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.

The Mynah Birds -- EP

SIDE A

1. It's My Time

2. Go On and Cry

SIDE B

1. I Got You (In My Soul)

2. I'll Wait Forever

There may or may not be a whole Mynah Birds album locked up in the Motown vaults. According to the Motown discography, there was an album scheduled for release in 1969. But by this time, only one member from the original group that signed with the record label in 1966 was still there.

The group that initially signed with Motown's subsidiary label VIP included Rick James, Neil Young, Bruce Palmer, Rick Mason and John Taylor. However, reportedly, after only recording four songs and right when the band's first single was to be released, word got out that James was a U.S. Army deserter and arrested. 

Motown pulled the single, and the other four members went their separate ways -- Young and Palmer traveled to L.A. and became members of Buffalo Springfield.

Eventually, after serving his jail time, James made it back to Motown and continued to record as the Mynah Birds with other musicians, but those tracks have yet to surface. 

However, the original four songs have been released on Motown compilation albums in recent years. What I've done here is simply make a self-titled EP of those tracks. UMe Records issued "It's My Time" and "Go On and Cry" as a 7-inch single in 2012 for Record Store Day (only 46 years after Motown pulled it). I took the record sleeve artwork for that and made some adjustments (removing excess verbiage and adding the VIP logo and song titles) to create the EP cover.

 "It's My Time" and "Go On and Cry" can be found on The Complete Motown Singles, Vol. 6: 1966; and "I Got You (In My Soul)" and "I'll Wait Forever" can be found on Motown Unreleased: 1966.

It would be great if someone would collect all the Mynah Birds tracks and issue them in one set.

Count Five - "Cartesian Jetstream"

Just a quickie this week.

A few weeks back I created a "new" album for the Count Five, Carburetor Dung. The title came from an essay by writer Lester Bangs in which he fantasized that instead of breaking up after only one album, the band had gone on to record five more, each one better than the last.

In that same spirit, I give you Cartesian Jetstream, an EP with all the remaining Count Five tracks that weren't on the band's debut or my imagined Carburetor Dung.

SIDE A
1. So Much
2. Enchanted Flowers
3. Coconuts

SIDE B
1. Mailman
2. God Alone (Above)
Bonus Track: Psychotic Reaction [alternative version]

For a cover, I Googled "Cartesian Jetstream," and this diagram came up. So I took that and added the band's name and album title.

Alas, there are no other recorded songs that I know of to create Ancient Lace and Wrought-Iron Railings or Snowflakes Falling on the International Dateline, the other two Count Five albums from Bangs' essay.

Next week's entry will be significantly longer.