The Led Zeppelin song Dave Grohl called “pure chocolate fuckin’ sex”
Whilst Foo Fighters leader Dave Grohl is a brilliant vocalist and guitarist, it is behind the drum kit that he really shines. A heavy-hitter that fuses technical ability with thunderous fury, it says everything about Grohl’s style that he cites the late Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham as his rhythmic hero, the finest ever to toe such a line.
Possessing extensive knowledge of drumming and the work of John Bonham, Dave Grohl was kind enough to list what he believes to be the greatest moments of the Led Zeppelin drummer during a feature with MOJO a few years back, as located on the Foo Archive.
For Grohl, first hearing Bonham and Led Zeppelin symbolised a turning point in his life. He said: “Led Zeppelin, and John Bonham’s drumming, especially, opened up my ears”.
Before that, Grohl had been a more traditional punk drummer determined to keep things tight and fast. “I was into hardcore punk rock,” he added. “Reckless, powerful drumming, a beat that sounded like a shotgun firing in a cement cellar.”
The soul with which Grohl and Bonham play the drums provides a strong connection between them. He said: “What I play comes straight from the soul — and that’s what I hear in John Bonham’s drumming. I’ve watched Bonzo on the Led Zeppelin DVD, and it looks like the film has been speeded up because he’s playing so fast. I don’t know anyone who thinks there’s a better rock drummer than John Bonham: it’s undeniable!”
In his list of Bonham’s greatest moments, Grohl effused about classic performances on tracks such as ‘Moby Dick’ and ‘Trampled Under Foot’. However, there was only one Bonham flourish that he described as “pure chocolate fuckin’ sex”. This is the stoned swagger on Led Zeppelin’s cover of ‘When the Levee Breaks’ from 1971’s Led Zeppelin IV.
Interestingly, by the time the English quartet recorded their version of the blues standard in 1971, the trope of bands taking on covers from this era was more than overdone, thanks to the likes of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, not to mention that Led Zeppelin had already covered a variety of numbers from the genre themselves. However, with ‘When the Levee Breaks’, things were different than before. Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, and Bonham produced an almost mystical form of magic here that trumps their previous blues renditions.
Recorded in a stairwell to collect the muffled but rich drum sound, Bonham is emphatic on every beat. This is to such an extent that Page and the band built the entire song around his performance. “That is a straight groove,” Grohl writes, “It’s incredible to have a rock drummer that powerful, that crazy, that bad-ass, but with a groove so smooth. It’s so purely human, so fuckin’ smooth, man! It’s pure chocolate fuckin’ sex.”
Listen to ‘When the Levee Breaks Below’.
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