Led Zeppelin -- "Four by Four" EP

Led Zeppelin’s last true studio album was In Through the Out Door, released in August 1979. Nearly a year later, the band launched a short promotional tour of Europe. The initial leg of a U.S. tour was scheduled for October and November to cover several cities on the East Coast.

Guitarist Jimmy Page realized that by the time the band initiated the tour’s second leg on the West Coast, it would be a year and a half since In Through the Out Door had been released. While there would be no time to write, record and release a new album, the band did have three outtakes from In Through the Out Door. Singer Robert Plant was so happy with the song “Wearing and Tearing” that he wanted to release it as a single in time for the band's 1979 performance at Knebworth. Reportedly, there wasn't time as In Through the Out Door had been delayed.

Page wanted to include the three tracks on an EP that could provide new material for radio stations to play and fans to buy in 1981. EPs had reemerged as a popular medium with punk and new wave groups in the late 1970s/early 1980s, and Page looked to capitalize on that. I don’t know how far the idea got before drummer John Bonham died on Sept. 25, 1980.

All three songs were eventually released in 1982 on the album Coda, along with other outtakes. The EPs released in 1980-81 range from three to nine songs, but four tracks are the average number. So it seems likely to me that if the EP had been released as planned, there would have been one other track – but what? Something else that ended up on Coda? An all-new song? A live track recorded on the European tour? One of the tracks from In Through the Out Door?

There’s no way of knowing, so we speculate.

SIDE A

1.       Ozone Baby

2.       Darlene

SIDE B

1.       Wearing and Tearing

2.       Fire (Say You’re Gonna Leave Me)

In the end, I went with an all-new song for the fourth track as the emphasis here would have been new songs for a new decade. "Fire (Say You're Gonna Leave Me)" was rehearsed by Zeppelin, but the only known recording is a rather poor-sounding version from a rehearsal (you can find it on YouTube). I don't know when the West Coast leg of the tour was to begin, but I suspect it would have been in spring 1981. That would have given the group plenty of time to go into a studio and bang out a new tune.

I designed the cover as a joke. Punks were calling groups like Led Zeppelin dinosaurs, so why not feature the greatest dinosaur of them all? OK, maybe he's not an actual dinosaur, but let's not split hairs. I took a black-and-white photo, tinted it, and added the words. I called it "Four by Four"—four songs, four members.