DB's Song of the Day (day 232): "TEN YEARS GONE" (1975) Led Zeppelin

Birthday boy today is Robert Plant, lead screecher of Led Zeppelin. Plant’s vocals were an acquired taste to me back in the period 1969-70 when I first heard him. It’s an unmistakeable voice, no one in rock sounded like that. At times I used to wonder what Zep would’ve sounded like with a different vocalist, but that was around the time of the fourth and fifth albums—1971, 1973—then I gradually grew to accept it. Plant’s wail, his frequent “ooh ooh yeah yeah,” his mercurial intonations, and his hippy Tolkien-inspired lyrics made him a bit suspect throughout my teens. Still, his voice is one that simply belongs in the music of the Seventies—perhaps the only singer who could riff along with the sounds Page, Jones, and Bonham created on stage and in the studio.

I never saw them live. I would’ve felt too ironic about it. Had drummer John Bonham not died in 1979 and the band continued, maybe I would’ve caught them in their mellower years. As it was, Zep is a band I’ve enjoyed more in retrospect than when they were actually around. I’ve considered catching up with Plant, who has been releasing solo LPs since 1982, but it hasn’t happened. Meanwhile, the remastering that Page has undertaken of the Zep LPs—which are now being reissued on vinyl—produced CDs notably more potent than the later vinyl pressings I had of some of the records. So that my re-discovery of the artistry of Page has caused me to make my peace with Plant’s vocals. Of all the albums, I liked best Physical Graffiti as the (double) album that showed the band's full range but which also showcased Plant’s singing, often in a somewhat lower register and grandstanding less. That said, the essential LPs for me have always been the fourth and fifth and the acoustic side of the third much more than the first two. After Graffiti things drop a few notches, though In Through the Out Door (1979) gained significance by being the last Zep LP.

So, what song to choose in tribute to Mr. Plant? The obvious choice might well be “Whole Lotta Love” as that’s the first song I heard that unearthly voice sing. Another might be “Stairway to Heaven”—if only because of its showcasing of the Olde English sound that Page mastered and because its lyrics show Plant reaching for some kind of prog-rock profundity. And because the part when it finally starts rocking and Plant moves up to his best screech is one of the great moments in Seventies rock. But I chose instead to showcase a track from Graffiti. “In My Time of Dying” came close, until I re-listened to it and realized that Plant seems largely superfluous on the track—it’s dominated by Bonham with great guitar parts from Page. “The Rover” was another contender—because it has some lines I like more for their delivery than for their actual words—but “Ten Years Gone” is less pretentious. It seems largely heartfelt in its taking stock of a love that endures, though ten years have passed.

It’s a love left behind, and yet it endures. What I like is the way Plant evokes the recall of it all. “Changes fill my time / Baby, that’s alright with me / In the midst I think of you / And how it used to be.” That may be one of the most simple and effective verses of his career, and it’s delivered with a kind of shrug, which is to say this guy isn’t eating his heart out about it, and yet he’s got the power of recall and the imaginative clarity to remember what was and what could’ve been. He even starts the song with a kind of que sera sera reflection: “Then as it was / Then again it will be / An’ though their course may change sometimes / Rivers always reach the sea.” Which I suppose is a kind of fortune-cookie clarity about the fact that you will reach your appointed end, no matter what that may be.

But it’s not the little nuggets of wisdom that draw me to the song (to speak of Plant’s contribution—as opposed to Page’s, whose multi-tracked and layered guitars, including one part that feels very much like a jazz figure, make the song one of the more sonically complex on the album), so much as the way Plant puts across the very passionate bridge, a segment that seems to recall—ten years gone—a first time with a particular lady: “Did you ever really need somebody / Really need 'em bad? / Did you ever really want somebody / The best love you ever had? / Do you ever remember me, baby / Did it feel so good / Because it was just the first time / And you knew you would.” The way the music of that section matches to the words—a kind of surge of memory and pride and, yes, pain—takes the song to a different place. It’s a recollection of what seems a woman’s loss of virginity, so that the ten years since allude to the way experience saps away the special quality of such “first times,” no matter how good they were. The need and the want—of the first love—hover over the memory, and how good it felt to give in to it all. This is done without any of the sexual images or double entendres that one finds in certain blues evocations that Plant favors. It isn’t even particularly boastful, as the “do you ever remember me, baby” suggests that the rivers are indeed running on and what went down back there might not surge up again, for her.

