Then came a musical epiphany, and it's the only way I can describe the moment, one lunch hour at Patterson and Barr's record shop in the Octagon, the first in Dunedin, from memory, to offer would-be record buyers a stereo ''listening post'', a try-before-you-buy service that pretty much changed the way I thought about music.
A friend suggested I try the latest album from a newish English band, Led Zeppelin, mainly because it featured ex-Yardbirds guitarist Jimmy Page. The stylus dropped on to the opening track of Led Zeppelin III and my senses were assailed by a thundering Page guitar riff and the howling banshee cry of Robert Plant's intro to Immigrant Song.
''Aaah-eeaaah! Aaaah-eeaaah! We come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow...''
That was it. Smitten. Instantaneously. Unlike Bono, I had, indeed, found what I was looking for.
The inscription I scrawled on the cover showed I bought that album in November, 1970, and before the year was out had scrimped and saved to buy the band's first two albums. Thereafter no teenage party in Dunedin was compete without a non-stop ''Led Zep'' soundtrack. They were, unquestionably, the greatest rock band in the world and Plant was without peer as a vocalist, his ''pipes'' a biological, audiological miracle.
Thus, I jumped at the chance to read this latest attempt at a Robert Plant biography, given I had only read Rolling Stone articles, but not full-length books on him, or the band, which, when I think about it, is unforgivable.
Perhaps though that's why, as I worked my way through the 360 pages of Paul Rees' research, I constantly felt underwhelmed. I was expecting, perhaps unrealistically, something far more authoritative from an author who has spent much of his lengthy career watching, listening and writing about the band and its hugely talented frontman.
It always felt like Rees was observing from a distance further than arm's-length, reservations confirmed in the acknowledgments where Rees thanks Plant for his ''past interviews'', noting it is an unauthorised biography because when he asked Plant for a more hands-on involvement, the singer replied it was ''too early'' in his career - ''there's so much more to come''.
That said, I should probably be a bit fairer to Rees' final effort. It is still a good read and filled in numerous blanks in my knowledge of the band and its incomparable singer and lyricist, whose ''rebirth'' as a major musical force came with Raising Sand, his award-winning project with Allison Krauss in 2009.
- Dave Cannan is ODT day editor.
