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Nov 19, 20225 min read

Led Zeppelin - Coda (1982)

FROM THE CRYPTS - CELEBRATING PAST ALBUM RELEASES in the HISTORY of HARD ROCK & HEAVY METAL…



On November 19, 1982, Led Zeppelin released their first compilation album, Coda via their own Swan Song label.


The album is a collection of unused tracks from various sessions during Led Zeppelin's twelve-year career. It was released almost two years after the group had officially disbanded following the death of drummer John Bonham. The word coda, meaning a passage that ends a musical piece following the main body, was therefore chosen as the title.



Background:

The fifth Swan Song Records album for the band, Coda was released to honor contractual commitments to Atlantic Records and also to cover tax demands on previous monies earned. It cleared away nearly all of the leftover tracks from the various studio sessions of the 1960s and 1970s. The album was a collection of eight tracks spanning the length of Zeppelin's twelve-year history. Atlantic counted the release as a studio album, as Swan Song had owed the label a final studio album from the band. According to Martin Popoff, "there's conjecture that Jimmy [Page] called We're Gonna Groove a studio track and I Can't Quit You Baby a rehearsal track because Swan Song owed Atlantic one more studio album specifically."


Guitarist Jimmy Page explained that part of the reasoning for the album's release related to the popularity of unofficial Led Zeppelin recordings which continued to be circulated by fans:

"Coda was released, basically, because there was so much bootleg stuff out. We thought, "Well, if there's that much interest, then we may as well put the rest of our studio stuff out".

As John Paul Jones recalled:

"They were good tracks. A lot of it was recorded around the time punk was really happening... basically there wasn't a lot of Zeppelin tracks that didn't go out. We used everything."

Side One (Original LP):

We're Gonna Groove opens the album and, according to the album notes, was recorded at Morgan Studios in June 1969. It was later acknowledged to have come from a January 1970 concert at the Royal Albert Hall, with the guitar parts overdubbed and the original guitar part removed—this can be heard in the original Royal Albert Hall show on 9 January 1970. This song was used to open a number of concerts on their early 1970 tours and was originally intended to be recorded for inclusion in Led Zeppelin II. I Can't Quit You Baby is taken from the same concert as We're Gonna Groove but was listed as a rehearsal in the original liner notes. The recording was edited to remove the overall "live" feel: the crowd noise as well as the beginning and ending of the song were deleted. Crowd tracks were muted on the multitrack mixdown on this recording as with We're Gonna Groove.


Poor Tom is from sessions for Led Zeppelin III, having been recorded at Olympic Studios in June 1970, and Walter's Walk is a leftover from the sessions for Houses of the Holy.


Side Two (Original LP):

Side two consists of three outtakes from the band's previous album, In Through the Out Door. The opening track, the uptempo Ozone Baby was recorded at that album's sessions at Polar Studios, Stockholm in November 1978, as was the rock'n'roll styled Darlene.


The third track, Bonzo's Montreux was recorded at Mountain Studios, Montreux, Switzerland in September 1976. It was designed as a Bonham drum showcase, which Page treated with various electronic effects, including a harmonizer.


The final track, Wearing and Tearing was recorded at Polar in November 1978. It was written as a reaction to punk and to show that Led Zeppelin could compete with the new bands. It was planned to be released as a promotional single to the audience at the 1979 Knebworth Festival, headlined by Led Zeppelin, but this was cancelled at the last minute. It was first performed live at the 1990 Silver Clef Awards Festival at Knebworth in 1990 by Plant's band with Page guesting.



Other Tracks:

The 1993 compact disc edition has four additional tracks from the box sets, Led Zeppelin Boxed Set (1990) and Led Zeppelin Boxed Set 2 (1993), the previously unreleased Travelling Riverside Blues, White Summer/Black Mountain Side and the Immigrant Song b-side Hey, Hey, What Can I Do from the former and the previously unreleased Baby Come On Home from the latter.


Album Cover:

The album cover was designed by Hipgnosis, the fifth album cover the design group designed for Led Zeppelin. It was also the last album cover Hipgnosis designed before disbanding in 1983. The main four letters CODA are from an alphabet typeface design called "Neon" designed by Bernard Allum in 1978.



Critical Reception:

Reviewing for Rolling Stone in 1983, Kurt Loder hailed Coda as "a resounding farewell" and a "marvel of compression, deftly tracing the Zeppelin decade with eight powerful, previously unreleased tracks, and no unnecessary elaboration".


Robert Christgau wrote in his Consumer Guide column for The Village Voice:

“They really were pretty great, and these eight outtakes—three from their elephantine blues phase, three from their unintentional swan song—aren't where to start discovering why. But despite the calculated clumsiness of the beginnings and the incomplete orchestrations of the end, everything here but the John Bonham Drum Orchestra would convince a disinterested party—a Martian, say. Jimmy Page provides a protean solo on I Can't Quit You Baby and jumbo riffs throughout.”

According to Julian Marszalek of The Quietus, however, "Coda has always been regarded as the band's weakest release. Made up of eight tracks that spanned Led Zeppelin's lifetime, it refused to flow as an album. Devoid of a coherent narrative, it felt tossed together to make up for contractual obligations."


In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine said while it did not include all of the band's notable non-album recordings, it offered "a good snapshot of much of what made Led Zeppelin a great band" and featured mostly "hard-charging rock & roll", including Ozone Baby, Darlene, and Wearing and Tearing: "rockers that alternately cut loose, groove, and menace".



2015 Reissue:

A remastered version of Coda, along with Presence and In Through the Out Door, was reissued on July 31, 2015. The reissue comes in six formats: a standard CD edition, a deluxe three-CD edition, a standard LP version, a deluxe three-LP version, a super deluxe three-CD plus three-LP version with a hardback book, and as high resolution 24-bit/96k digital downloads. The deluxe and super deluxe editions feature bonus material containing alternative takes and previously unreleased songs, If It Keeps On Raining, Sugar Mama, Four Hands, St. Tristan's Sword, and Desire. The reissue was released with an altered colour version of the original album's artwork as its bonus disc's cover.


(2015 Deluxe 3CD Reissue)


The reissue was met with generally positive reviews. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received an average score of 78, based on 8 reviews. In Rolling Stone, David Fricke said it is "the unlikely closing triumph in Page's series of deluxe Zeppelin reissues: a dynamic pocket history in rarities, across three discs with 15 bonus tracks, of his band's epic-blues achievement".


Pitchfork journalist Mark Richardson was less impressed by the bonus disc, believing "there is nothing particularly noteworthy about the Bombay Orchestra tracks".


(Program for the 1979 Knebworth Festival, headlined by Led Zeppelin, where Led Zeppelin had originally planned to release the single for Wearing and Tearing)


Note: The reviews shared here are for historical reference. The views and opinions expressed within are not always supported (in full or in part) by Into the Wells. — E.N. Wells



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