#75 - Darlene from Coda (1978 by way of 1982)
Appeared On: 1 ballot (out of 61)
Total Points: 4 points (out of 1,525 possible points . . . 0.262%)
High Ranker: @Anarchy99
Live Performances: Not on your life.
Other Versions: No one is dumb enough to cover this song.
Ultimate Classic Rock Ranking (out of 92 songs): 64
Vulture Ranking (out of 74 songs): Not Ranked
Rolling Stone Ranking (out of 40 songs): Not Ranked
Louder Ranking (out of 50 songs): Not Ranked
Uproxx Ranking (out of 50 songs): Not Ranked
WMGK Ranking (out of 92 songs): 81
SPIN Ranking (out of 87 songs): 85
Ranker Ranking (out of 87 songs): 73
Anachronarchy Ranking (out of 80 songs): 62
OK, this may not be my brightest hour or best selection. I was giving this one serious consideration and hoped someone else would take one for Team Anarchy, but when no one else picked it, I had to pull the trigger. My musical journey started in the seventies when I used to ride around with my dad listening to Top 40 radio and R&B songs. Not even AOR classic rock, just regular old 70’s bubble gum pop. We’re taking songs like
Indian Reservation (The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian) - Paul Revere & The Raiders,
Hooked on a Feeling - Blue Swede, and
Little Willie - Sweet. The closest I got to rock was Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles, a Foreigner song here and there, and the occasional Queen song. The few albums I owned on vinyl were K-Tel compilation records albums and some Elton John and Chicago albums. My favorite song back then (and now if I am being honest) was
My Sharona - The Knack (at least that falls in the rock category).
When I started high school, I hung out at the school radio station. I lived a sheltered life . . . do many high schools even have on-air radio stations? The mantra was that we were supposed to support up and coming artists and non-commercial music. Led Zeppelin certainly was the antithesis of that. I started playing (at the time) some lesser-known acts like The Cure, Talking Heads, Duran Duran, Bowie, U2, R.E.M., and some other new wave and alternative bands. LZ didn’t check those boxes either.
Outside of school, I also started getting into the FM music scene . . . mostly Steely Dan, Yes, Dire Straits, some Rush, etc. But where I lived, popular kids didn’t listen to those bands (and certainly not Top 40 or alternative either). Guys and girls alike were judged by how hard they rocked. Van Halen, AC/DC, Ozzy, Sabbath, Judas Priest, and Def Leppard ruled the day. Literally, kids would judge you by what you had on for music in your car and how loud you cranked it. (Yes, we were all destined to become future Nobel laureates and magistrates.) Folks that hated you or thought poorly of you would give you street cred and you could move the needle popularity wise if you pulled up with your car shaking and Mean Street screaming out of your speakers. The sound decision-making and evaluation process of teenagers. The line from Fast Times at Ridgemont High was legit (“When it comes down to making out, whenever possible, put on side one of Led Zeppelin IV.) Literally, in the real world as HS teen at the time, that was an actual thing.
Anyway, out of the blue, John Bonham died. That meant very little to me as I was not into Zeppelin that much. Then Coda came out and Darlene was all over the radio. I was floored. To a then 16-year-old Anarchy that owned Michael Jackson's Off the Wall, this was the bomb. I took some of my money and started buying their albums. I also asked for others for my birthday and Christmas (Coda came out at the end of the year and I have a late birthday). I certainly acquired the albums in the wrong order, but while I knew some of their songs, I didn’t know their names of which albums they were on. To the uneducated and ill-informed younger me, Coda sounded fantastic.
Then I moved on to college, got involved in college radio, and to them, Led Zeppelin was the anti-Christ. This was also a time when Zeppelin had grown to be even more popular than when they were still a band (hard to believe, but true). Most FM rock stations had rock blocks, and it seemed like every third one was LZ. One station had a nightly Stairway to Seven segment, where they played 7 Zep songs each night at 7 PM (and they still do). A 24/7 all Zeppelin station popped up in Florida (this was before satellite radio).
By comparison, I hosted one alternative music show and one world music show. I co-hosted one classical show and an all-Frank Sinatra show. And I filled in for anyone that was out and kept their show format (one professor had a polka show, an older student had a big band / swing show, one DJ had a jazz show, etc.) Again, Led Zeppelin did not exactly fit any of those genres.
As an experiment at home on one Saturday starting at 8:00 AM, I scanned the FM radio dial until I found a LZ song playing. When the song was over, I would scan the dial again until I got to another LZ song and stayed there until that song was done. I wanted to see if I could get through the entire range of the FM dial without hearing another Zep tune. I stopped at midnight and gave up. I could not go a full cycle completely all the way through the FM dial and miss a Led Zep song. At least one station always had them on for 16 hours straight. (Yeah, you think that was a waste of time? What were YOU doing as a teenager? At least I was clean and sober, you degenerates!)
I liked the band, but they were the poster boys for over saturation. My LZ vinyl collection mostly sat gathering dust for many years. The songs had been played out both at my house and on the radio. I needed a break. But many years later, this invention called the Internet appeared. And this concept called music sharing and song downloading became a thing. And there were tons of high sound quality LZ concerts out there that were mind altering, attainable for very little effort.
Perhaps some of you have heard some of them? I found the live versions of songs to be far more interesting than the studio versions, mostly because every performance was different, and you never knew where they would go and what they would do next. But for me, all that started with, of all songs, Darlene.
The song itself is an outtake from In Through the Out Door, recorded in 1978. Coda also featured two other songs from those sessions . . . Ozone Baby and Wearing and Tearing. Some places suggest that In Through the Out Door was already too full and there wasn’t enough room for those 3 songs. I guess that’s the polite way of putting it. There is so much apathy over Coda and Darlene, that it's difficult to find any information online about either. The best way to summarize Coda is . . . it's an album of leftover songs from The Island of Misfit Toys.
Though the song was never released as a single, Darlene hit #4 on the US Billboard Top Tracks chart (based on airplay alone). It was never performed anywhere by LZ, P&P, RP, JP, or pretty much anyone else, living or dead. Allegedly, there is a different version of the song on the 1993 box set, but I don’t hear anything different about it.
Anyway, flame away. But that's why I picked this less than stellar effort from the Zeppelin of Led. I shoulda gone with "Jerk Store."
to see what else from Coda makes the cut. Ozone Baby was very close to my top 25 for the reasons above. 
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