I recently read Mark Blake's Bring It On Home, a biography of Peter Grant, manager of Led Zeppelin. It's not a great book, but Blake does manage to keep the focus on Grant throughout, so we get the familiar story of Led Zep's career from a fresh vantage point. The degree to which it was Page's band is heavily emphasised, as that's how Grant saw it. On a couple of occasions, even quite late in the band's lifetime, Grant would seem to regard Robert Plant as potentially dispensable.
Grant's aggressiveness and his readiness to use violence is not ignored, but Blake does take pains to portray him as more bark than bite. Paul Rogers, though, is depicted as close to 100% prick. Also, Grant's son Warren comes across as a pretty obnoxious little brat, a bit like AJ from The Sopranos.
Grant was very secretive about his childhood, to the extent that some documents were literally buried with him, and in the book his early life is frustratingly thinly sketched. Even his twenties when he had several jobs which you would think would be replete with anecdotes and insights into the times - wrestler, enforcer for slum landlord Peter Rachman, movie extra and bit-part actor - are passed over too swiftly, but it's a pretty good read on the whole.
