Hear Led Zeppelin’s Rare, Riotous Blues Rave-Up ‘Sugar Mama’
Led Zeppelin are opening their vaults for a final time next month, when they put out deluxe reissues of their final three albums. One of the most curious, interesting finds among newly unearthed bonus tracks is “Sugar Mama,” a thumping, upbeat blues rave-up that finds Robert Plant wailing the title at the top of his lungs and Jimmy Page playing an elastic slide-guitar solo. An official version of the song is streaming for the first time ever below.
The group recorded the track in October 1968 at London’s Olympic Studios with the intention of including it on its debut, Led Zeppelin. Although it’s circulated on the bootleg market for years, the rarity will be getting its first official release on the bonus discs that accompany deluxe editions of Coda on July 31st.
Unlike all of the other reissues, the compilation album Coda – a 1982 album that collected outtakes from throughout the band’s career and came out after the death of drummer John Bonham – will come with two discs of companion audio, which contain recordings that span 1968 to 1974. They will also feature “Baby Come Home” from the same session as “Sugar Mama,” a previously unreleased instrumental from 1970 called “St. Tristan’s Sword,” recordings from Page and Plant’s voyage to India in 1972 and an early version of “When the Levee Breaks.”
The reissue will come out on the same day that the band puts out deluxe versions of 1976’s Presence and 1979’s In Through the Out Door. The bonus disc of the former release will contain five previously unreleased reference mixes of songs from the record, including another never-before-released instrumental (“10 Ribs & All/Carrot Pod Pod [Pod]”). The latter’s companion audio will feature rough mixes of every tune on the LP.
As with all of Led Zeppelin‘s other reissues over the past year, the new ones will come in a variety of formats ranging from basic single-disc editions to a lavish super-deluxe edition, which contains CDs, vinyl, links to digital editions, all the bonus audio, a hardbound book and a high-quality replica of the album’s art.
All of the reissues are available for preorder on LedZeppelin.com.