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 150): "DOWN SOUTH" (2006) Tom Petty

“Headed back down south”—the opening of today’s song is suitable to a trip back to where I’m from. It’s taken some time to see this as the case. As a mid-Atlantic State, Delaware isn’t really “south” and the state didn’t go with the South in the Civil War, though its agrarian southern part, which I’ll be driving through tomorrow, wanted to. And I’ll be going to Maryland, which did go with the South. So, south enough. And anyway, from the perspective of those Yankee lands I’ve lived in for 20 years this summer, it’s certainly south.

Though that’s not what Tom Petty means by “south.” He means Deep South, where he’s from. And this little ditty characterizing colorfully his relation to that region is one of my favorites from him, in recent memory. It’s from Highway Companion (2006), and that title is fitting too since I spent the greater part of the day today driving the highway from Connecticut to Delaware, which means that most of the day I’ve been in New Jersey—though not southern Jersey.

This notion of “the South” has a lot of valiance to me. You know it when you see it, and if you’re a Northerner like me, you kind of dread it. Regionalism is a major factor in what it means to be American, I believe. Petty does a great job of turning his relation to his own region into both a caricature and a kind of archetype. With the south comes family, Faulkner style, and Petty begins with what seems a trip back south to deal with his father’s past—“Gonna see my daddy’s mistress / Beg for her forgiveness / Pay off every witness.” Such concise rhymes to create backstory is pretty impressive for Petty, who by and large isn’t a narrative song-maker. Here we can imagine the hell-raiser aspects of Daddy, and a son who is trying to make amends—as with the whole history of “the South” and its reputation. This continues with him disposing of “the family headstones” and a “bag of dry bones” which is all that’s left of his ancestors. Moving the cemetery plot to make way for development, I suppose, to “make good all my back loans.” A reckoning is due.

“Down South” isn’t so much a story as an evocation of the phrase “down south,” but by piling up such details, Petty gives a voice and an attitude to this speaker that feels southern, but also distanced from his roots. And that’s the point. He’s going back home, where everyone knows him and where his relation to his surroundings is part of what makes him who his is, still.

In the next two verses we find more of a fantasy, of sleeping late and looking up former mentors, and the clever “Live off Yankee winters / Be a landlord and a renter”—the idea that he will, as a landlord, rent his property to Yankees who flee to the south (Petty’s from Florida) during the winter months, so that he himself will rent so as to rent out his own property. We imagine him throwing out the bones of his ancestors to raise up condos he will rent out while he rents a room in some kind of majestic fleabag hotel, where, the next verse imagines, he will “create myself” as a gracious Southern gentleman: “Impress all the women / Pretend I’m Samuel Clemens / Wear seersucker and white linens.”

That verse always brings a smile; you can almost see Petty himself pulling it off, once he’s aged into 70s or 80s, turning into a kind of “Colonel” figure, sitting in a straight-back rocking chair, sipping a mint julep on a porch, with great white mustachios. Hell, why not?

From that fantasy we come to two verses that sound more like reality and that they might be part of the singer’s real experience—“the heroes of  my childhood / Who’re not gonna do me no good / Carve their names in dogwood.” This is different than looking up mentors; this is reliving the process of growing up that took place there, where the “heroes” (who may have been the kind that lead “astray”) are still heroes, with names to be carved on trees. Which sets up a relation to his own past (apart from the family past): “Chase a ghost down South / Spirits cross a dry field / Mosquitoes hit the windshield / All documents remain sealed.”  That last line could still point back to the father’s past—if the father is the ghost being chased and possibly exorcised, but, following the previous verse, these lines strike me as better suited to the speaker’s own past. Or the entire family, perhaps. Nothing will be revealed in their lifetimes, he’s seen to that. The lines about the fields and mosquitoes evokes for me the drive “down south” in my home state, especially back when it was even more rural than it is now.

The chorus of the song, “So if I come to your door / Let me sleep on your floor / I’ll give you all I have and a little more,” keeps bringing us back to the provisional nature of this trip. On the road, sleeping on the floor of people he stills knows or once knew, and the mournful tone of it makes it sound like this might be the last homeward trek, as it’s taking all he has to get through it. The fantasy of a life to come in the south is just that, and the mourning is for having to go and take care of the father’s effects and to make peace with the past. “One more time” may be a way of saying “one last time.”

The song has become a favorite each time I venture “down south” and it matches to a time of the falling away of much of the elder generation in my own family, so hits right with that sense of dealing with the remnants of the past and of going back to where you once belonged to have a last look around. It’s an elegant and wistful, and wryly amusing, evocation of a place and time from Petty who, like all of us, is getting older, and, as he says on the album’s next song “fading by degrees.”

