Two years on from the death of their drummer, the original powerhouse John Bonham, Led Zeppelin decided it was time for a swan song. Coda was what resulted, an unexpected treat for Zeppelin fans, appropriately released through the band’s label Swan Song Records. And all eight of the tracks comprising the album’s 33 minutes feature Bonham, more alive than ever.
In the official canon of Led Zeppelin’s music, Coda is listed as their ninth studio album. Yet this description doesn’t really suit the record. It’s not as though what’s presented to us is a holistic picture of sessions for an album the band was working on before Bonham died or even an incomplete version of that picture. There’s no cohesive musical or lyrical theme encompassing the tracklist, and the single thread running through it is the same inimitable thread that binds every song Zeppelin ever recorded.
Not much work was done to finish any of the tracks after Bonham passed away. Indeed, none of the band could contemplate returning to the studio properly without their fallen comrade. Instead they simply put out all they had left to give, the last fully constituted songs leftover from the studio recordings they’d amassed during the course of a decade in which they redefined the outer limits of electric blues and hard rock. This is why the album title Coda is so fitting, even if the record’s categorisation as a singular studio effort isn’t. It doesn’t represent the main body of Zeppelin’s music but a kind of extended fadeout, the dying embers of a sonic tapestry.
As such, it wasn’t the output of a solid block of studio sessions from any particular year but the compilation of recordings from five different periods of the band’s career. The album takes us from Zeppelin’s live performance at the Royal Albert Hall in the first days of the 1970s and the sessions for their third album later that same year, through a 1972 recording for Houses of the Holy and finally to three tracks left off 1979’s In Through the Out Door, via the ear-splitting 1976 Bonham special ‘Bonzo’s Montreux’.
So why did they put the record out?
On first listen, the record can sound scattergun and somewhat confusing. That is, unless it’s been clarified beforehand that it’s not really a studio album at all but a compilation of outtakes that could otherwise be found on fan-made bootlegs.
Capitalising on the existence of these bootlegs was one part of the logic for making Coda. The other part was appeasing Atlantic Records, the parent company of Zeppelin’s label. “We owed the record company another album,” Jimmy Page told Radio. The band’s manager essentially told him they didn’t have a choice, even though Page it would be “a difficult album to put together” with the loss of Bonham still raw. Page calls the drummer’s solo track the “backbone of the album”, which inspired him to go through his band’s other recordings.
Page also added guitar overdubs to the songs ‘We’re Gonna Groove’ and ‘Walter’s Walk’, remixed the live recording of the former, and persuaded Plant to overdub vocals onto the latter. The guitarist-producer edited down the live performance of ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’, too. But he left the other five original recordings on the album untouched.
Not least, Bonzo’s orchestral exorcism of a drum kit essentially mixed itself and remained as its creator had intended. There’s a reason why Coda is Nirvana and Queens of the Stone Age drummer Dave Grohl’s favourite Zeppelin record, after all.
