's a new guide from Santa Monica Press: "Led Zeppelin Crashed Here," by Chris Epting ($16.95).
In fact, the book is fun to leaf through even if you don't plan on hitting the road any time soon. It's packed with tidbits about larger-than-life music legends from the past 50 years and beyond, from places where they grew up and went to school, to venues where they performed and recorded their music, to sites that mark their sometimes tragic endings.
You'll be humming old Bruce Springsteen songs as you read about his youthful performances in New Jersey, and trying to remember the lyrics to the Rolling Stones' "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby" as you gaze upon a photo of a Manhattan building featured in a promotion for the song in which the band appeared in drag.
You'll learn that three of the Talking Heads' band members met at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, that Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon met as 9-year-olds at P.S. 164 in Forest Hills, Queens, N.Y., and that all the brothers in the Jackson Five attended Garnett Elementary School in Gary, Ind.
Bill Haley & the Comets first performed "Rock Around the Clock" in Wildwood, N.J., and the Beach Boys used Paradise Cove, just north of Malibu on the Pacific Coast Highway in California, as the backdrop for the cover of their first album, "Surfin' Safari." The house featured on the cover of Jackson Browne's "Late for the Sky" album is located at 215 S. Lucerne St., in Hollywood, according to the book, and the E Street that gave Springsteen's band its name is in Belmar, N.J., a few blocks east of Highway 71.
A section called "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" can help you find the gravesites of Duane Allman (Macon, Ga.), Johnny Cash (Hendersonville, Tenn.), and Ritchie Valens (Mission Hills, Calif.), while elsewhere in the book you'll learn the location of a marker in the woods of Tennessee marking the site of Patsy Cline's plane crash, and where Sonny Bono was skiing when he hit a tree and died (Heavenly Ski Resort, near the border of Nevada and California).
For more information on the book, visit http://www.santamonicapress.com.
