The 1971 song Jimmy Page wanted to disturb people: “Just so ominous”
Jimmy Page didn’t want to give the people what they wanted when he founded Led Zeppelin.
The whole point of him going solo after The Yardbirds was to make something heavier than the pop-blues songs that he was being forced to play every single time he got onstage, and with the help of John Bonham, none of their songs were ever going to sound all that tame once they rolled the tape. But even if Page wanted his fans to have a good time, he did want the opportunity to freak them out more than a little bit whenever he played around with his favourite tunes.
From the first Zeppelin record onward, though, everyone knew that they were going after something a bit darker than usual. The heaviest thing on the radio at the time was Cream or The Rolling Stones, but when everyone heard ‘Dazed and Confused’ for the first time, it felt like Page was trying to make one of the most intense songs that anyone had ever heard. And if that was what he was playing the first time around, their fourth record was where they pulled out all the stops.
Gone were the days of them having some fun with echo on ‘Whole Lotta Love’, and in its place were some of the most structured riffs that Page had ever come up with. ‘Black Dog’ was already a firecracker of a riff to kick off the entire record, but even for an album that had a song like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on it, Page’s idea of a musical journey had to be a little bit more visceral than his musical hero’s journey.
‘Stairway’ was the acknowledged masterpiece from him and Robert Plant, but it wasn’t always about their partnership. Bonzo was already one of the heaviest drummers that the world had ever seen, but despite being able to beat a drum kit to within an inch of its life every single time he got onstage, the massive reverb sound on ‘When the Levee Breaks’ was the real high point of the record for Page.
Compared with the majestic side of ‘Stairway’, Page said that ‘Levee’ was intended to scare the daylights out of people when they heard it, saying, “‘Levee Breaks’ had to end it, because it was just so ominous and dense and it was just going to disturb people. After you’ve caressed them with ‘Stairway’, now you’re going to disturb them [laughs]. That’s what it’s all about – conjuring up all these different emotions.”
And a lot of that was done by slowing the tape down ever so slightly. The common rule behind every single heavy metal band usually revolves around how fast you’re able to play, but even when Metallica started to become one of the biggest bands in the world years later, nothing that James Hetfield ever wrote was ever going to be able to match this kind of song. And like all great Zeppelin songs, it all came back to working on the blues.
The original Memphis Minnie song is already one of the finest blues tracks of all time, but if you put it in the context of a hard rock band, it takes on a whole new meaning. Plant didn’t have to change too much of the lyrics or anything, but whereas the original was centred around a flood that took out an entire town, their version puts you in the thick of that situation, almost like you’re watching the levees breaking and getting swept up in the waves.
Playing a cover this late into one’s career would have easily been seen as a ‘cop-out’ move at this point, but Page wasn’t one to just play a bunch of old tunes for the hell of it. What he was doing needed to have a musical edge to it, and like all of his other blues songs, it was always about trying to recontextualise the song for a new generation so they could appreciate what those blues records meant to him.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Led Zeppelin Newsletter
All the latest stories about Led Zeppelin from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.