“That black hole”: The song Jimmy Page claimed was impossible to reproduce
Whenever anyone enters the studio, it’s about trying to capture lightning in a bottle. It might be an easy enough task to capture what a band does live in front of a couple of microphones behind the glass, but the true artists are the ones who see the studio as an opportunity to make something a little more nuanced than a standard performance. It might not always be easy, but when a band like Led Zeppelin entered the studio, they created the kind of tunes that could never be made by any other human hands.
Even before they had the musical bells and whistles to worry about, though, they were already a machine. Jeff Beck had been priming everyone’s palette for this kind of music when working with Rod Stewart, but the minute that Robert Plant started howling over Jimmy Page’s guitar riffs on ‘Dazed and Confused’, everyone fell head over heels for what the band were making. This was blues with a darker edge, but Page was only getting started.
While the first four self-titled albums fly by like some musical whirlwind, there was a lot more for them to discover on every project. Led Zeppelin II may have been released while they were on the road, but there was something feral to the way that the band played, like Page turning his guitar into a weapon when playing the solo of ‘Heartbreaker’ or turning acoustic songs into heavy tracks like ‘Ramble On’.
If there was ever a moment when Zeppelin put their music before anything else, it was around the time of their fourth album. Since the record was meant to be included with no band shot or anyone’s name on the cover, Page figured that it would be a great way to prove their critics wrong. Now, everyone would judge them for their music, and when any album has a song like ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on it, it’s hard to argue that the songs are terrible.
Led Zeppelin IV feels like a damn fireworks show throughout every track, but if ‘Black Dog’ was the massive kickoff, ‘When the Levee Breaks’ is pure bluesy Armageddon. The band were no strangers to blues covers by this point, but by having John Bonham lay into that groove as the rest of the band swirls around him, it makes you feel like getting swept up in the waves that are coming from the flood Plant is singing about.
And for Page, it was a miracle that they made everything sound this good in the studio, saying, “The Sunset Sound mix of ‘When the Levee Breaks’ had a density that could not be replicated when we remixed it in England. It didn’t have that space – that black hole. So we put that one on the original album.” And listening back to later remixes, it doesn’t have the same kind of punch that the original had going for it.
That “black hole” that Page talks about is the whole reason why it works so well as the album’s closer. Since the top of the album began with a guitar army slowly getting warmed up, this is the aftermath of what went on in those 42 minutes, with every piece crashing in on each other until it finally fades out.
Page was always going for something slightly sinister when he started working with Zeppelin, but ‘When the Levee Breaks’ wasn’t something that he could have done on his own, either. The performance itself sounds magnificent, but there’s some strange ex-factor about the tune that makes it sound like it got ripped from the underworld.
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