Steve Sauer is the writer behind Lemon Squeezings: Led Zeppelin News. He explains the genesis of this site in an interview with Led Zeppelin Examiner Sonya Alexander conducted and published in June 2010.
Examiner: How did Lemon Squeezings come together?
Steve Sauer: Lemon Squeezings came about technically in 2007, but it is just the latest in a succession of online formats that began in 1998. Not everybody in my personal life wanted to read everything I wanted to say about Led Zeppelin. My parents preferred the tones of Perry Como and Harry Belafonte to Robert Plant, so I spared them the trouble. That’s what the Internet was for!
I sought out a community online that shared my enthusiasm for everything related to the band, and I spent a few days over the months between high school and college not earning money on some summer job like everybody else but just listing one event in Led Zeppelin’s history for every day of the year. This was at the point when all I had read about Led Zeppelin were just two books, Dave Lewis’s “Led Zeppelin: A Celebration” and Ritchie Yorke’s “Definitive Biography of Led Zeppelin,” and I’m sure I liberally lifted unattributed passages from both sources. As time went on, I became better educated about the rules of writing.
Quite quickly, this online newsletter I had created was going out to thousands of people every day, and it helped me land my first-ever interview with a musician, John Paul Jones. I was 21. He spent four hours of his day answering whatever questions I’d always wanted to know, and then I got to share my experiences with the thousands of people.
Read the full interview at Examiner.com.
Steve works as a writer and consultant for Carol Miller’s “Get the Led Out,” a nationally syndicated radio program dedicated to Led Zeppelin and appearing on 75 U.S. radio stations. He is also a freelance writer and musician.