When The Levee Breaks: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. – If it keeps on raining shit, the levee is going to break.

By the levee I mean the world.

By shit I mean the distortions, disinformation, misinformation and out right lies spouted on an hourly basis by Donald Trump and his minions of chaos monkey, ratfucking sycophants, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who want to break everything on purpose for their mean spirited, evil little plans for chaos and anarchy.

Somehow there seems to be a big profit in it. It’s a mystery to me why people fall for it. But there it is.

Clearly there is not much profit in telling the truth anymore.

If this shit keeps on raining down and is not stopped – every greasy, runny turd of it spread all over the tube and internet by every media channel in the land – the world is going to break. And that includes the internet and the power grid.

Some days I feel like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke who laid there all night and saved the small town in the Netherlands from a debilitating flood.

Only I can’t keep this up much longer. The waves are getting bigger every day. They will swamp the place soon. I do not want to be under the rip tide.

It’s interesting, at least to me, how writers/musicians come up with these ideas. On the same day I woke up thinking about “When the Levee Breaks,” one of my friends in Arkansas posted on his Facebook page a line from “The Jig Is Up.” When I asked him about it, he said it was a song lyric, and that’s what he had in his head when he woke up in the morning.

“I do that all the time,” I said. It may be a word, a phrase or a book, movie or song title.

The interesting thing is when you take the idea and start thinking about it and doing online research to flesh it out more.

When Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page decided to cover the blues song “When the Levee Breaks” in 1971 for their untitled fourth album, usually referred to as Led Zeppelin 4, they were coming down South like many rockers from the British Invasion looking for blues songs in the public domain to basically rip off.

The song is a country Delta blues song written and first recorded by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie in 1929 for Columbia Records. It reflects on the upheaval people experienced during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

The original recording is, of course, on Youtube, like everything else these days. That is for now, until the servers break and go down, when the A.I. data centers use up all the power and break the power grid.

Now I don’t know how the band was feeling at the time, or whether there was more to it than stealing a song to record, but the world seemed to be breaking in 1969, ’70 and ’71. Read this intro:

The Story of a Swamper And a Sideman

Perhaps the band wanted to make a subtle, literary message about that to put out in the world. I mean that’s what John Lennon of the Beatles was doing at the time. Only he was not always so subtle. Remember Vietnam? “Give Peace A Chance?”

One of the interesting things I got into when researching the song turns out to be one of the more fascinating legends about rock recordings from those days, and it also happens to be about the drums, which of course I’m always interested in learning about.

Just so you know, if and when I get to California, I am going to be starting a new FM radio station and am considering developing a podcast for it. I will not reveal a final name until I get there.

But on this song, I learned, there is an ongoing controversy about how John Bonham’s drum parts on the song were recorded. He played a set of Ludwig drums, just like my first set purchased from the window of the Alabama Music store on Fourth Avenue North in Birmingham in about 1971.

The drum part was recorded in the lobby of the Headley Grange castle used by the Beatles and Eric Clapton at times. The sound engineer set up two Beyerdynamic M 160 microphones suspended above the staircase in the entry room. Many web commenters believe there was no echo effect device used on the song. The room had a natural echo, what we in the biz call a “live” room. Recording studios use all kinds of padding to dampen any natural echo like this. But Led Zeppelin thought the song could use some of this on the special song.

As Rick Beato revealed on YouTube in his popular podcast, a pair of Helios F760 compressor/limiters were set aggressively to create a breathing effect on the song, and engineers used a Binson Echorec delay effects machine on it too.

Bullshit revealed. Now if we could just stop all the other horseshit raining down on us all day every day from the White House, we might could stop the levee from breaking.

Of course I had been living in New Orleans before the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina. But I saw and wrote about the big waves coming, and got out in time not to get trapped there.

Global Warming Makes Saving Louisiana’s Wetlands Hard

Listen to the song for yourself. Notice the echo on the drum sound.

Lyrics

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
When the levee breaks I’ll have no place to stay
Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan
Lord mean old levee taught me to weep and moan
It’s got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home
Oh well, oh well, oh well

Don’t it make you feel bad
When you’re tryin’ to find your way home
You don’t know which way to go?
If you’re goin’ down South
They got no work to do
If you don’t move to Chicago

Cryin’ won’t help you prayin’ won’t do you no good
Now cryin’ won’t help you prayin’ won’t do you no good
When the levee breaks mama you got to move
All last night sat on the levee and moaned
All last night sat on the levee and moaned
Thinkin’ ’bout me baby and my happy home
Going to Chicago
Going to Chicago

Sorry but I can’t take you
Going down, going down now, going down
Going down now, going down
Going down, going down, going down

Going down now, going down
Going down now, going down
Going down now, going down
Going d-d-d-d-down
Woo, woo