Jason Bonham Might Have Found Unheard Led Zeppelin Recordings
Jason Bonham said he recently found a box of tapes left by late father John Bonham that might contain previously unheard Led Zeppelin recordings.
"Believe it or not, Dad didn't like to play at all at home," the drummer recently told The Vinyl Guide podcast (via MusicRadar) of his father, who died in 1980. "He had no recording equipment. We've got his old Revox two-track and that was literally just to be able to play mixes when he came back from the studio. They'd make another reel [for listening].
"I know I found a whole bunch, a box of tapes – reel-to-reels – at home, last time I was there," he continued. "But I need to get the machine up and running and hook it up, which… I'll save that for YouTube, like, 'Let's get this thing up and running. Let's find out if we've got anything that hasn't even been released yet.'"
Bonham added that none of the reels were labeled, which was "the best of it," but worried that the tapes might have deteriorated over time: "You put them in the machine and it just erases them the moment you press start."
He suggested he might have to use the tried-and-true method of baking the tapes at low temperatures to make them playable again. "I think they had to do that when they were doing the Knebworth mixing," he said. "They only had the U-matic tapes and they had to bake the tape to preserve what was on there."
Bonham also confirmed that the private jam session with Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones at his 1990 wedding was completely unplanned. "If we would have planned it, I definitely would have made sure that my drums were onstage and not somebody else's," he said. "I probably would have stayed a lot more sober if I'd have known that was going to go on at the end of the night."
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