Led Zeppelin Box Set (1990)
Disc One
1. Whole Lotta Love
2. Heartbreaker
3. Communication Breakdown
4. Babe I'm Gonna Leave You
5. What Is and What Should Never Be
6. Thank You
7. I Can't Quit You Baby
8. Dazed and Confused
9. Your Time is Gonna Come
10. Ramble On
11. Traveling Riverside Blues
12. Friends
13. Celebration Day
14. Hey, Hey, What Can I Do
15. White Summer/Black Mountain Side
Disc Two
1. Black Dog
2. Over the Hills and Far Away
3. Immigrant Song
4. The Battle of Evermore
5. Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp
6. Tangerine
7. Going to California
8. Since I've Been Loving You
9. D'yer Maker
10.Gallows Pole
11.Custard Pie
12.Misty Mountain Hop
13.Rock and Roll
14.The Rain Song
15.Stairway to Heaven
Disc Three
1. Kashmir
2. Trampled Underfoot
3. For Your Live
4. No Quarter
5. Dancing Days
6. When the Levee Breaks
7. Achilles Last Stand
8. The Song Remains the Same
9. Ten Years Gone
10. In My Time of Dying
Disc Four
1. In the Evening
2. Candy Store Rock
3. The Ocean
4. Ozone Baby
5. Houses of the Holy
6. Wearing and Tearing
7. Poor Tom
8. Nobody's Fault But Mine
9. Fool in the Rain
10. In the Light
11. The Wanton Song
12. Moby Dick/Bonzo's Montreaux
13. I'm Gonna Crawl
14. All My Love
The inevitable finally arrived. With the compact disc era well under way, and the industry's mania for retrospective compilations in full swing, Led Zeppelin delivered their own four-disc monument. This was not, however, a vault-raiding affair brimming with curiosities. Quite the opposite. The set offered a mere three previously unreleased tracks—no live cuts, no alternate takes, no studio asides. In essence, it served as a comprehensive anthology of the band’s studio oeuvre, drawing from all nine of their full-length albums, which meant a substantial two-thirds of their recorded output was accounted for.
To that end, this box set stands as a de facto “best of”, though the concept of “best” becomes rather slippery when a band’s catalogue has so few genuine missteps. Led Zeppelin IV and Houses of the Holy are almost wholly intact, each missing only a single track. Sequencing was adjusted for flow, but remained largely chronological—a wise decision that respected both historical context and musical development.
And yet, curiously, a few years later came Box Set II, a rather lean 2-disc affair cobbled together from the leftovers omitted here. It was, inevitably, less essential, though it performed the useful function of closing the loop for completists. Together, the two box sets essentially comprise the full studio history of the band—a sprawling, thunderous legacy neatly boxed and shrink-wrapped.
One curious misstep: the decision to meld Moby Dick and Bonzo's Montreux into a single hybrid track. Inexplicable, really, given the iconic status of both pieces in their original forms. Fortunately, this anomaly was quietly corrected in the follow-up release.
So while the set did not revolutionize the Zeppelin narrative, it reinforced it with authority, preserving their might in a medium newly hungry for permanence. What was once vinyl myth was now digital canon.
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