Coda

Coda gathers the unreleased recordings left over from Led Zeppelin's twelve years into eight tracks and just under 33 minutes. After John Bonham's death in September 1980 and the band's dissolution that December, Swan Song still owed Atlantic one final studio album. Jimmy Page reasoned that if that much bootleg material was already circulating, they might as well put the rest out, and went through the vault. The title is the musical term for the passage placed after the main body of a piece has ended. Nothing here was newly recorded. What it contains are offcuts from every period. “Poor Tom” is a third-album leftover and “Walter's Walk” a fifth-album reject, while “Ozone Baby,” “Darlene” and “Wearing and Tearing” come from Polar Studios in 1978 — the remains of the previous record. “Wearing and Tearing,” written as an answer to punk, was to have been handed out at Knebworth in 1979 before the plan was cancelled at the last minute. The two tracks taken from the Royal Albert Hall were included with the crowd noise muted, and on “Bonzo's Montreux” Page layered electronic treatments onto a Bonham solo cut in Montreux in 1976. It is a scrapbook. But Bonham plays on all eight, and on that alone the coda earns its place.