Led Zeppelin's Led Zeppelin IV Page 12
How much is Bonham’s drumming informed by his personality, which we can only know through a cartoon veil of rumor and report? It remains an open question, especially with this band, where personality, myth, and performance blur. I suspect that Zeppelin’s Viking hype relates in some way to the vulgarity that many hear in Bonzo’s beats (Robert Christgau called him “ham-handed”). But Bonham’s physical strength as a drummer and his relative lack of technical sophistication does indicate something primal at work in this man and the sounds he made. Though a savvy drummer, his work is most essentially characterized by his barely restrained power, by his ability to smack a drumhead with enough force and control to propel sound waves into your skull with the crisp conviction of a grizzly bear swatting a hatchback. But even this sounds too mammalian. Unlike Keith Moon, a power drummer that Bonham justifiably idolized, Bonham does not even really play with “heart,” because heart implies passionate excess. Bonham never gushes, at least on record, never drips over the brim. What we hear in his drums is more deeply rooted than heart, an absolute pulse that bubbles up from Earth’s molten core, that grinds time with the monumental calm of a continental plate. Bonham is not primal, but primeval.
Bonham’s sigil, emblazoned on his single bass drum, suggests the element of earth; within the alchemical dynamics of the band, he concretized and contained. With the hollow thundering beats that open “When the Levee Breaks,” it is clear that the final chapter of is driven by his telluric energies, by the drum’s invocation of fate rather than the guitar’s bid for freedom. These beats are the molten core of rock grooves: a heaviness that flows, that lifts us up with a sinking feeling. The denouement of is not some misty peak—that came earlier, with “Stairway to Heaven.” Instead we fall away from myth and return to the root, to matter, to a dirge of the earth. This is a song, after all, about an ecological disaster, about the triumph of the elements over our pathetic attempts at control. If there is a Lady in this song, it is Dame Nature, and she’s got more cataclysmic things to think about now than Robert Plant’s latest roll in the hay.
As a blues number, “Levee” returns to the root in another sense as well, not because the blues are somehow closer to nature, but because British musicians of Zeppelin’s generation considered the blues to be the Source. The genealogy of rock and roll is more complex than this, of course, but under the rootless conditions of modernity, we often choose our ancestors, and for a number reasons, noble and not, British rockers chose black American blues musicians. Revisionist blues is also where Zeppelin first came together musically. As their blistering early bootlegs show, blues helped the band discover the volcanic energies they would later refine and arrange into their unique combo work. Robert Christgau points out that Zep’s blues recastings generally sound at once oddly cerebral and almost parodic in their overstatement. But with “Levee,” he notes, the band simultaneously transcends these peculiarities and fully realizes them, creating a song that “really sounds like a blues” even as it crescendos like a symphony. “When the Levee Breaks” is Zeppelin’s definitive blues song on record; it puts the vision into revisionism.
As practitioners of white Brit blues go, however, Zeppelin has a particularly vexed relationship with the genre. The issue is appropriation—specifically, the band’s refusal, ultimately costly, to give much credit to the blues musicians whose lyrics and licks they lifted. In rehearsal and onstage, Plant freely drew from the blues canon, and he honestly seemed to believe that these songs in turn had emerged from some collective well of folk memory that welcomed all comers. Given the way that early American music was repackaged for young consumers during the folk and blues boom of the early 1960s, this was not an unreasonable assumption. But intention is not really part of the controversy. With cuts like “Bring It On Home,” which smears on blackface even as it trumpets white moves, Zeppelin reignited a racial narrative that goes back to Elvis: White popularizers get rich off the backs of American blacks. On some level, it’s all about the benjamins, and one would be churlish not to applaud whatever out-of-court settlement Willie Dixon won after suing Zeppelin in the 1980s for swiping his lyrics for “Whole Lotta Love.” On the other hand, the fact that Zeppelin squeezed their lemons all the way to the bank doesn’t dissolve the complex questions about how artists cut and paste their way toward novelty within a genre. Moreover, given today’s intense conflicts over intellectual property—which set public culture against the omnivorous corporate exercise of copyright—it is harder to see Dixon’s suit as the simple triumph of an aggrieved musician over arrogant white pirates.
