Coda (1982)
1. We're Gonna Grove
2. Poor Tom
3. I Can't Quit You Baby
4. Walter's Walk
5. Ozone Baby
6. Darlene
7. Bonzo's Montreaux
8. Wearing and Tearing
By 1982, Led Zeppelin was no more. The death of John Bonham two years prior had made the decision unavoidable. There would be no attempt to stagger on, no stand-ins, no rebranding. The band knew what most fans suspected—without Bonzo, there could be no Zeppelin. Coda emerged in the aftermath, not as a final creative statement but as a necessary cleaning out of the closet. A footnote. A punctuation mark. A coda.
With only eight tracks, Coda is slight in length but curiously weighty in tone. The material spans the full arc of the band’s career—leftovers, live cuts, and curios—assembled more to preserve than to impress. Unsurprisingly, it lacks the polish and cohesion of the canonical studio albums. There’s no attempt to disguise the fact that this is a posthumous patchwork. But if the record is uneven, it's also unexpectedly vital. These are not scraps. They're artifacts. And in their own way, they hold power.
The album opens with We’re Gonna Groove, a raw blast of Ben E. King-penned energy drawn from a 1969 concert performance, with crowd noise thoughtfully scrubbed from the mix. It’s a terrific opener, a reminder of the band’s early punch and their capacity to inject swing into stomp. Less successful is the inclusion of another live cut, I Can’t Quit You Baby—a retread of a track already familiar from the debut album. While the performance is competent, its presence feels more like filler than revelation. It’s hard not to suspect the vaults were running low.
The six studio tracks are far more compelling. Poor Tom, a folksy number with a deceptively light touch, is elevated entirely by Bonham’s drumming, which thuds and rattles with purposeful menace. Fittingly, Bonzo’s Montreux gives the man his own spotlight. Unlike Moby Dick, this percussion showcase feels composed rather than improvised—layered with studio effects and auxiliary instrumentation that transform it from a mere solo into something more textural, almost cinematic. It’s a drum piece with architecture.
Side two brings a trio of outtakes from the In Through the Out Door sessions—Ozone Baby, Darlene, and Wearing and Tearing. All three are brisk, punchy, and possessed of a looseness and joy conspicuously absent from the album they were cut from. Had they been included on In Through the Out Door, that record might have emerged sounding less burdened and more balanced. Admittedly, these tracks are rougher in mix and lacking the sheen of a fully curated studio LP—but they compensate with energy. Fun, even. Something Zeppelin hadn’t quite sounded like in years.
Coda is not essential in the way IV or Physical Graffiti are. But it isn’t meant to be. It’s the trailing edge of a comet, not the flame itself. Still, it manages to remind us, if briefly, of what this band could do—on stage, in the studio, or in the spaces in between. And in a way, it serves its title well. A “coda,” musically speaking, is a final flourish, a returning motif, a last statement before silence. This album is all of that. Modest in ambition, poignant in retrospect, and—against the odds—worthy of the legacy it closes.
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