For the first five albums, the tracks were left in the vault whenever Led Zeppelin had additional songs that didn’t fit. But with
the recording of Physical Graffiti, instead of cutting songs that didn’t fit
they decided to instead expand to a double album and include unused songs from
the past to fill it out.
However, I wondered how things might have turned out if
the band had gone its usual route and, after the band's end, continued issuing albums of leftover tracks into the 1980s.
So first, I had to cut Physical Graffiti down to a single disc:
SIDE A
- Custard Pie
- Trampled Underfoot
- In My Time of Dying
SIDE B
- Kashmir
- Ten Years Gone
- Sick Again
To keep both sides around 20 minutes, I was forced to cut “In the Light” and “The Wanton Song.” I like both songs, so it wasn't easy—and that's essentially why Zeppelin chose not to cut them and turned the album into a double.
Then, knowing what we know now from compilations and the remastered albums with bonus tracks, I worked backward and created three new albums that could have been released following Led Zeppelin’s breakup.
TRIANGULUM
SIDE A
- Ozone Baby
- Darlene
- Bonzo’s Montreux
- Wearing and Tearing
SIDE B
- In the Light
- 10 Ribs & All/Carrot Pod Pod (Pod)
- The Wanton Song
If the first side looks familiar, that's probably because it's the same track list and order as the second side of Coda, including three outtakes from In Through the Out Door and John Bonham's drum track from 1976. The second side here has my two Physical Graffiti outtakes as well as a long instrumental outtake from Presence. I chose Triangulum as the title because the Triangulum Galaxy apparently has a lot of hydrogen, which is the gas that filled the Hindenburg. How's that for random? For a cover, I used a chart by German astronomer Johannes Hevelius from 1687 of the constellations of Pavo, Ara and Triangulm Australe and surrounding constellations, and added titles.
CLOUD SERENADE
SIDE A
- Walter’s Walk
- The Rover
- Down by the Seaside
- Friends (Bombay version)
SIDE B
- Black Country Woman
- Houses of the Holy
- Four Hands (Bombay version)
- Boogie with Stu
- Night Flight
Here we have an all-“new” album featuring outtakes from the
fourth album and Houses of the Holy, as well as Page and Plant's experiment with the Bombay Orchestra where they re-recorded two Zeppelin tracks. For a cover, I used this image of a bunch of zeppelins from Dissolve, cropped it and decided to leave off any titles as the band often did with album covers. Assume that the band name and album title would have been a sticker on the plastic wrap. I chose the title because I thought the zeppelins looked a bit like clouds.
ALBION REVISITED
SIDE A
- Sugar Mama
- Jennings Farm Blues
- Poor Tom
- St. Tristan’s Sword
- Key to the Highway/Trouble in Mind
SIDE B
- Baby Come Home
- Bron-Yr-Aur
- Hey, Hey, What Can I Do?
- La La
- Medley: I Feel So Bad/Travelling Riverside Blues/32-20 Blues/Diving Duck Blues/Fixin' to Die/That's All Right (Mama)
These tracks include outtakes from the first three albums, but primarily from III, including also "Hey, Hey, What Can I Do" which was originally released as a b-side to "The Immigrant Song." The last track has not actually been officially released but is available on various bootlegs and on the web, sometimes titled “Blues Medley.” For cover art, I used a stock photo of the abandoned English village of Tyneham and added titles. Albion is an alternative name for Great Britain and is sometimes used poetically to refer to the island. So I titled the album Albion Revisited yet showing a ruined, abandoned town, which I thought was sort of symbolic.
And there you have it: three albums of outtakes arranged close
to reverse chronologically. I think the release of these would have been better
than the somewhat haphazard way the tracks popped up over the years. I also think it would have been interesting if these had been released each year beginning in 1982 as it would have continued the band's album releases into the mid-'80s.
