The one 1982 album that officially killed Led Zeppelin: “Oh my God, no”
The entire concept of Led Zeppelin seemed too good to be true when they first started.
Everyone expected Jimmy Page to make something interesting after flying solo from The Yardbirds, but getting some of the greatest musicians of all time all under one roof wasn’t something anyone was planning on when they first heard tunes like ‘Dazed and Confused’. In fact, it might have been too good to be true for a reason, as the whole thing seemed to come to an abrupt stop once John Bonham passed away.
But did it really end? There’s been no real shortage of great Zeppelin bootlegs that have been released ever since the band went their separate ways, and Page certainly has no problem remastering their live material for records like How the West Was Won years later. He was happy to keep the spirit of Zeppelin going throughout the years, but the idea of them finding someone to replace Bonham was going to be impossible. He was an animal, and any chance of giving the band a new heartbeat just felt wrong.
After all, Phil Collins had tried his hand at playing with a reunited band, but even Page knew that it was never going to be a good fit when Collins hardly knew the material that they were playing half the time they were onstage at Live Aid. If we’re being perfectly honest, though, the band did seem to cut things off right before they started getting into territory that was a little bit too experimental for their taste.
Presence and In Through the Out Door were both fantastic albums, but they were clearly going in directions that would have been divisive for fans to take in. Maybe this was the right place to stop after Bonzo passed away, but even after the band seemed ready to pack it in, Page was a little bit jaded when he got a call from his record company saying that they needed one more record to see out their contract.
These kinds of label disputes happen all the time, but the idea of throwing together a half-assed Zeppelin project just felt wrong. And while the band did a respectable job of doing themselves and Bonham justice on Coda, Page remembered being a lot more cynical about the whole thing when he first heard about their ordeal. So for the first time, Zeppelin was making an album because they had to.
The whole thing was still impeccably constructed, but Page felt that this was bound to be the final death knell for Zeppelin in terms of original material, saying, “It was put to me that there was another album due. It was contractual. I was like, ‘Oh my God, no.’ [It was] an attempt to make something out of very little – or nothing. That was the most difficult album I had to approach. I knew that it was just going to be things that were left over. It couldn’t be current. We’d lost John. We couldn’t do another album.”
But that doesn’t mean that the record doesn’t have its fair share of great material in there as well. ‘Bonzo’s Montreux’ is a good way to remember what a fantastic drummer he was during his prime, and even when you look through some of the other tunes, tracks like ‘We’re Gonna Groove’ are decent enough tunes that show the band cutting loose the way they used to do in their early days.
It’s not anything too substantial, but the purpose of the album is all in the album title. The whole thing was meant to be a postscript of what had come before, and even if it didn’t hold up as well as the rest of their catalogue, all it was meant to do was put a nice bow on the end of a brilliant career. Zeppelin probably would have wanted a different ending to their story, but even under the circumstances, they were going to go out on their own terms.
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