The Led Zeppelin Top 50 Countdown (#15-11) & This Week's Statistics

Hello, my friends! We have just about reached the top 10 in our Led Zeppelin Top 50 Countdown, but not quite. This will happen after today's story.

At #15 in our countdown is the closing number from LZ's best album, Led Zeppelin IV (1971). When the Levee Breaks was originally recorded by the blues musical duo Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie. In the first half of 1927, the Great Mississippi Flood ravaged the state of Mississippi and surrounding areas. It destroyed many homes and devastated the agricultural economy of the Mississippi Basin. Many people were forced to flee to the cities of the Midwest in search of work, contributing to the "Great Migration" of African Americans in the first half of the 20th century. During the flood and the years after it subsided, it became the subject of numerous Delta blues songs, including When the Levee Breaks, hence the lyrics, "I works on the levee, mama both night and day, I works so hard, to keep the water away" and "It's a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan, gonna leave my baby and my happy home". The song focused mainly on when more than 13,000 residents in and near Greenville, Mississippi evacuated to a nearby, unaffected levee for its shelter at high ground. The tumult that would have been caused if this and other levees had broken was the song's underlying theme. This is the original version:

Led Zeppelin kept the original's lyrics, but there is a very hard drive to the arrangement, and a distinctive churning upbeat that resolves into a nice, plangent guitar break - with a very warped undertone to it - halfway through, culminating in an almost hypnotic slide rave-up at the end. Page's freaky, drowned-world production uses heavy echo, backward harmonica, and slo-mo playback. Bonzo's drums, recorded in a stairwell at Headley Grange, are so ginormous they became a classic sample (most famously opening the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill). "The acoustics of the stairwell happened to be so balanced we didn't even need to mic the kick drum," Page recalled.

If John Bonham never did anything for Led Zeppelin but the first two measures of When the Levee Breaks, his place in rock history would still likely be secure. The song’s thundering intro has been sampled and rebuilt so many times in rock and rap history that you’d think it’d lose its impact, but when it hits as the last track on LZIV, right before Plant zooms in with that swampy harmonica blaring, it doesn’t matter how many thousands of times you’ve heard it before. The rest of the song is nearly as great, but when you have the best intro on a Led Zeppelin song - the group with more classic intros than any other rock band in history - it’s worth keeping the focus on that.

This is a good cover version by Alison Krauss:

At #14 is a song from the band's debut album, Led Zeppelin (1969). Communication Breakdown is a quick and dirty rave-up. Plant tries out some of the squeals that will make his mark on Whole Lotta Love on the next album. Page contributes some very crisp, very hard riffs.

As much as Zeppelin might have fretted about being phased out by the punks in the late 1970s, they could’ve very easily pointed to the three-chord riffing and breakneck pace of their debut album’s Communication Breakdown as evidence that they'd beaten the brats to the punch nearly a decade earlier. The band would go on to write songs way more complex and compelling than this, but they never got rawer or harder-hitting - and in fact, no less a punk authority than Johnny Ramone admitted to practicing this song to master his guitar technique.

This is a promo video for Japanese TV:

This is a cover version by the Dickies (a punk rock group):

There is a change of mood at #13. All My Love is the penultimate track on Led Zeppelin's last proper studio album, In Through The Out Door (1979). With a winding synthesizer solo by Jones, the majestic All My Love is one of only two Zeppelin songs not written or co-written by Page. It's Plant's mystical tribute to his son Karac, who died in 1977 at age five. According to a friend, Page "hated All My Love, but because it was about Karac, he couldn't criticize it."

On this song, you can see the entire band moving forward toward a more mature music, past the thudding guitars and preening sexism. You could have imagined Led Zeppelin growing old playing such music; delicate and somehow meaningful, with touches of the old grandeur, all put to the words of a serious song, a tribute to Plant's young son, who died in a car accident. I hear the sound of musicians having passed the point of needing to overwhelm their listeners.

This is a good cover version by Bettye LaVette:

At #12 is yet another song from Led Zeppelin's masterpiece, Led Zeppelin IV (1971). Rock and Roll, three and a half minutes of cataclysmic rock 'n' roll, is among the group's most popular rave-ups, earned through the sheer frenzy of Bonham's cymbal-crashing, Page's fret-racing (one of the most dramatic guitar attacks ever captured on record), Jones' keys-on-fire piano, and Plant's dog-whistle shrieking. The result: an utterly anachronistic but absolutely captivating nostalgic hymn to the 1950s.

Zeppelin were struggling to rehearse Four Sticks when Bonham spontaneously played the now-famous snare and open-high-hat drum intro to Rock and Roll, which imitates the first few bars of Little Richard's 1957 hit Keep A-Knockin'. The song - initially called It's Been a Long Time - expresses a palpable longing for youth and the innocence of Fifties rock: Plant refers to the Stroll, an old dance, and to The Book of Love, by the Monotones, from 1958. But the music recasts rock & roll as something fierce and modern.

This is a live version from The Song Remains The Same DVD:

This is a blues cover version by Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown:

Finally for today, at #11, is The Rain Song from Houses Of The Holy (1973). One of their best ballads, a gorgeous, chiming epic that builds and unwinds itself perfectly, with strings, piano, and even mellotron all adding to the song's stately mystique. Even without the title and "Just a little rain…" section of the song's climax, it evokes the feeling of rain falling outside your window as well as any other song ever has, and shows that the world's biggest band didn't always have to go huge to achieve maximum impact.

It is one of Page's most gorgeous guitar displays, with acoustic and electric lines glistening alongside Jones' lush Mellotron chords. Per legend, it's a response to George Harrison's complaint that "you don't do any ballads" - although Plant and Bonham still make it roar at the end.

This is live at Earls Court, London on 24th May 1975:

This is a cover version by The Shakers:

Now, let's continue with last week's statistics; it was another very good week, with the same number of visits as the previous one, give or take a dozen. I'm glad.

As far as stories are concerned, all of last week's stories did very well, but the story of the pre-disco Bee Gees stood out: In less than a couple of days, it was visited almost twice as much as the next-best story of the week.

As far as countries are concerned, most of the all-time top-tenners increased their overall percentage, with France performing the best. The only exceptions were Germany, which remained stable, Belgium, which dropped only slightly, Russia, which fell more markedly, and the United States, which, once again, lost the most. Australia, South Korea, and Brazil had a good week.

Here are this week's Top 10 countries. You will notice that Europe, North and South America, Oceania, and Asia are all represented. Only Africa is missing.

1. the United States

2. France

3. the United Kingdom

4. Greece

5. Italy

6. Cyprus

7. Canada

8. Australia

9. South Korea

10. Brazil

Here are the other countries that graced us with their presence since our last statistics (alphabetically): Albania, Argentina, Aruba, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bermuda, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Jersey, Kenya, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malta, Mexico, Nepal, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Palestine, Paraguay, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Happy to have you all!

And here's the all-time Top 10:

1. the United States = 37.5%

2. the United Kingdom = 9.4%

3. Greece = 8.8%

4. France = 8.5%

5. Russia = 4.9%

6. Germany = 3.3%

7. Cyprus = 1.38%

8. Italy = 1.31%

9. Canada = 0.77%

10. Belgium = 0.62%

That's all for today, folks. Till the next one!