Serious Music on the Stairway to Heaven

Susan Fast stumbled across a Led Zeppelin album when she was 14 years old and has been hooked ever since. Now an associate professor of music at McMaster University, in Ontario, Ms. Fast argues in her book In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and the Power of Rock Music (Oxford University Press) that the band -- long dismissed as derivative -- makes serious music.

Q. You're a musicologist. So why are you interested in how Jimmy Page wore his guitar or the way Robert Plant tensed his

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