Ethan Hein's Blog

The drum intro from Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks” is, as far as I’m concerned, the very embodiment of The Awesome Majesty Of Rock.

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John Bonham’s staggeringly heavy drum performance was recorded by engineer Andy Johns in Headley Grange, a Victorian-era poorhouse in England. Bonham played a brand new drum kit at the bottom of a stairwell, recorded by microphones placed three stories above. This arrangement made for a big and powerful, yet oddly diffuse and distant sound. To make it even more humungous, the band slowed the tape down a little, lowering the pitch and giving the track a thick, sludgy quality. Zeppelin only ever played “When The Levee Breaks” live a couple of times. On the recording, the tempo is seventy beats per minute, and it’s hard to maintain a heavy groove when you’re playing that slow. Also, it’s impossible to replicate the pitch-shifted timbre acoustically. It’s almost as if “Levee” was meant to live in the electronic realm.

There’s this song called “Damn, I Wish I Was Your Lover” by Sophie B Hawkins. It’s a glassy nineties alternapop thing, a style that I generally don’t have much use for, but it does have a nice groove. I found myself doing the white man’s overbite to it in line at the coffee shop one day. So I looked it up on the Rap Sample FAQ, and was delighted to find out that the beat is a sped-up sample of “Levee.” The sample also appears in “Army Of Me” by Björk, “Lyrical Gangbang” by Dr Dre, two Depeche Mode songs, three Beastie Boys songs and a whole bunch of others.

The best song I’ve written with the guitarist Alex Torovic uses the Levee break, along with as some samples of Pac-Man.

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It’s fitting that the “Levee” break has been so widely appropriated, since the Zeppelin song is itself appropriated from an older work. Like so many British rock songs of the period, it’s an adaptation of an old Delta blues tune. “Levee” was written and first recorded by Memphis Minnie in 1929. It’s about the upheaval caused by the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which destroyed many homes and crippled the agricultural economy of the Mississippi Basin. Farm workers were forced to flee to the cities of the Midwest in search of work, part of the large-scale black urban migration of the first half of the twentieth century. “When The Levee Breaks” is one of many blues songs written about the flood. It focuses on the evacuation of more than thirteen thousand black plantation workers from Greenville, Mississippi. They were moved to a nearby unbroken levee and forced to pile sandbags on it at gunpoint. After the levee breached, the workers weren’t allowed to leave the area. Instead, they were forced to work in the relief and cleanup effort, living in camps with limited access to supplies. Are you getting a Katrina tingle?

Zeppelin’s version is very different from the Memphis Minnie original, musically and lyrically. Still, it’s recognizably derivative. A big chunk of Zep’s early catalog bites from American blues musicians. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant complain bitterly about all the unauthorized sampling of their stuff, which I think is hilarious. Maybe they should just call it even.

Update: see a blog post on how to program this break on a drum machine.