Led Zeppelin Reveals Unreleased Song ‘Sugar Mama’
Led Zeppelin have revealed the details of the final three albums in their reissue campaign, and have debuted an official recording of the unreleased song, “Sugar Mama.”
The song has long circulated among Led Zeppelin bootleggers, as Rolling Stone points out, but fans can now finally hear it in an official capacity for the first time. Originally recorded in 1968 and intended for their epochal debut album, Led Zeppelin, the song will instead get its first official release as a bonus track on the current remaster/reissue of Coda, Zeppelin’s swan song.
An upbeat blues rave-up that was put to tape at London’s Olympic Studios, “Sugar Mama” features Robert Plant’s wailing vocal and Jimmy Page’s talents on slide guitar. Interestingly enough, the release of the track comes just a week after the Rolling Stones debuted an alternate take of “Brown Sugar,” which also featured a slide guitar solo from none other than Eric Clapton, as the Inquisitr previously reported.
Led Zeppelin reissues of ‘Presence, In Through the Out Door and Coda’ set for this summer: http://t.co/7pFPpRPuRk pic.twitter.com/nnOcd0emVu
— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) June 3, 2015
Coda will be unique in the Led Zeppelin reissue campaign, as it was in the band’s original catalog. An essentially posthumous release, the album was issued after the death of drummer John Bonham, collecting outtakes from Zeppelin’s decade-long-career. While the other Led Zeppelin reissues have been released with companion discs of archival audio, Coda will contain twice the amount of additional material. The previously unreleased tracks cover the period from 1968 to 1974, and include rarities that Led Zeppelin fans have chased after for years, according to Blabbermouth. In addition to “Baby Come Home,” which was recorded at the same session as “Sugar Mama,” they include audio from Page and Plant’s 1972 trip to India (which eventually gave birth to “Kashmir”), an early version of “When The Levee Breaks,” and “St. Tristan’s Sword,” an instrumental from 1970.
.@ledzeppelin to reissue Presence, In Through The Out Door, and Coda with tons of bonus tracks http://t.co/Vgvbwzm474 pic.twitter.com/dkEShgWPkQ
— Pitchfork (@pitchfork) June 3, 2015
The final three Led Zeppelin reissues, Presence, In Through The Out Door, and Coda, will all be released on July 31. Available in a variety of formats, each album is packaged with its own unique additional material. In Through The Out Door is paired with a disc containing rough mixes of the original album (as well as their working titles), while Presence will showcase reference mixes of several of the album’s songs. Presence will also debut an instrumental track, 10 Ribs & All/Carrot Pod Pod (Pod), which may be the most curiously titled song in the entire Led Zeppelin canon.
[Photo by Hulton Archive / Getty Images]