That’s not to say that Zeppelin could not be, as Will Shade called them, “thieving magpies.” In an article in Perfect Sound Forever, Shade meticulously and acerbically catalogs Plant’s lyric borrowings and Page’s sometimes-miserly swipes from his heroes and peers.77 Shade has done his homework, although his big revelation—that Page appropriated the opening bars of “Stairway to Heaven” from Spirit’s “Taurus” “note for note”—is pretty feeble.78 Perhaps the most important point to make about Zeppelin’s creative appropriation here is that, while they could be magpies, they were equal-opportunity magpies. In all the brouhaha over Zeppelin’s blues piracy, one rarely comes across critics rallying around the flag of Bert Jansch, despite the fact that Jimmy Page lifted major elements of “Black Mountain Side” from Jansch’s 1966 gem “Blackwaterside.” Though Jansch rightly listed the song as “Trad.,” Page felt his own stylings original enough to give himself sole songwriting credit.
Given such conduct, we might glimpse the hand of some cosmic ironist behind the fact that the beats that open Zeppelin’s greatest blues song have become rock music’s most widely used sample. Besides making its way onto myriad breakbeat compilations, Bonham’s “Levee” riff has been sampled by Ice T, Dr. Dre, Derek B, Puff Daddy, Eminem, Coldcut, and Massive Attack, among many others. Though not on the par with “Funky Drummer” or the Amen break, Bonham’s snippet has woven itself permanently into hip-hop and dance music’s collective DNA. The Beastie Boys committed perhaps the most notable (and thematically appropriate) swipe of Bonham in “Rhymin’ and Stealin’,” which opens their hip hop masterjerk License to Ill. Given the Beastie Boys’ snarky white bum’s rush on what at the time was a definitively black genre, it is perhaps appropriate that their album’s opening volley sampled the heaviest white rock drummer who could also swing; certainly the song’s lyrics betrayed a debt to Zeppelin’s marauder mythos. (“Skirt chasing, freebasing, killing every village / We drink and rob and rhyme and pillage.”) Some histories of sampling claim that Zeppelin or their lawyers tried to sue the Beasties for copyright infringement, a move that marked the beginning of the end of sampling’s open range. But Mike D insists that Zeppelin never contacted the group regarding beats, rhymes, or fashions. “Maybe that’s ’cause they got all three categories on lock,” he added.
“When the Levee Breaks” raises another question about props: Why, given their historic parsimony in the matter, does Zeppelin credit the song to Memphis Minnie as well as to all four members of the band? Minnie wrote and recorded “When the Levee Breaks” with her husband Kansas Joe McCoy in 1929, shortly before the guitar-playing couple migrated from Tennessee to Chicago. Admittedly, though Zeppelin’s music is entirely different, Plant does retain most of the original verses. But I think greater significance lies in this invocation of Minnie at the close of . For though Minnie’s original recording of the tune sounds pretty quaint, the woman who performed it was a powerhouse. A bridge between the country blues of the Delta and Chicago’s urban groups, as well as a link to the classic female blues singers of the 1920s, Minnie was an early architect of the postwar Chicago sound. With her guitar combos, Minnie always played lead, and her intricate fingerpicking won her many a showdown. But her most visionary move was to strap on an electric guitar, picking up the instrument at least a year before Muddy Waters. Minnie’s electric playing was never recorded, but if a 1943 column by Langston Hughes is to be believed, she was fierce
—worlds away from the clean sound of Charlie Christian or the supper-club stuff she recorded as part of Lester Melrose’s self-consciously sophisticated Bluebird roster:
Memphis Minnie sits on top of the icebox at the 230 Club in Chicago and beats out blues on an electric guitar … The electric guitar is very loud, science having magnified all its softness away. Memphis Minnie sings through a microphone and her voice—hard and strong anyhow for a little woman’s—is made harder and stronger by scientific sound. The singing, the electric guitar, and the drums are so hard and so loud, amplified as they are by General Electric on top of the icebox, that sometimes the voice, the words, and melody get lost under sheer noise, leaving only the rhythm to come through clear. The rhythm fills the 230 Club with a deep and dusky heartbeat that overrides all modern amplification. The rhythm is as old as Minnie’s most remote ancestor.79
Despite this invocation of the old ones, Hughes winds up emphasizing the industrial scale of Minnie’s sound—“a musical version of electric welders plus a rolling mill.” His description helps us hear what Big Bill Broonzy meant when he said that Minnie “played like a man,” but it’s probably more accurate to say that she played like an ancestor. Evoking rural moods with modern machines, Minnie birthed a new ghostworld of electric sound.
