Get out the bibs. Classic-rock fans will be drooling over a fresh batch of retuned and repackaged albums from two of the genre's demigod groups - Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith.
- LED ZEPPELIN'S hugely successful first boxed CD set was titled, plainly enough, "Led Zeppelin." The four-disc 1990 collection, produced and digitally remastered by guitarist Jimmy Page, included 54 tracks and racked up almost five hours of playing time. But it didn't include quite every studio track ever released by Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones and John Bonham.And so, as with the movies, we have a sequel, straightforwardly titled "Boxed Set2," from Atlantic Records. Again, Page was at the helm, retrieving and CD-renovating 31 tracks on two discs from the band's nine albums that weren't in the first batch - plus another never before released.
This is more a case of the best ("Led Zeppelin") and the rest ("Boxed Set2"). Some of these songs are vital rock 'n' wail Zeppelin, though, it must be said, a few were filler then and are filler now. The initial anthology included all but one track from the fourth album (the otherwise untitled opus with the runic symbols) and "Houses of the Holy," and maybe not enough of the classics from the first two. "Boxed Set2" takes care of that.
Page and his crew reshuffled the playlist for both collections, so neither particularly follows the program sequence of the original albums. But where the four-disc package kept to a more or less chronological order, "Set2" is something like a "Radio Zeppelin" mix, wandering thither through the years. Appropriately though, the sequel kicks off with the first track of "Led Zeppelin I" - "Good Times Bad Times" - and winds down with "Tea for One," a bluesy-moody number from "Presence" that hinted broadly at some of Plant's best post-Zeppelin work.
In between are 2-plus hours' worth of songs that (may the clones take note) underline Led Zeppelin's eclectic style. Yes there's plenty of blues-based rock ("You Shook Me," "Bring It On Home"), but "Set2" also features a very early, never-released gospel-tinged jewel, "Baby Come On Home," a perfect reminder of the band's 1968-70 sound; rockabilly ("Hots On for Nowhere"), and even the synthesizer-powered "Carouselambra" from "In Through the Out Door."
With all of Led Zeppelin's studio tracks now pristinely balanced and remastered but jumbled on "Set1" and "Set2," fanatics can rebuild the original albums on tape if they so desire. But then, Atlantic also apparently plans remastered CD re-releases of the originals as well.
- AEROSMITH, it isn't stretching a notion too far to suggest, was America's answer to Led Zeppelin in the mid-'70s: hard-rocking, sassy, often lascivious and undeniably influential. Steve Tyler, Joe Perry and company served as an important, maybe even vital, bridge - with memorable originality to boot - between the R&B-influenced rock of the '60s and the R&B-influenced rock of the '80s and '90s.
To think they're still at it.
Columbia, Aerosmith's record company through the band's first decade, has just re-released a dozen albums on CD, having remastered the lot of them with impressively impactful 20-bit digital technology, all from the original source tapes.
Yes, their roots - the Rolling Stones (though that comparison's been overstressed), the Yardbirds, maybe even cross-pond rivals Led Zeppelin - show in the eponymous first album (which included "Dream On," a 1973 hit in Utah and other regions that didn't break nationwide until 1976) and the two mid-'70s bulwarks of the Aero-smith legend, "Toys in the Attic" (with the classics "Sweet Emotion" and "Walk This Way") and "Rocks" ("Last Child," "Back in the Saddle"). But their legacy is also evident early on. Van Halen, the Cult, Cinderella, Guns 'N Roses and the Black Crowes - these and uncounted other rock acts all owe a significant debt to Aerosmith.
The remastered releases include the studio albums "Get Your Wings," "Night in the Ruts," "Draw the Line" and "Rock in a Hard Place." Also out is 1980's "Greatest Hits" collection, with truncated single versions of some songs, like "Same Old Song and Dance" and, most painfully, the intro-less "Sweet Emotion" - but not the original 45 mix of "Dream On." The rock-oriented "Gems" collection presents 12 album cuts like the early "Mama Kin" and their Yardbirds-inspired version of "Train Kept a Rollin'." The three live albums in the dozen are "Classics Live," "Classics Live II" and, for the first time on a single CD, 1978's 75-minute "Live! Bootleg."
The Aerosmith crew survived a severe personal and artistic decline attributed to overindulgence, incompatibility and immaturity. The albums "Permanent Vacation," "Pump" and "Get a Grip" and singles like "Angel" and "Janie Got a Gun" put them right back at the top of the rock heap. The most stylish of these '70s classics, with Tyler's machine-gun mouth and Perry's inventive guitar, document just how it was they happened to get there the first time around - and why this second brush with mega-success is no fluke.