“So ominous”: the song Jimmy Page called too dark for words
Led Zeppelin never had the intention of making anything easy for mainstream rock fans. They had adopted the album as their medium, and they were going to make sure that anyone listening to them in full was going to get every bit of the musical spectrum, whether that was some blues, some ballads, or trips into the world of folk-rock. Although Jimmy Page was always proud that the band could go in different directions, that didn’t mean things couldn’t get a little bit sinister as well.
Then again, was anyone really shocked to see a band like Zeppelin getting darker? Their heavy approach to music is practically what birthed the idea of heavy metal for a lot of people, and given Page’s interest in the occult throughout their glory years, they were one of the last bands that any mother wanted their kid to be listening to. But that hardly detracted from the fantastic riffs he was spewing out.
Across every one of their self-titled records, you can hear them gradually inching towards something more adventurous, and by the time they reached their untitled record, people were gobsmacked about how much they had grown. The critics could complain about them all they wanted, but any band’s ability to go from ‘Rock and Roll’ to ‘Stairway to Heaven’ to ‘Going to California’ within the span of one album was truly on another musical plain.
But like all great Zeppelin albums, they weren’t shy to wear their blues influences on their sleeve. Half of Page’s greatest riffs came from the blues scale, and the minute that John Paul Jones kicked everything off by writing ‘Black Dog’, the band had the kind of rock-solid foundation that felt like a cross between funk, rock, metal, and some sort of primal form of rock not yet discovered by man.
“It’s so dark that there isn’t a colour to describe it…”
jimmy page
If Jones ushered everyone into the album, though, ‘When the Levee Breaks’ was the minute everything got darker. Zeppelin were no strangers to doing blues covers as far back as their debut, but this take on a Memphis Minnie tune was proof of how far they had come as a unit, especially with that phenomenal backbeat from John Bonham and the guitars sounding like they’re being played in slow motion.
Even when talking about the tune years after the fact, Page felt that what they captured there was truly too demented for words, saying, “The whole work ethic was absolutely superb so we could – did – arrive at things like ‘When The Levee Breaks’, which is so ominous. It’s so dark. It’s so dark that there isn’t a colour to describe it, and then you’ve got something that is really caressing, like ‘Going To California’. You’ve got these extremes of music there.”
And the fact that both songs come side-by-side is a great way to close the record. The band had messed around with acoustic tunes before bringing out a Joni Mitchell-style tune, but by the time Robert Plant starts singing about the levee breaking and an entire town being washed away by the flood, it may as well be a sign of the apocalypse with the drums acting like every breaking wave engulfing the land.
Aside from being one of the finest examples of Zeppelin’s power, though, ‘When the Levee Breaks’ is the perfect lesson in where all the heaviness of modern music comes from. The blues was where everything truly started, and whenever someone tries their hand at making their own version of the blues, they should be willing to lay everything on the line to bring something like this to life.
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