When the 14-Bar Blues Breaks
With a blues stomper like Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks," it's all too easy to pinpoint the source of the tune's extraordinary impact: Literal impact is the first thing you hear, in the thundering cannon fire of John Bonham's bass and snare, famously recorded in the reverberant stone stairwell of a former poorhouse-turned-posh-house in Hampshire. But that alone doesn't account for the hypnotic gravity of this epic 7-minute jam.
It's not just that Zep's arrangement of the Kansas Joe McCoy/Memphis Minnie original avoids the classic 12-bar blues form, stretching its signature tonic-chord riff in the key of F through the whole chorus rather than following the usual I-IV-I-V progression, for a kind of drone effect. It's also that this repetition leads them to stretch the form: To wit, the main chorus is not 12 bars but 14 bars, or 12+2. At least, that's how it goes, twice, the first time through with the vocals, from 1:23 to 2:12:
Then it's got that great 8-bar turnaround on Db and Eb, followed by an ebullient major-key bridge that breaks in like a splash of water, in an 8-bar form played three times through (2:25-3:04). Then we get the 14-bar blues twice—or at least, 28 instrumental bars of the main riff, who knows how it's divided—and the 8-bar turnaround...And then, weirdly enough, when the vocals come back at 4:14, the chorus that follows adds up to another 28 bars, just differently distributed: It's 16 bars for "Cryin' won't help you" and 12 bars for "All last night."
I have no idea what guided these choices (or the fact that the opening drone, before the vocals come in, lasts 36 bars, plus the 8-bar turnaround), only that together they work to make this a kind of blues "Bolero" (minus the crescendo). If some songs evoke a wall of sound, "When the Levee Breaks" sounds more like the pummeling flood waters that could tear one down.
It's not just that Zep's arrangement of the Kansas Joe McCoy/Memphis Minnie original avoids the classic 12-bar blues form, stretching its signature tonic-chord riff in the key of F through the whole chorus rather than following the usual I-IV-I-V progression, for a kind of drone effect. It's also that this repetition leads them to stretch the form: To wit, the main chorus is not 12 bars but 14 bars, or 12+2. At least, that's how it goes, twice, the first time through with the vocals, from 1:23 to 2:12:
Then it's got that great 8-bar turnaround on Db and Eb, followed by an ebullient major-key bridge that breaks in like a splash of water, in an 8-bar form played three times through (2:25-3:04). Then we get the 14-bar blues twice—or at least, 28 instrumental bars of the main riff, who knows how it's divided—and the 8-bar turnaround...And then, weirdly enough, when the vocals come back at 4:14, the chorus that follows adds up to another 28 bars, just differently distributed: It's 16 bars for "Cryin' won't help you" and 12 bars for "All last night."
I have no idea what guided these choices (or the fact that the opening drone, before the vocals come in, lasts 36 bars, plus the 8-bar turnaround), only that together they work to make this a kind of blues "Bolero" (minus the crescendo). If some songs evoke a wall of sound, "When the Levee Breaks" sounds more like the pummeling flood waters that could tear one down.
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