I don’t know what Robert Plant or Jimmy Page felt about Memphis Minnie, but I still hear their version of “When the Levee Breaks,” with its deliriously processed guitar and vocals, as an homage to a blues musician whose own ferocious electric spirit was never interred on wax. But Minnie was more than an honored musician—she was an honored female musician, one as powerful and important to as Joni Mitchell or Sandy Denny, albeit from an ancestral remove. The presence of these three women should hardly be considered accidental on an album devoted to the search for the Lady, especially in an oeuvre as basically hairy as Zeppelin’s. They are all figures of power as well: Denny commands soldiers with her extraordinary voice; Mitchell eludes the grasp of Kings and Percy alike; Minnie co-authors the heaviest song on the disc. Rather than serve as avatars for some nebulous feminine current, these women, these peers, are a de facto rejoinder to Percy’s goofy idealism, which by this point has led him to the brink.
Some have heard this Zeppelin performance as an expression of sexual anxiety. Claiming that the broken dam is one of the central symbolic fears of the “proto-fascist imagination,” Joy Press and Simon Reynolds ask if this “tour-de-force of Doomsday boogie” is not in fact an “an allegory of [the] fear of feminine engulfment, elevated to a histrionic pitch of cosmic dread?”80 Certainly we can hear the engulfment Press and Reynolds describe. “Levee” features one of the most ceaseless riffs of any Zeppelin song, a grinding dirge interrupted only by the cycling guitar figure of the bridge, which serves as Percy’s last stab at pop transcendence. But each time we return to the core twelve bars, the relentless undertow gets thicker and weirder and darker. Guitars, vocals, and harmonica are subjected to heavy phase, creating a swirling whirlpool of sound that Page and Johns intensify with stereo pans, backwards guitar, backwards echo, and other tricks whose destabilizing effects can only truly be appreciated with headphones and a brain full of smoke.
The effect of all this “scientific sound” is indeed to engulf the listener, as the boundaries defining and separating instruments and voice begin to dissolve into a vortex, an experience that Page once described, in a discussion of related echo effects, as “sucking you into the source.”81 But is this feminine engulfment? The idea, I suppose, is that the well-bounded masculine ego that Zeppelin supposedly represents can be threatened or smothered by female Eros. But Percy has spent the whole album looking for transcendence through the Lady; he wants to be obliterated in Her. And it doesn’t make much psychological sense to sing a song written by a woman to express your fear of woman’s power. Zeppelin doesn’t have that kind of irony. So while I do hear the waters surging and sucking through this Doomsday boogie, that’s what I think they are: waters. Sometimes a jellyroll is just a jellyroll, and a broken levee is just a broken levee. ends in the element of water, in a flood of analog waves.
Besides, while brownshirts may quake at the notion of a broken dam, a broken levee has a far more concentrated meaning, especially to blues hounds like Zeppelin. Minnie and McCoy’s song is only one of a number of classic blues songs—Charley Patton, Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Lonnie Johnson wrote others—that reflect the havoc wreaked by the 1927 flood of the Mississippi Delta, a nightmare that marks blues consciousness the way the sinking of the Titanic marks American consciousness. The 1927 flood is often described as one of the worst natural disasters in US history, although, as is often the case, the word “natural” cloaks human hubris—in this case, the longstanding attempt to control the Big Muddy’s periodic flooding. To achieve this lofty goal, engineers corralled the river into a single channel defined by thousands of miles of earthen ridges—some the height of four-story houses. Sheltered by these levees, the rich alluvial lowlands of the Delta came to host black tenant farmers as well as levee camps, rough and licentious tent villages perfect for brutalized laborers, whores, and the occasional traveling bluesman. In early 1927, heavy rains swelled the river to towering heights before the waters burst through, ultimately flooding an area the size of Connecticut. Hundreds died, and a couple hundred thousand were displaced, many of whom pulled up their nonexistent stakes and headed north, especially to Chicago.
