Album Reviews
Side one is early days. The opener, a frontal assault on Ben E. King and James Bethea's "We're Gonna Groove," is definitive 1969 raunch. The essential elements of Zeppelin's sound are already firmly in place: Page's propulsive guitar playing, Robert Plant's pealing vocal, John Paul Jones' duty-bound bass, and the late John Bonham's creature with - the - atom - brain drumming. "Poor Tom," from 1970, isn't completely successful at mating an acoustic-guitar turn with an insistent drum tattoo, but it does demonstrate Page's links to the Bert Jansch-John Renbourn school of urbane folk picking. The walking-bass rendition of Willie Dixon's "I Can't Quit You Baby," tossed off at a sound check that same year, perfectly captures the bluesmania of the period, complete with a classically overwrought guitar solo. More impressive is Page's frantic, trebly chording on "Walter's Walk," which recalls Paul Burlison's steaming leads with Johnny Burnette's Rock 'n' Roll Trio in the mid-Fifties.
Side two skips ahead to November 1978 for three outtakes from the Stockholm sessions for In through the Out Door, Zeppelin's last LP before the group-sundering death of John Bonham. Recorded at Abba's state-of-the-art Polar Studios, these tracks the bone-rattling "Ozone Baby," the hypnotic "Darlene" and "Wearing and Tearing"are about as wonderful as hard rock & roll gets.
Completing the picture there was no getting around this is "Bonzo's Montreux," recorded in Switzerland in 1976. Extended rock drum solos are notoriously the pits, but this one, electronically enhanced by Page and executed with considerable panache by Bonham's "drum orchestra," is true to the spirit of Sandy Nelson, and thus vestigially nifty at the very least. Coda is an honest and honorable career profile, and a classy way to go out.
(Posted: Jan 20, 1983)
Your Turn
Review 1 of 1
miccc writes:
Does Kurt Loder not know that Led Zeppelin were not a heavy metal band? Yes, they virtually invented the genre with their first two masterpiece albums, but anybody that's familiar with Zeppelin knows that, even from the very beginning, Zep's music with its breathtaking variety and scope, defies simple or easy categorization. Kurt has to know better. Coda was a haphazard affair released two years after Bonham's death to fulfill contractual obligations for Zeppelin. For almost any other band, outtakes and rehearsals would be of little quality and less interest, but, of coarse, Led Zeppelin was like no other band, aka the greatest rock band to ever strut the earth, thus their scraps were far superior to most band's very best work. In fact, this album, though certainly not in the same league with their first six world changing records, has aged remarkably well and is well worth owning.
Dec 18, 2007 09:58:23
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- Portions of Album Content Provided by All Music Guide © 2008 All Media Guide, LLC.