The Zeppelin album Robert Plant said he wouldn’t have released

Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, John Bonham and Jimmy Page were together for 12 years, until the drummer tragically died at the age of 32. Out of that remarkable musical partnership came nine studio albums revered by fans and extremely important to the evolution of Rock and Roll.

Although they have all been quite successful and widely praised, there is one album in particular that, if it had been up to Robert Plant, he would not have released at all.

The Led Zeppelin album Robert Plant said he wouldn’t have released

If it had been up to Robert Plant, he wouldn’t have released Led Zeppelin’s posthumous album ‘Coda’, which the band put out two years after John Bonham’s tragic death. “We only recorded what we wanted to record and we really didn’t play the game. I’m playing the game now (as a solo artist) because I’ve got to come in at a different angle in a different time. I’m not relying on legend, I’m talking about it now because I enjoy talking about it. But I don’t think I have to. I mean, I can go get live tapes now and be back on the train in three hours, and it’ll make your hair stand on end. But if it was up to me, I wouldn’t even have put ‘Coda’ out,” Robert Plant told Musician in 1988.

That same he made clear he didn’t have anything to do with that record. He explained that when “Coda” was discussed he had enough of “the whole thing”. So he really wasn’t involved with the band’s business side since Bonham died. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. Then again, I didn’t have anything to do with any Zeppelin stuff at all for a long time, really from when Bonzo died. When Coda was discussed, I really had”.

He continued:

“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. When Bonzo died, it’s the only reason to start staying actively involved with Led Zeppelin,” Robert Plant told Tony Bacon.

“Coda” (1982) is a collection of rejected and live tracks from various sessions the band recorded during their career. It was released under their own label, Swan Song, and was primarily issued to honor contractual commitments to Atlantic Records. Also in order to cover tax demands on previously earned income.

Two songs featured on “Coda” were a response to Punk Rock

In the mid-70s, bands like The Ramones, The Clash and the Sex Pistols were changing the Rock scene by showing the power of Punk Rock. They were part of a movement that aimed to bring Rock back to basics. They were proving that it wasn’t necessary to be an accomplished musician to write songs and that a great track should be long and complex. Like most bands of its generation, Led Zeppelin was also affected by that movement. According to Robert Plant, on two tracks featured on ‘Coda,’ they were trying to prove they could also do that kind of thing.

“We were absolutely dumbfounded by the idea of British Punk having some kind of revelatory gift that put us into the shadows. BBecause we had been raised on stuff that was far wilder than, you know, ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’. So that’s why we did things like ‘Wearing and Tearing’ and ‘Ozone Baby’. Because we knew how to make that shit up, but we were so busy trying to write eight-minute epics about crossing the Atlas Mountains that we forgot all about (it),” he told CBC in 2018.

Although he said he didn’t have much to do with that record, Plant was the only one who had a recording of another song, “Poor Tom.” As he told Relix in 2014, he took the quarter-inch tape home after the original sessions. Years later, when making “Coda”, he gave it to Jimmy. “It’s just like when we put out Coda, after John passed. I was the only guy who had a quarter-inch of ‘Poor Tom’ with the vocal on it. Because (at the time) we tried a vocal idea and I took it back home”.

Robert Plant continued:

“Twenty years later, I pull it out of the cupboard and we bake it and play it, and it’s good. There are ten million cassettes of work in progress, every band everywhere has got them. It’s like building any song. The consummate, ultimate conclusion passes through a million changes before it gets to that point,” he said. When ‘Coda’ was released, it peaked at number 4 on the United Kingdom Albums Chart. In the United States, it appeared at number 6 on the Billboard 200 chart.

Jimmy Page said it was Led Zeppelin’s most difficult album

Besides being the guitarist, Jimmy Page also was the producer of all the band’s records. With all the knowledge he had gathered from his years as one of the most in-demand session musicians in the United Kingdom during the 1960s, he was able to capture his guitar, John Bonham’s drums, John Paul Jones’ bass and keyboards and Plant’s vocals exactly the way he imagined. Although that might seem like the hardest part of making an album, aside from writing the songs, he said that “Coda” was actually the hardest record to complete.

“Well, it wasn’t for the taxman (that the album was made) but it was a contractual album. It was a difficult album. People say: ‘What was the most difficult album?’ and that was it. It was a posthumous album. You’re going to be using studio outtakes, because we didn’t have anything else in the can. It wasn’t like we had an album in the can to go, of course we didn’t, far from it. It was what it was, but it wouldn’t have gone out if I hadn’t thought it had a place.”

He continued:

“But it was a difficult one to do and put together. [For the reissue] I wanted to make Coda the mother of all Coda. I wanted to make it such a celebration of the group in all its quirkiness and all its directness. Well, that’s what this Coda is. It’s just got so much fun on it,” Jimmy Page said in an interview with The Guardian in 2015.

Another reason why Coda wasn’t that special to Robert Plant was that his late friend Bonzo was already gone. “I can often listen to some Zeppelin stuff and go, well, I thought I would be bored with this by now. ‘Kashmir,’ say, or ‘Song Remains The Same.’ It’s the drummer that makes it. Because Bonzo didn’t start flailing around like a demented octopus, like everybody else was doing at the time.”

“I think he and Page were real close on the riffs and what he didn’t play. It’s what he didn’t play that made him the drummer that everybody now talks about, rather than what he did. I think there was the toughness of Jimmy’s riffs and the muso quality of Jonesy’s bass playing, which kind of knitted the two things together. But those two were the archetypal crunch merchants,” he told Tony Bacon in 1988.