As with the Titanic, the Delta flood took on Biblical proportions in its retelling. Even today, as the historical memory fades to a dew, the event carries the force of judgment, making its most powerful recent appearance in Bob Dylan’s “High Water,” a flooded Desolation Row that appears on 2001’s Love and Theft. Dylan wrote the song for Charley Patton, a Delta resident who recorded the most powerful of the original broken-levee blues, and the one most relevant to Percy’s plight here at the close. Over both sides of a 78 recorded in 1929, the growling singer abandons his flooded home for other towns in Mississippi and Alabama, only to discover that the waters have already reached his destination: Rosedale, Greenville, Vicksburg, Blytheville, Marion City. As the flood waters spread, the singer’s attempt to escape grows ever more pointless. Though Patton never loses his documentary grit, the monstrosity of the event opens up a universal dimension to the story, a space of homelessness and loss that none of us can hope to flee although we must make the attempt. The final line is as desolate as anything in Kafka or Beckett, and much less funny: “I couldn’t see nobody’s home, wasn’t no one to be found.”
Even the famous and hedonistic millionaires in Led Zeppelin came to know such desolation in their lives, although I suspect they encountered scant hints of it in the early 1970s. For his part, though, Percy has reached the end of the groove. The waters that will engulf him are the apotheosis of the ecological disturbance that has been growing throughout the record, from the red seas to the quaking mountains, the rotten apples to the crying pines. Mother Nature is disturbed: she weeps and bleeds: the balance is not coming back. But the levees are not holding either, because no tool of Mephisto modernity, from jet planes to electric guitars, is going to keep back the flood. We are all just apprentices of this sorcerer Civilization. Just listen to the scientific sounds that swamp Percy’s voice at the close of the song: technology drowns us all.
Percy knows he is a “mountain man,” a spiritual being, and he still wants to climb those paths straight and high. But now he is sinking, and the hill country is barred, and the mountains have washed away. At last, he realizes what a fool he has been: Throughout all his fruitless searching and cruel dissatisfaction, he has had a good woman and a happy home. He has failed the Joseph Campbell monomyth. He is not a hero; he is a cad. But it’s “too fucking late,” as Chuck Eddy has it. “You should’ve thought about that before we left home.”82 Percy makes a final bid for Chicago, but we don’t believe it, and neither does he. The waters are rising, and he’s going down. Like Don Giovanni at the close of the show, like the g
laciers melting in the land of the ice and snow, like poor Bonzo dying on spooky Jimmy’s bed, Percy is going down. We hear a strange little guitar flourish at the very end, like the bark of a shaggy dog or the rare green flash of sunset. Then silence swallows the winding road, and the spirit leaves, and lifts into the air.
VII.
CODA:
IN THE EVENING
The likes of Led Zeppelin will never again lumber across the landscape of pop consciousness. They were true rock dinosaurs: huge, vaguely malevolent wonders, possessing more force than forebrain, and yet feathered with the avian grace of the songbirds that are the distant genetic descendents of T. Rex and crew. Their likes will never come again, not just because Led Zeppelin was a unique fusion of unique talents, but because the environment they ruled is gone, leveled by any number of incoming asteroids: punk rock, MTV, AIDS, skinny ties. Their environment was the early 1970s, an era marked by the slow fade of the counterculture’s utopian hopes and expectations. The children of the sun became the wayward teens of sunset, as a revolutionary generation woke up to find itself a mass market and a ship of fools, as John Sinclair’s guitar army became Jimmy Page’s. The reason most revivals of the 1970s focus on kitsch—smiley faces, bell bottoms, the great Billy Jack—is because we still cannot take on this malaise, cannot breathe the air of dissipated dreams, of paranoia and retreat, of silent running. The surface of the decade was gaudy and groovy, but the depths were heavy, a heaviness you can hear in metal guitars, in the inky grooves of funk, and in the almost morbid introspection of singer-songwriters. Even the Carpenters can sound like a dirge.