DB's Song of the Day (day 149): "A SALTY DOG" (1969) Procol Harum

The beach visit is looming. I’m packing, so that means it’s happening. And it’s Gary Brooker’s birthday. Brooker, the pianist, main composer and main vocalist for Procol Harum. Brooker was the vocalist on all the songs I know best, but early on there are also vocals by Matthew Fisher and Robin Trower.

Today’s song is the title track from that initial band’s best LP, and it’s the album that features the most variety in composition credits, with lyricist Keith Reid writing with all three of the band’s composers. By the time I got around to buying PH material—the 45 “Conquistador” from the live album with symphony orchestra, in 1972 (a version of today’s track, with orchestra, was the B-side), and Exotic Birds and Fruit (1974)—Brooker was the man on the vocals. And I’ve always loved his singing. My favorite pick from the latter LP would probably be “Strong as Samson,” but I picked “A Salty Dog” for its seafaring theme. O let me get down to the sea again, y’know?

Of course their most famous song is “A Whiter Shade of Pale” with that indelible organ intro and Brooker’s voice coming in with a bluesy intonation in the midst of that Bach-like sound. Really gets to ya. But I find Brooker’s vocal on today’s song even more stirring, and the lyrics show Reid’s penchant for rather literary conceits.

This one, of a crew that lays waist to another ship, then flees pursuit only to find an island upon which to live (and escape), has associations with stories like the mutiny on the Bounty (and thus also shares something with a song I may get to next week, one of my favorites, Mekons’ “(Sometimes I Feel Like) Fletcher Christian”). What’s key to the success of this song is the way that the big lifts in Brooker’s melody and vocal match to the lyrics in that section.

Each verse begins somberly enough with a verse that sets the mood and sets up the big burst of excitement that comes at its close and carries into the next verse’s bravura:

“All hands on deck, we’ve run afloat,”

I heard the captain cry,

“Explore the ship, replace the cook,

Let no one leave alive.”

One might assume the captain is speaking of his own ship, but then that makes no sense. They’ve “run afloat”—a drifting ship, I take it—and pillage it, slaying its crew, then take off: “Across the straits, around the Horn / how far can sailors fly? / A twisted path, our tortured course, / and no one left alive.”  The final line drops back into the mood of somber reflection after the stress of the flight—a “tortured course” to frustrate pursuit.

We sailed for parts unknown to man

Where ships come home to die

No lofty peak nor fortress bold

Could match our captain’s eye.

This part simply serves to let us know that they have become nomads, and that the captain, in his fortitude, is loftier than a peak and bolder than a fortress, then the big climb again for: “Upon the seventh seasick day / We made our port of call / A sand so white, a sea so blue / No mortal place at all.”

That’s the part that has always tugged at my heartstrings: that vision of a beach and the sea. Sounds like heaven, and “no mortal place at all” lets us know it’s deserted, much as Pitcairn Island was for the Bounty deserters. In my youth I used to think that perhaps the lyrics here were suggesting that the “port of call” in its perfection beyond the “mortal” was actually death. That the ship sank and this was Reid’s way of saying it in a very poetic way.  But then that makes the final verse pointless, and it is a very good, very pointed final verse.

“We fired the gun, and burnt the mast / And rowed from ship to shore / The captain cried, we sailors wept / Our tears were tears of joy.” That little pause as he climbs from the somber doings of the crew as it abandons and destroys the ship (again, like the Bounty) to the Joy! Is wonderful, particularly as this verse has very touching violin fills in the background. Then, the kicker (with its internal rhymes on lines 1 and 3):

Now many moons and many Junes

Have passed since we made land

A salty dog, this seaman’s log,

Your witness: my own hand.

Here, as with the Mekons’ “no one will know I got away,” we realize that the narrator is a crewman who remains on the island—which they reached many moons and many Junes ago. We may, if we like, assume that, in fact, they have all gone to those heavenly beaches by now, and “I alone am left to tell the tale”—a seaman’s log.  Very nicely done.

But what sells the song is that brooding orchestration, the major uplifts that soar highest on the title line “a salty dog,” making it an epithet of praise. The song didn’t break the top 40 and I’m not surprised as it's too brooding in its sound, too long in its duration, and too elliptical in its narrative for most listeners. And yet it is a key example of the majesty of Brooker’s singing and writing and the great economy of Reid’s lyrics.

And, with the sound of the gulls at the opening, it’s a song that feels as fully expansive as the ocean seems when you stand before it, as lung filling and as uplifting. And now it’s time to go back again.

Now many moons and many Junes have passed since we first went there. Actually, the family has been staying a week at least since the summer before this song came out. Many Junes indeed.