The 1971 song Jimmy Page called too dark to describe: “So ominous”
If anybody knows the dark side of music, it’s Led Zeppelin guitarist and producer Jimmy Page.
For a start, he was a keen dabbler in the occult. A fascination with the likes of Aleister Crowley hovers all over Page’s extra-curricular pursuits, from his appearance as ‘Man Holding the Stele of Revealing’ in Kenneth Anger’s magickal underground movie, to opening London’s very own occult bookshop with Kensington High Street’s The Equinox.
Even within his hard rock heavyweight band, esoterica peppers their world. Be it the runes that adorn their untitled fourth LP or the Thelemic “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” etched into Led Zeppelin III’s vinyl run-out. According to Page, however, their most abyssal conjuring was plucked from the depths of the old blues songbook during the sessions of their unnamed 1971 album, owing to its uniquely residential genesis when holed up in Hampshire’s Headley Grange estate.
“The whole work ethic was absolutely superb, so we could – did – arrive at things like ‘When The Levee Breaks’, which is so ominous,” Page reflected to The Quietus in 2014. “It’s so dark. It’s so dark that there isn’t a colour to describe it.”
The old country blues number had been around since 1929, first cut by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy, but Led Zeppelin managed to inject some deeper, headier menace that further realised the original’s dark recount of the deadly Mississippi Flood that claimed as many as 500 lives.
There had actually been earlier attempts at ‘When The Levee Breaks’ with tThe Rolling Stones Mobile Studio in December 1970, later revised as ‘If It Keeps on Raining’ for the 2015 Coda reissue, and another stab at Island Studios, but the blues piece’s belligerent growl would be nailed for the band’s third grapple, involving the novel use of mic placement and Page’s artful production.
All kinds of tricks were deployed for ‘When The Levee Breaks’ thunderous energy, Page and bassist John Paul Jones shifting aside its twelve-bar blues foundation for a one-chord droning style and slathering further disquieting murk with the harmonica and guitar solos’ tempo alterations and the engulfing panning that swallows Robert Plant’s vocals on its arresting finale.
Its central feature is John Bonham’s crashing Ludwig drum pummel, however. Charged with cavernous aggression, the acoustics in Headley Grange’s old stone country house lobby offered the perfect sonic bristle for Bonham’s percussion to rattle around. Two Beyerdynamic M 160 mics were suspended above a flight of stairs to capture Bonham’s lobby drum takes, with the output fed through various limiters and delay effects gear, with a little reverse echo added when mixing at Hollywood’s Sunset Sound.
The result? A behemoth rock monster that sounds like it’s emerging from the swamps of the Mississippi Delta like a malevolent harbinger of doom. ‘When The Levee Breaks’ stands as one of Led Zeppelin’s most dramatic moments and offered a generation of DJ crate diggers an immortal piece of hip-hop’s sonic foundation with its copious samples decades after first bottling the old blues number’s baleful spirit.
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