According to Jimmy Page, as there wasn't enough studio material for an alternate mix of Led Zeppelin I, the first album will come with a disc of Led Zeppelin's live show from the Paris Olympia, recorded in 1969 and broadcast on French radio, which Jimmy discovered as a bootleg while in Japan. In other words it's been out there for years, and we have probably heard it before.I'm sure the audio will have been cleaned up but there seems to be a lot of those early shows on the internet already, not to mention released previousley.
Led Zeppelin II and III, meanwhile, come with an additional disc of what Page calls “working mixes”, that were produced during the course of the sessions. “It’s not a mirror image of the original album because it can’t be exactly that,” says Jimmy. “That’s why it’s a companion."
“But it’s important to get this clear: these aren’t the 8-tracks or the 16-tracks that we’re listening to” he clarifies further. “These tracks are the working mixes, mixes the were taken home at the end of the night. Not every night did I take them home, because I was going in the next night to do some more work, but that’s why Robert [Plant] had a little box of tapes: he needed mixes that he hadn’t heard that day to work on the song. He sent me what he had down and that was useful too.”
So, basically we're getting Led Zeppelin doing The Beatles anthology, or what The Velvet Underground did with their fully loaded version of Loaded. As a Led Zeppelin fan, I find it hard to get excited about this. Rough mixes, are just that, rough mixes. With The Beatles we got an incite into the working of the most exciting musical sensation in the history of the known Universe, with The Velvets we got what sounded almost like an entirely lost album. But this is Led Zeppelin, and particularly with Led Zeppelin II which is pretty much a meat and potatoes blues rock album, I can't see how this is gonna pan out. An extra guitar or mandolin here, a missing bongo track there, more of Percy's 'my my baby baby mama mama' wailing, a bit of mouth harp? Only time will tell.
Now onto more sacred ground...
The cover art for the new re-issues is a different kettle of fish (mostly rotten) altogether. Frankly the images I have seen look like a sixth form Photoshop homework assignment, particularly Led Zeppelin III. An inverted version of the original cover! WHY?
The original covers were intrinsic to the whole 'Led Zeppelin experience' (I know, I couldn't come up with anything more original). Remix the album, add some 'un-released material', chuck a live show at us (which has been doing the rounds for decades), stick in a booklet of photo's and much needed reminiscences about the glory days at Olympic Studios, but for fuck sake leave the covers alone Jimmy!
Maybe I'm just not enough of a Led Zeppelin archaeologist to get excited about this. While alternative mixes are interesting, the originals were released like that for a reason, because they were the best. Jimmy goes to great lengths to stress that he even made sure the running order was the same, well I'm sure that must have kept you up for days Jim!
Anyway, enough of my neigh-saying, if this 'auspicious occasion' opens the Led Zeppelin door to a whole legion of new fans, then that's great, because let's face it Led Zeppelin were, are and always will be fantastic, but on the other hand if this is a thinly disguised and horribly designed attempt to open the door to Page, Plant and Jones' wallets, then I for one am not buying it....
See the wanton destruction of beautiful album cover artwork below.
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