When the Levees Broke...

Zep's a good band, aren't they?

Many of my favorite songs by Led Zeppelin are off their forth album. You know, the vinyl/CD that have a few little known, obscure songs like Stairway to Heaven, Rock and Roll, Misty Mountain Hop... OK, every song on this album is a classic rock hit. The best of the bunch (outside of Stairway, my all time favorite song) would have to be When the Levee Breaks.

The song is a sonic masterpiece. The first thing that you hear is an echoing drum and top hat beat (played by John Bonham, the drummer). After a quick few seconds, the song breaks into full force with mega-heavy riffs by Jimmy Page (the guitarist) and a crazily haunting harmonica melody by Robert Plant (the high pitched singer). The harmonica in this song is interesting; the sounds made seem almost like echoing train whistles, almost like a fleet of locomotives going north. The verses are sung in the old fashioned Blues style (A-A-B), and seem to be about a levee. (Apparently, its in danger of breaking.)

As the song sludges on, the guitar and harmonica get even more intense, almost epic sounding. Drums fill in the areas that are not covered by the whirlwind of noise, along with giving a strong back beat to the fiery guitar (and harmonica) solos and the pleading, biting vocals. Everything seems ghostly, almost. Things pick up again near the end, with a big drum roll by Bonham -- and then things get strange. The sound itself starts swirling around, as if in some gigantic blender. Finally, once you had all you can possibly take, the song plops you out into an almost electronic sounding finish. And then you can finally breathe a sigh of relief.














So what does this song have to do with a place? Well, surprisingly a lot; this is actually a cover of a Memphis Minnie song about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. According to National Geographic, they had a lot of rain down in the Mississippi delta that year (like TEN TIMES as is usual annually!) Anyways, the article states that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built many levees to hold back back the river back then, and the Corps stood by their work, thinking that it would be enough to hold back the river. Unfortunately, they weren't enough to hold back the massive amounts of fluid that would come by that year. After the levees were razed, the Corps forced the local Blacks to rebuild the engineers shattered failures, many of them at gunpoint. This is the place and event that the song is about.

Zeppelins interpretation of Minnie's blues number seems to evoke the chaos of the flood. The music sounds crazy, chaotic and hard, much like the storms and rushing water (and slave camp like conditions for the workers) really were. The lyrics in the non blues sounding verses deal with getting out of the place, and these lyrics are more pleading, frenzied than the relatively quieter bluesy sections. It's quite a hellish place that the music takes you to.

Anyways, the reason I probably like this song so much is the hard blues rock feel that it has with it (as well as its epic sounding qualities, as I mentioned above). The music states it's emotion and purpose well, and in my humble opinion, is probably one of the deeper and more gripping Zeppelin songs. (Of course, most Zep songs are about how great women and Hobbits are, in all fairness.) For me at least, it is a great pleasure to listen too.

EDIT: Just in case you wanted to listen to the song itself... The music is set to pictures of the devastation that Katrina left behind, and I think the combination is very moving. This song really took a whole new meaning two years ago.