There’s another small segment that matches to the “Changes fill my time” passage, but is slightly different: “Vixen in my dreams / A great surprise to me / Never thought I’d see your face / The way it used to be.” You gotta love that; especially the way Plant seems truly surprised when saying so. In a dream: the face of the “vixen” he’s recalling—or, more to the point, the look on her face, as a vixen. “The way it used to be”—its power over him, its provocation. Not expecting to see it again, then finding it in a dream. Most of the lyrics—about eagles and nests and “the wings of maybe”—are the usual Plant malarkey, but in the midst of it all he does manage to make some sincere-sounding noises.

Holding on, ten years gone

DB's Song of the Day (day 151): "WHEN THE LEVEE BREAKS" (1971) Led Zeppelin

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.

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

DB'S Song of the Day (day 36):"NO QUARTER" (1973) Led Zeppelin

Today’s song—yeah, Led Zep again—comes from 1973’s Houses of the Holy, chosen because it suits the kind of weather we’re getting in these parts. This song, written by John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, and Robert Plant, is a stately bit of music given much more atmosphere by the way it was recorded. Essentially it’s been recorded at the wrong speed to sound murkier and to create a distortion that makes it feel uncanny. Around this time, the Zep were into magic and tales of swords and sorcery and all that—all of which has returned big time with the likes of Jackson's films of Tolkien’s Rings and then Game of Thrones—and this song, like “The Immigrant Song,” is part of LZ's exploration of Nordic myths: “The snow falls hard and don’t you know / The winds of Thor are blowing cold.”  Pretty much.

Here in the eastern and middle northern U.S., just now, we’re in the midst of gray skies, freezing rain after wet snow, and “the snow drives back the foot that’s slow,” alright. The song, about some band of troopers who have to fight their way through death-threatening weather—to “carry news that must get through”—is apropos, as it fills me with visions of something like the dude in Frank Frazetta’s Silver Warrior (which, I might mention, I painted copies of three different times in those days when Led Zep still trod the earth . . . and, no, I don’t consider the recent reunion in 2007 for the Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert to be “really” Led Zeppelin, even if it did win a Grammy in 2014).

Frazetta's Silver Warrior

Anyway, the line I always liked best was “Walking side by side with death / The devil mocks their every step.”  But the real glories of this song are not in the lyrics—though Plant’s filtered voice sounds like it’s coming from some other “realm” alright—but in the effects, such as J. P. Jones’ stately little piano section, seeming to float in from somewhere else, that percolating bass line he plays, and the electric piano shimmer that gives it that “woods are dark and deep” feel. Then there’s the riffs Page flings into the mix, all fuzzed-out, especially the part that kicks in after we hear “they choose a path where no one goes”—which is when Plant shifts into his banshee wail for a bit. Then there’s John Bonham launching into crescendos that just about break into out-and-out rout.

The video accompanying this should be something like the final charge into the amassed ranks of Orcs at the siege at Helms’ Deep. “They hold no quarter / They ask no quarter / They give no quarter.”  No mercy, in other words, full slaughter. It’s a blood-thirsty song, well enough, but in the end, to me, it's about merciless weather, coming down on you like an angry horde. The weird effects embellish it all with a lost in the storm ambiance. Like, remember when the Fellowship is trying to cross the mountain pass in the snow before deciding to head under ground at Moria? Like that. The Zep, with songs that drop references to the Misty Mountain, and Mordor, and Gollum, were definitely on that page.