“They sort of disappeared”: Jimmy Page on the lost Led Zeppelin album
Then again, Zeppelin has become the kind of group who have been over-mythologised ever since their final projects. Looking back through the different reissues, fans have been given everything from different bootlegs of shows to alternate takes to demos of what could have been great songs in the can, but never any new original material to speak of.
And when combing through their back catalogue, is it really a wonder why they didn’t want to follow up their masterpieces? Although any drummer is known as a side player in a band, what Bonzo brought to the kit was superhuman, and even if he wasn’t leathering the life out of his kit on In Through the Out Door, his sudden death from alcohol poisoning in 1980 left the band in limbo of where to go next.
Even though Robert Plant was comfortable leaving Zeppelin where it was, Jimmy Page seemed lost in the woods. Zeppelin was his baby, and looking at where he went later with the supergroup The Firm, the guitar legend looked like he was still trying to get over Bonham’s death whenever he took to the stage.
Still, there was some unfinished business to attend to once Coda came out, featuring various odds and ends as well as a tribute to their fallen bandmate on ‘Bonzo’s Montreux’. Looking at it as a proper album, though, it’s fairly anaemic by comparison, especially since there are live versions of older songs and tunes that sound closer to demos than any proper Zeppelin release.
As Page recalled, though, there were songs that they couldn’t get ahold of that were lost to time, saying, “If you knew how many bootlegs there were out on Zeppelin, those were the only studio tracks that were left. Actually there were some tracks that weren’t on [Coda] because they’d gone actually. Good tracks. They sort of disappeared in New York or somewhere. But those were all the studio recordings left from amassing all the Zeppelin tapes. And that’s only relative to the bootleg situation.”
But in some ways, it might be better than Page left the legacy where it was back in the day. Considering how well the band had been working, Coda feels more like a way of putting a final stamp on the end of Led Zeppelin without having any ambition other than to remind people of the good times.
If those songs were to ever see the light of day, though, it would be about more than simply getting new Led Zeppelin material. This would be the equivalent of unearthing rare rock artefacts the same way The Beatles had done with ‘Now and Then’.