Jason Bonham recently said that he had found a box of tapes that were left behind by his late father John Bonham that may contain previously unheard Led Zeppelin recordings.
Bonham told The Vinyl Guide podcast that, “Believe it or not, Dad didn’t like to play at all at home, 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].”
He continued to say, “I know I found a whole bunch, a box of tapes – reel-to-reels – at home, last time I was there, 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.'”
He also explained that none of what he found was labeled, and was worried that the tapes may have deteriorated over time, “You put them in the machine and it just erases them the moment you press start.”
He mentioned that he may have to use the method of baking the tapes at low temperatures in order to make them playable again.Stating, “I think they had to do that when they were doing the Knebworth mixing, They only had the U-matic tapes and they had to bake the tape to preserve what was on there.”
Bonham also mentioned that the private jam session that took place with Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones at his 1990 wedding was unplanned. Explaining that, “If we would have planned it, I definitely would have made sure that my drums were onstage and not somebody else’s, 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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