Picking Up The Hammer Of The Gods

By way of follow-up to some Led Zeppelin discussion over on Deep Fat, haahnster is going to briefly touch on the mighty Zep.

Let me start by reiterating that from about 6th grade through at least freshman year in high school, Led Zeppelin was an obsession of mine, absolutely my favorite band without question. I very quickly accumulated all their studio LPs, and a reissued 7" single of "Immigrant Song" with the great, otherwise unavailable (at that time) B-side "Hey Hey What Can I Do".

By the latter part of high school, I wasn't listening to Zeppelin as much, although I still considered them a (maybe "the") favorite band of mine. When CDs first began to take over for vinyl, Atlantic rushed to reissue the Led Zep catalog on the new format, with absolutely no attention to detail whatsoever. No bonus tracks, no remastering...no effort at all. In fact, those CDs had such a god-awful hiss that I KNEW my old LPs sounded better, and I refused to replace them. (Of course, the CDs have since been remastered with some actual care, and I've purchased them all, because I'm a madman.)

My friends and I had always said that Zeppelin never had a Greatest Hits album, because *every song* they recorded was a "greatest hit". Like I said, I had been obsessed with their music for several years. My interest in Led Zeppelin was rekindled in the late summer/early autumn of 1990, when their 1st, remastered CD boxed set was released (remember, their individual CDs still sounded like shit--full of hiss--at that time). The remainder of this post will be devoted to complaints about the boxed set.

#1 - No "Good Times, Bad Times". The first song from their first LP, this tune was among my favorites. It was an inexcusable omission.
#2 - No "Living Loving Maid". How this song could ever be separated from "Heartbreaker" was beyond me. They were always played together on FM radio, and by gawd, they always should be.
#3 - No "Hots on for Nowhere". Arguably my favorite song from Presence (which, admittedly, is my least favorite Zeppelin LP this side of Coda), it would've been a nice inclusion.

More on the Zep to come...but, I'm not sure when.