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Led Zeppelin - The Rain Song

From the album Houses of the Holy (1973)

Here's a first for this blog: I'm posting a Zeppelin track. Honestly, I've always had kind of an odd relationship to this band (quite similar to my up-and-down feelings towards the Doors, now that I think about it). It's a relationship that probably stretches back to the wee wee hours of 1991, when I used to suffer insomnia and the local UHF station would play the 30 minute version of this infomercial over and over (and over) again. At the time, I was a youngun' in high school, still devouring any and all Beatles-related music I could get my hands on. But the Zeppelin informercial worked its magic, and eventually I scrounged together the bread to purchase their boxed set. I got a rush off the music, bought a regrettable band t-shirt that did me no favors in the fashion department, and had like a three month period of being pretty into the band. Hell, I probably even read a copy of Hammer of the Gods. 

But....at a certain point, I wasn't 16 anymore, and certain aspects of Led Zeppelin started to seem a bit silly to me. Or melodramatic. Or a bit too bombastic. I liked blues music, I liked classic British rock....but I was never really a Dungeons & Dragons fan, and some of the band's lyrics seemed to veer too far into the realm of the mystical and fantastic, and before I'd finished high school, I ended up giving my Led Zeppelin boxed set away to a friend. They just weren't doing it for me anymore. 

In the many years since, I've built up a grudging appreciation for some of the band's singles and some of their bigger songs, recognizing that there's still a fair amount of their material that just leaves me cold. But one song I instantly loved back in high school, and continue to love all these years later, is The Rain Song. The crisp acoustic guitar strumming out the chords, the delicate electric lead building on top of it, the tasteful strings floating in to carry the gorgeous, melancholy melody....it's a song that paints a restrained, slightly ominous mood with each bar, building energy and then pulling back with each verse, like an unsettled musical ocean. Unusual for the times, Robert Plant plays it mostly cool and understated, even when he starts singing more forcefully. In short, it sounds like the perfectly crafted come-down song for the kids trying to shake off another epic night of partying in the mid-70s. Even in the final couple of minutes, when the full band kicks in and amps up the energy level, the song still retains this brilliant tension, pulling back for the last 30 seconds as the instruments start to peel back and leave only the acoustic and electric guitars to wind it all down. 

On a grey, cold winter afternoon, it remains the perfect come-down song as the weekend draws to a close. Even if the weekends don't contain quite as much hedonistic excess as they maybe did 40 years ago...