Mama, you got to move

Led Zeppelin - 'When The Levee Breaks' (Led Zeppelin IV - 1971)

When I started this project, I would discuss over beers¹ with different people what type of songs I would initially write about; one question from my friend and former colleague, Matt, was, “When are you going to do ‘When The Levee Breaks; by Led Zeppelin?” Matt was interested as just over a year ago, he celebrated his 50th, and so did Led Zeppelin IV.

Many magnificent things other than Matt and Led Zeppelin IV turned 50 last year, and with this being the 70th record we’ve celebrated, the closing track of it is also the 7th from 1971 - a remarkable 1 in 10 entries so far have been from a musical year good enough to write a book about. Only one more 1971 record will come in my initial burst of 100, but I have another half dozen on the shortlist.²

As this is Led Zeppelin, when we look at the origin of the song, it had routes in 1927.

The original song is a blues song with a hint of country written and recorded by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie in 1929 in the aftermath of the destruction wrought by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. One of the outcomes of this flooding is that many people that lived around the river basin upped sticks and moved north. Many others at this time moved north, escaping economic issues, the weather, or straight-up racism. This is known as the Great Migration and saw around 6 million African-Americans move out of the south of the USA.

Among the several million were bluesmen such as Muddy Waters, Freddie King, Albert King and Albert Collins, who moved to Chicago. Whilst there, they would develop their delta blues into something more urban and gritty; this guitar sound significantly influenced Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. So we now have Page reflecting this style, and we have singer Robert Plant borrowing lyrics, so the line in Led Zeppelin’s version speaking of “going north to Chicago” is a nod to the experience of those that gave the song impetus.

If you are around the same age as me and don’t live in the US, the song is potentially the first place you heard the word levee or at least until Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and the levees did indeed break, with disastrous consequences. Back in 1927, African-Americans in the area were equally devastated, with some not allowed to escape the area and made to work on the recovery, living in camps and the last to get any food when it did make through to the afflicted and now useless plantations. This is how the levee taught us to weep and moan.

In 1970, as Led Zeppelin were beginning work on the follow-up to Led Zeppelin III, they decided to set their version out as somewhat different from the original; a new guitar riff from Page would help. The first stop on that journey was ‘If It Keeps On Raining’ - eventually released in 2015 with the extended re-issue of Coda.

You’ll notice that this sounds more like the 1920s original; it has some of that swing, and while there is the genesis of the riff from Page, the noticeable difference is that John Bonham’s drums are not doing what we are familiar with from the 1971 version, stomping all over the song like Godzilla.

As they moved from that version to the final one, the song moves further away from the twelve-bar blues into something more like the drone that is starting to be suggested by Page’s guitar. Parts of the final mix are delayed, even slowed down to give the guitars and harmonica around Bonham’s concrete bombast a sludgy sound. ,

There seem to be some zombie facts about this song on the Internet, particularly relating to the 2008 document It Might Get Loud, where when Jimmy Page visits Headley Grange, where this song was recorded, he talks about the drums being miked up close and halfway up the stairs in the lobby and the implication is that the echo is from that physical distance rather than the delay devices that were used.

Sound engineer Andy Johns covered this in a 2006 interview for Rhythm magazine saying.

"One night Zeppelin were all going down the boozer and I said, 'You guys bugger off but Bonzo, you stay behind because I've got an idea.' So we took his kit out of the room where the other guys had been recording and stuck it in this lobby area. I got a couple of microphones and put them up the first set of the stairs."

and of the stairs alone achieving the echo;

"I used two Beyerdynamic M160 microphones and I put a couple of limiters over the two mics and used a Binson Echorec echo device that Jimmy Page had bought. They were Italian-made and instead of tape they used a very thin steel drum.

"Tape would wear out and you'd have to keep replacing it. But this wafer-thin drum worked on the same principle as a wire recorder. It was magnetised and had various heads on it and there were different settings. They were very cool things!

"And so playing at that particular tempo on 'Levee the limiters had time to breathe and that's how Bonzo got that 'Ga Gack' sound because of the Binson. He wasn't playing that. It was the Binson that made him sound like that. I remember playing it back in the Stones' mobile truck and thinking, 'Bonzo's gotta f**king like this!' I had never heard anything like it and the drum sound was quite spectacular."

Indeed it seems to be a rare song from that era that Bonham didn’t complain about how the recording didn’t line up with what he had been playing.

It’s a song the band didn’t often play live, as the song’s ending, with the instrumental sections panning around Page’s vocals, was hard to recreate even if it was one of his favourite mixes.

Led Zeppelin didn’t '“do” singles, but this is a song that has built up quite a legacy even if radio play pales in significance when compared to the likes of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ and ‘Stairway To Heaven’ Robert Christgau called it the album’s most outstanding achievement as it manages to mix the authenticity of the blues with the ambition of an orchestra rushing to the climax.

You can make the case that it is the best drumming performance by one of rock music’s best drummers and the song’s second life as an inspiration to those that sampled it; Eminem and Dr Dre, Sophie B. Hawkins, Mike Oldfield and most (in)famously, The Beastie Boys who have taken the drum sound that kicks these epic closing seven minutes off and used it as the foundations to open up something new.

Likewise for Plant, who just a few days ago was on the Pyramid Stage at this year’s Glastonbury with Alison Krauss performing another twist on a song approaching its 100th birthday.

1. When lockdowns allowed them!

2. Currently approaching 600 songs.