‘When the Levee Breaks’: Jimmy Page once named his favourite Led Zeppelin mix
It takes a lot for any musician to start looking at their music through a production lens. Many people can get bogged down trying to figure out what any of their songs need, but after coming off the studio floor, listening to the same performance repeatedly is enough to drive anyone insane if they don’t know where to look. Since Jimmy Page already had a musical sixth sense with Led Zeppelin, he knew exactly what every song needed when touching things up in the studio.
Then again, anyone who had played on as many sessions as Page had usually had a good idea of what he wanted his tunes to sound like. His whole purpose was to find the right sound to help push everything forward for the band, and that meant either messing things up in the mix or turning certain portions up as loud as he could to see what effect it had on the rest of the music.
While that kind of adventurousness may have been unheard of when The Beatles were doing it, Page made it a part of Zeppelin’s collective DNA. The whole reason why a track like ‘Whole Lotta Love’ works so well is because of how much he distorts the song in the middle section, and while a song like ‘No Quarter’ already sounds fantastic when played with a band, his choice to slow the whole thing down is what makes it sound so much heavier than it actually is.
Even for a guitar player, though, Page always knew that a good mix starts off with the drums first. No one was going to get anywhere if John Bonham wasn’t satisfied behind the drumkit, and while he unleashed his inner animal every time he played, some of the best moments of his career came when he was laying back into the groove when working on tracks like ‘Kashmir’ or ‘A Fool in The Rain’.
Still, there’s a reason why ‘When the Levee Breaks’ is considered one of the best drum sounds of all time. Compared to every other drummer of his time, Bonzo is laying back and delivering the kind of performance that could stop anyone in their tracks, with that natural echo on the record giving the entire track a chilling ambience before any other instrument plays a note.
Whereas most people would kill to say that they produced three seconds of this song, Page still considered it one of the finest productions he made with Zeppelin, saying, “Things like panning and extreme positioning make for a very exciting listening experience. One of my favourite mixes is at the end of ‘When The Levee Breaks,’ when everything starts moving around except for the voice, which stays stationary.”
Even if Page wasn’t thinking about these terms, the ending is also a great way of tone-painting the end of the tune. The whole track revolves around this pending flood set to wipe out everything in its wake, and hearing Plant scream about going down as the rest of the band swirls around him makes you feel like you’re swept up in flood as if Percy’s voice is the only thing keeping you from floating away.
While Zeppelin might not have received their due credit in their prime, ‘When the Levee Breaks’ is still one of the finest examples of hard rock, and it is a look into what pure darkness could sound like on record. Even if they don’t like this term all that much, much of heavy metal still lives in the shadow of this tune as well.
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