Today is the birthday of, yes, Walt Whitman, but for our
purposes it’s the birthday of John “Bonzo” Bonham, the storied drummer—which is
to say the originator of the galloping rhino beat—of Led Zeppelin. In the history of great bands there is always
something magically fortuitous. That four or five particular individuals found
one another and formed a band that became more than the sum of its parts,
creating an unmistakable body of work that lives on . . . . And yes the heroicizing tone is fitting when
one tells the saga of Zep.
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| John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, John Bonham, Robert Plant |
There are really only a handful of bands about which that
romantic account works. They have to have solidified their line-up early and
once and for all. And they have to have evolved over the course of their
career—which should run to five albums at least, but, for a band from the
Sixties (the heyday for this sort of thing) the productive years should be a
decade at least and, since albums tended to come yearly in those days, that
means closer to 10 albums. Led Zeppelin gave us eight studio albums and a live
album before Bonzo left this world, done in by his own appetites, we might say,
his capaciousness having reached its limit.
What he gave on those nine albums—stretched out beyond that
by posthumous releases—is some mighty heavy drumming. Today’s song, from the
band’s fourth album, is one of my favorites for what Bonham can get up to, the
way the song opens with him playing a pattern that is a swampy groove that soon
finds accompaniment from harmonica, bass, and guitar with the blues harp
leading the way but that beat dominating.
Then it hits the first mini-crescendo a minute into the song, that intro
establishing a dark foreboding with wailing harmonica that sounds as tortured
as it can get (it’s being treated by the recording process to make the sound
dense and layered). But the way the drums announce the song, ending in a
pregnant pause, give us a sense of all hell about to come down: “If it keep on
raining the levee’s going to break / When the levee breaks I’ve got no place to
stay.” “Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan,” then, after the oh wells,
that crescendo again and another pause that lets guitar take over the harmonica’s
riff and start creating various textures as Plant takes up the vocals a notch—“Don’t
it make you feel bad / When you’re tryin’ to find your way home / And you don’t
know which way to go”—then something about “goin’ off to Chicago.”
The song, in its original incarnation by Kansas Joe McCoy
and Memphis Minnie, was about escaping the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and
Plant’s version sounds suitably distressed. But the drum pattern Bonham sets up
becomes positively tonic as he goes bashing away (reportedly, he was recorded
in a stair well to create those booming echoes). Page starts what sounds like a
vibrato-treated guitar that might be a slide at times and which is mixed with
harmonica to create an unearthly effect—it just keeps going, punctuated by
those great cymbal crescendos. “Cryin’ won’t help ya and prayin’ won’t do you
no good,” and my favorite part “All last night I sat on the levee and moaned /
Thinking about my baby and my happy home”—lost in the flood.
Then Bonham goes crazy with fills that sound like some huge
beast crashing through brick walls as the guitar/harmonica continues to crank
and then gets echoey as Plant starts moaning about “going to Chicago, sorry but
I can’t take you . . .”
Anyway, it’s a song that showcases Bonham in a very tangible
way, and it’s a brooding, big production masterpiece from the first Led Zep
album I ever bought—in 1971—and the one that I most strongly identify with, and
“When the Levee Breaks” is one of the key exhibits.
Going’ down, goin’ down down, goin’ down
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