Appetite for description

Stephen Davis has written about rock's biggest bands. Next up: Guns N' Roses.

MILTON - It's only rock 'n' roll, but Stephen Davis likes it.

From the instant he saw the Lizard King lurch onto the stage at the Back Bay Theatre in 1968, Davis was enthralled. He wanted to chronicle the madcap characters and profligate partying that defined the music of his generation.

"I saw [Jim] Morrison that night and thought, 'Wow,' " recalls Davis, who was a student at Boston University at the time. "This was the energy I wanted to be around."

And he has been, more or less, for the past 40 years. Davis has written a series of best-selling biographies - some authorized, some not - of rock's biggest bands, including Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, and Aerosmith. His latest, "Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N' Roses," comes out Tuesday.

Aided by a researcher, Davis has assembled interviews with roadies, tape operators, guitar techs, and groupies - "little people," he likes to call them - to tell a behind-the-scenes story that's at times tawdry and titillating, harrowing and hilarious.

"Stephen writes with elegance about rock 'n' roll," says Danny Goldberg, a onetime publicist for Led Zeppelin who's now president of Gold Village Entertainment. "You can read his books and not feel like a dumb fan. He's like those French critics who write about films in a way that makes you feel like it's art."

Davis's book about Led Zeppelin, "Hammer of the Gods," is widely regarded as the gold standard of rock bios. Published in 1985, it spent three months on the bestseller list and has sold more than 1 million copies worldwide, enabling Davis and his wife, Judy, a psychotherapist, to put their two daughters through private school and college.

"It was an instant classic," he says, relaxing on a couch in the couple's unprepossessing house at the foot of the Blue Hills in Milton. "It just seemed like fun at the time."

Davis, who'll turn 61 this fall, grew up on New York's Upper East Side. His father, Howard Davis, was a writer and director of the 1950s TV show "Howdy Doody," and also directed NBC's "Today" during the Dave Garroway era. (Visiting his father on the set one day, Davis says he was bitten by J. Fred Muggs, the show's chimpanzee mascot.)

In college, Davis was an editor of the BU News, and he went to work as a journalist after graduation. Among his first assignments, in October 1969, was covering Jack Kerouac's funeral in Lowell. He pitched the piece to Rolling Stone, then a small, alternative paper based in San Francisco. "Gregory Corso, [Jimmy] Breslin, Allen Ginsberg, all the beat elite were there," Davis says. "Like a wax dummy, Kerouac was lying in the casket. It was great." Rolling Stone printed the story and sent Davis a check for $50, which he says he spent on a bag of marijuana.

While writing for The Phoenix, Davis befriended Jon Landau, the music critic and producer who later gained fame as Bruce Springsteen's manager. Landau helped Davis get a job at Rolling Stone, where he became the record review editor, at least for a while. "I was fired for running too many jazz reviews, stuff like Archie Shepp, Miles Davis, and Santana," he says.

In 1975, Davis got a call from Goldberg, who had just become Led Zeppelin's publicist. He was looking to generate press for the harbingers of heavy metal, and wondered if Davis, for whom he'd written a few reviews at Rolling Stone, might be interested in interviewing Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.

"Zeppelin was bigger than the Stones then, but no one knew it," says Davis, who pitched the story to The Atlantic Monthly. "Danny promised us access to the band."

So Davis and his college friend Peter Simon, who had been the photo editor at the BU News, flew to California and holed up with the band - and a throng of half-naked girls - at the Continental Hyatt House, dubbed the "Riot House" because of the debauchery that ensued. (Davis and Simon were on a hotel patio with Plant when he famously yelled, "I'm a golden god!")

"I thought it was hilarious that a straight magazine like The Atlantic would run a story so full of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll," says Simon.

In the end, it didn't. The magazine spiked the story, but a decade later Davis wrote up his notes and published "Hammer of the Gods." Though not authorized by the band, the book, full of black magic and backstage bombast, has become "a key pillar of Zeppelin's mythology," says Goldberg, who credits Davis for taking minimal creative license with his superstar subjects.

"As I recall, all that mystical stuff in the book - Jimmy Page's interest in Aleister Crowley, for example - was Stephen's inference," Goldberg says. "But the history and events he describes are accurate."

The book gave Davis credibility, and before long other performers came calling, wanting him to write their stories, too.

"Mick Fleetwood was going into bankruptcy and called me up," says Davis. "Within a couple of months, I got a [book] advance and Mick had $100,000 in his pocket."

The 1990 memoir "Fleetwood: My Life and Adventures in Fleetwood Mac" became a bestseller. There were also bios of The Band, Bob Marley, and Michael Jackson, with whom Davis worked on "Moonwalk." (Continuing a family tradition, his daughter was accosted by Jackson's pet chimp Bubbles during his visit to the singer's home, the author says.)

"Stephen Davis is a national treasure," says Bebe Buell, a former Playboy Playmate and famous groupie who dated numerous rock stars, including Page, Mick Jagger, Elvis Costello, Todd Rundgren, and Steven Tyler, with whom she had a child, the actress Liv Tyler.

Because of her many A-list assignations, Buell is something of a recurring character in Davis's books. "At a very young age, Stephen dubbed me 'the eagle woman of rock 'n' roll,' and that made me feel good, a bit like Isis," she says. "There are very few historical documents about rock 'n' roll that don't have my name in them."

Buell, who recalls Davis being in the room the first time she met Tyler in the mid 1970s, was interviewed at length for "Walk This Way," Davis's authorized account of Aerosmith's roller-coaster career. The book, published in 1997, was an enormous bestseller.

"It's never the whole story when it has to get past the wives, but that book comes close," Davis says. "Of all of my books, that one is also the most drug-soaked, which is saying something."

While writing "Walk This Way," Davis traveled twice around the world with Aerosmith. The band, by then clean and sober, was attending AA meetings in Buenos Aires, Warsaw, and Tokyo even as they were sharing stories of their legendary drug use with Davis.

"He was embedded, kind of like the reporters in Iraq," says Tim Collins, Aerosmith's former manager. "What Stephen wrote was more like an MRI than a snapshot. Steven and Joe felt like they told him too much, but my position was: Why expend energy keeping secrets?"

The book upset Tyler, in particular, and is one of the reasons Collins was ultimately fired. Asked about the experience of working with Davis on "Walk This Way," Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer is mostly mum.

"I've got nothing bad to say about the guy," Kramer says. "Otherwise, I'll reserve comment."

The new book, about Guns N' Roses, has a lot in common with Davis's earlier work. It's the improbable story of a band born in the gutters of the Sunset Strip that goes on to sell millions of records. Along the way, there are the requisite overdoses, sexual escapades, foul language, and hair spray. The band did not participate in the book, but former Guns guitarist Gilby Clarke is clearly impressed that Davis is the author: "He wrote 'Hammer of the Gods,' right?"

"My books are quest sagas," Davis says, comparing his rock-star subjects to the heroes of epic poetry. "It's five guys from nowhere who go in search of fame and fortune, and find unlimited gold. . . . Instead of a chariot, they have a private plane."

Davis says he doesn't set out to write the definitive history detailing the band's every recording session and concert. Because his loyalty lies with the reader, he says, his goal is merely an entertaining story.

"On Elvis's death certificate, it reads 'straining at stool,' " Davis says, chuckling. "That's the stuff I want to know. As Joe Perry says, 'Don't bore us, get to the chorus.' "