‘The Rain Song’: the strangest track Led Zeppelin ever wrote
Led Zeppelin were never ones to say no to a challenge. Everything about their formation was based around Jimmy Page trying to move out of the shadow of The Yardbirds, and that meant going down every sonic avenue he could while still staying within the confines of rock and roll. Although they still had some ballads in their arsenal, having the gauntlet thrown down by George Harrison with ‘The Rain Song’ gave them one of their strangest tunes ever.
While Zeppelin had been known as one of the biggest names in rock and roll for years at that point, Harrison found it funny that there were hardly any ballads in their catalogue. Looking back on what they were known for, though, Harrison might not have been looking hard enough to find them when making such a comment.
‘Thank You’ is one of their more heartwrenching tunes, and considering their wealth of acoustic work on tracks like ‘Going to California’ and ‘Tangerine’, it’s not like they didn’t know how to tone things down when they wanted to. If it was a ballad that he wanted, though, Page figured he’d give it to him from a different direction.
Since most of Zeppelin’s ballads were known to be folksy, ‘The Rain Song’ feels like it’s coming in from another dimension. While it’s easy to see what Robert Plant is doing with the melody, most people would be lost in the woods trying to figure out what Page is playing for most of the tune.
Why does ‘The Rain Song’ sound so strange?
There had been flirtations with tunings like open-D and open-C before, but you aren’t going to find this tuning in any other song in the band’s catalogue. Considering the weird shapes that Page made to get the chords, chances are he stumbled upon the tuning and stuck with it for long enough until this tune fell out, which led to many notes creating suspensions in the same way that Joni Mitchell’s greatest guitar songs did.
Even when a ballad is supposed to have an emotional release, the chords sound like they are crying out in pain half the time. And once everything breaks down towards the end of the tune, it’s among one of the darkest sections in their catalogue, almost sounding like the music that takes place in some thriller when a lunatic finally snaps and realises that he’s going to kill everyone in his path.
Although Zeppelin would still try for different ballad-type songs later on tracks like ‘Ten Years Gone’, they never managed to have the same type of urgency they had on this tune. As much as they might have matched the sound quality and even surpassed it to some degree, it’s hard to capture that same tortured spirit on record twice.
But like all of Zeppelin’s output, ‘The Rain Song’ was about doing something more than writing on commission from one of The Beatles. When listening to everyone play off each other, they are playing as if some spiritual force is driving it out of them, and even if it sounds a bit disturbing, it’s still a watershed moment in a career already filled with classics.
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