Old Songs, New Lease on Life

Jimmy Page is closing the door on Led Zeppelin’s studio recordings at long last.

The guitar legend helped steer what he swears is the last batch of unreleased Led Zeppelin material for public consumption. The band’s last three albums – 1976’s “Presence,” 1979’s “In Through the Out Door” and 1982’s “Coda” – will be re-released July 31 with “new” material packaged on companion disks. That means not only will the reissues feature the best sound possible but songs fans haven’t heard before in their current form. Yes, by “current” we mean tracks dating back to the late 1960s.

Page has been doing the press rounds on behalf of the project. He says while there’s still plenty of live recordings to be explored the three-disk release is all there is for untapped studio recordings. Led Zeppelin is hardly the first musical act to release fresh content long after disbanding or, in some tragic cases, dying prematurely.

Take rapper Tupac Shakur, whose 1996 death at the age of 25 remains a scar on the hip-hop world. He recorded plenty of material in his too-brief life, so much so that his albums have gone platinum seven times since his death in a Las Vegas fire fight.

Michael Jackson’s passing in 2009 also couldn’t stop his estate from releasing “new” tracks from the King of Pop. Rolling Stone magazine reported last year we can expect up to eight new albums from Jackson’s library, a combination of repackaged material and outtakes.

Jimi Hendrix is part of a tragic group of superstars who died at the age of 27, including Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. Hendrix has only recorded three albums at the time of his death, but left behind a crush of unreleased material which eventually fueled a 12-disk posthumous career.

The Beatles broke up in 1970, but the supergroup didn’t aggressively plumb their past as some acts have done. The surviving members of the group did reunite in the mid-90s to lend their talents to two tracks – “Real Love” and “Free as a Bird.” The songs fleshed out a trio of “Anthology” albums including outtakes, rarities and alternate tracks from the final Beatles years.