The Led Zeppelin album Robert Plant said should have never been made
The ending of Led Zeppelin reads like one of the great Greek tragedies of rock and roll.
For generations of kids, this was one of the few bands that could have given The Beatles a run for their money, and yet in one instant, the death of John Bonham meant that everything came crashing down. Any other band would have been devastated to lose that kind of powerhouse, but Robert Plant had enough good sense to realise that the band couldn’t have gone on a day longer after he passed away.
After all, who in their right mind would try to replace Bonzo? There were certainly excellent drummers in rock and roll who could have filled in that slot if they put in the work, but none of them would have had his sense of power and musical sensibilities. He was locked in with Jimmy Page every time they played together, and his death wasn’t just a simple case of a rock and roll casualty. It was a death in the Zeppelin family, and Plant figured the next best thing was to move on from the band.
Because if there’s one person who could have afforded to shake things up, it was Plant. He couldn’t have been able to maintain his status as a ‘Golden God’ for the rest of his life, and the rest of the world was wide open for him to play with different sounds. But the more that people saw the different Zeppelin knockoffs coming out, that was only going to make the heart grow fonder for that one day when they would all bury the hatchet.
But even with a handful of reunion shows, all new Zeppelin material was only going to be a half-hearted idea. Page and Plant was the closest thing that anyone was going to get, and even listening to those tunes, Plant wasn’t breaking out his inner ‘Percy’ or anything. He had become a much different singer over the years, but even if Page managed to move on with The Firm, Coda feels like a half-formed idea rather than a finished album that the band were strong-armed into releasing.
A lot of the tunes are outtakes, and while it is nice to hear Bonzo get one last spotlight to own on ‘Bonzo’s Montreux’, a lot of the songs like ‘Ozone Baby’ don’t hold a candle next to the true classics on the rest of their records. And considering how much they switched things up, Plant felt that the record felt like a cheap way for everyone to make a few extra bucks off of the band’s memory.
No one was supposed to hear these tunes, so by the time that it was out in the world, Plant had washed his hands of the whole thing, saying, “When Coda was discussed, I really had—I don’t know, I’d just kind of had enough of the whole thing. If you start playing for something other than just kudos and money, then that should be part of the motive all the way through. And when Bonzo died, it’s the only reason to start staying actively involved with Led Zeppelin.”
There are still a handful of post-Zeppelin releases that have been pretty damn good like How the West Was Won, but it’s easy to see what Plant was getting at there. Every one of Zeppelin’s proper albums was a thought-out departure, and had they been able to make another album, they wouldn’t have been going back in the vaults to pick out whatever scraps they had lying around from the last record.
It’s still a decent listen for connoisseurs who want to get the full experience of what Zeppelin sounded like, but for anyone trying to dive headfirst into Zeppelin, this is them at their absolute unprofessional in the studio. But if this is what the band sounded like when they were at their most raw and unpolished, it says a lot that the tunes still sound better than half of their copycat bands.
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