“It wouldn’t have fit”: The one song Jimmy Page believed was too different to release

Every band has to take each song on an album-by-album basis. There are many cases where a song could be great in the context of a record, but if it doesn’t manage to measure up to everything else they were doing, there’s no sense in trying to recreate everything around serving one great track. It’s about creating the right journey to take the listener on, and Jimmy Page felt that some of the best Led Zeppelin tracks didn’t always make it onto great Zeppelin albums.

Whenever sequencing one of their records, there was no question that Page was the boss behind everything. He had been the one who founded the group, and even when some other producers had other ideas about how the band should sound in the mixing stages, it wasn’t uncommon for Page to be there every minute or show someone the door when he thought they had overstayed their welcome when making suggestions.

When going through their entire output, Physical Graffiti marks a strange middle ground for their music. Every single thing one could ask for in a Zeppelin album is accounted for somewhere on there, but when someone has captured their essence that well right out of the gate, where the hell are you supposed to go from there?

Although Page found his answer by turning up the guitars louder in the mix on Presence, they often started to feel slightly fractured. Robert Plant’s voice was far from the booming quality that most had known due to his car crash, and while In Through the Out Door gave fans some more adventurous tunes to latch onto like ‘Fool in the Rain’, it was also the moment where the keyboards started to become far more prominent in the mix.

That can be the kiss of death for any other band, but John Paul Jones always knew how to make his keyboard lines have the same amount of grit as Page’s guitar. It could be absolutely devastating when it wanted to be on tracks like ‘All My Love’, but considering how many great moments were downbeat, the album could have used a song like ‘Wearing and Tearing’ to bring some edge to the mix.

But for Page, it was always about what served the album correctly, and he wasn’t going to put a great song on the record if it didn’t complement the rest of them well, saying, “The album was so much lighter, it wouldn’t have fitted. ‘Wearing and Tearing’ was ‘One, two, three, four, charge.’ My goodness! It was like an assault. It wasn’t in character with something like ‘All My Love.’”

When it did finally see a release on Coda, though, it’s easy to see what Page meant. The song is fantastic in the context of being a compilation, but listening back to what they were doing at the time, this was the kind of riff that would have fit in better on something like Houses of the Holy, where the focus is both the dark and the light sides of their sound.

Hell, if the band hadn’t gone through having to make Coda to put a bow on their career after John Bonham’s passing, this could have been an excellent way for Page to kick off one of his solo albums as well. Zeppelin was always his baby, and he was never going to find his way out of its shadow, but had his collaboration with someone like David Coverdale had this tune, it may have been even more epic than it already was.