Just Keep Swimming (The Ocean)

Right. I was gonna do a post on The Ocean. 

Some time has passed since I last journaled about our thing. [Much of this post was written before our Newfane show. Sorry the chronology is a little off.] Darcy calls it Life in 3D and even wrote a song about it entitled Life Sucks In 3D. But somehow, despite tooth infections and broken ribs and general old-fart fatigue we've managed to keep plowing away. Our Darcy is an unstoppable force of nature. She would be practicing every day, 7am to 7pm, if she had her way. We manage to wrestle her down to two full band reheasals a week, Wednesday and Sunday, with sectionals with her and Ben or me or all three on however many of the remaining days we can. Then when we're there, again, she puts that stupid pink rabbit to shame. She plugs herself in, grumbles about the amp a little and we take off and work at high intensity, loud, turned up. Play a tune. dissect what went wrong. Drill a spot, looping a phrase over and over, repeating it until you own it. Then play the tune again. Better! One more time! Hell yeah! Darcy's the chooch, the bandleader. She's the one who has to be the heavy, stopping us when something's bad, saying something's bad when it's bad, keeping us on our toes, and at the same time thinking of the big direction of the group, the playlists and where we're going with the project. 

Anyway, all that to say that we've been chugging away. 

My journaling of this project got waylaid by both illness and forgetfulness. Damn tooth infection; that sucked. Then I broke my ribs skating and didn't feel like doing a damn thing for a several weeks. But I'm feeling somewhat better, and now we've actually performed this song in public, so maybe it's time to dive into the sea. The Ocean was one of those songs I knew, culturally; that opening riff is as Led Zeppelin as the first four notes of his 5th symphony are Beethoven. Everybody knows it. Did I know the name of this tune before starting my degree here at Zeppelin U.? No I did not. But it's a riff you don't forget. Bang. It's like an off-balance, teetering freight train coming right at you. First two notes are declamatory A eighths (with grace notes) then 16ths follow, spelling out the rest of an Am7 arpeggio in first position, ending on the C#. Then two ferocious beats of silence from the guitars. (I'll get around to that post about the band's use of silence in their music, I promise.) The rest of the riff follows, unison guitars, but never forget, this is Led Zeppelin. The second bar of the song is, perversely, in 7/8. Thus the teetering train. We're on a D, with quick, nervous ascending figures, then from below a C#, leading tone to the D. We bounce through the 3/8 part of the bar back to the A. Rinse and repeat. 4X. Then, finally, after this stew of 7/8 time messing up all the people dancing, we arrive at the first verse. Finally! We've already played what is an epic Zep rock unit of eight bars, difficult, loud and thorny, and instantly recognizable to anyone who has listened to rock music in the past 50 years. It's purely instrumental. And honestly, as this lick crashes into the first vocal entrance, this is where things get weird, analytically speaking. 

The lyrics are pure Percy; The song seems autobiographical, the first verse recalling his youth, singing in the sunshine without a care in the world. A foot out the door. The accompaniment is huge, commanding bar chords, vertical, thudding down into the narrator's sunshine.  Igor Stravinsky loved screwing with rhythm. He'd write passages in 2/4 that sounded exactly like they were in 3/4. You never know when what seems like a strong beat actually is a bluff. Growing up I'd listen to Rite of Spring and Firebird and try and figure out the rhythmic subdivisions. Later, actually studying and playing this music I discovered that how I'd always heard and counted things were all wrong, that Stravinsky had fooled me. Same thing here. To my ear the instruments in this section play a distinct 5/4 bar + 3/4 bar. The strongest beat in the bar is the sixth, as the harmony returns to the Dm of the first chord. Or you could bar it 3/4+2/4+3/4. When I saw it written out in 4/4 I thought, "oh." With the exact same feeling as I saw the score of The Dance of the Firebird and realized how badly Stravinsky and deked me. 

So there we are, chunking down below the vocals, then back to the riff, then V.2, equally nostalgic, telling us of singing to the Ocean, "Singing about good things and the sun that lights the day." Imagine being Robert Plant, on the biggest stages, his audiences flowing like an ocean before him. Plant's image of the ocean of fans, hearing the ocean's roar, brings to mind a brief scene in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test when the Pranksters are at a Beatles concert at Candlestick Park. 

Of course, after this concert the Beatles stopped performing live walked away from all that power and control. Interesting, to have this power of Sauron, this insane control over tens of thousands of people, and turn your back on it.  May I confess something? It was on my mind during our recent show. Being in a rock band is intense. You get what Wolfe's talking about. 

I think Plant had an idea of it too. You have your ocean and your rock. The ocean is great, but it gets out of control; you need your rock. If the rock washes away you have your family. The rest of the song is about Plant's 3-year-old daughter, Carmen, "who won my heart." 

Two huge features of this song have to be mentioned: Before the last verse about young Carmen, after the thunderous bar chords and Bonzotime, there's a startlingly sudden, completely 100% unexpectable shift to a baby's lullaby. On the videos Plant's face and gestures carry the tenderness of an earth mother as he sings "Na, na, nanana na na, naa, nanana nananananaaah!" We try to be tender but we're Black Rover, it has the gentleness of a Harley to it. The other great moment is after the final verse when we wheel into the main riff once again and we think this is the end of the tune. But being Led Zeppelin, they bizarrely decide to staple on a groovy, swinging Doo-Wop section, in a slower swing tempo, straight from the Ink Spots, capped off by.a crisp unison rhythm that is exceedingly fun to play.  

This song is one of my favorites to play, and judging from our very limited scientific study of one concert, very popular with the crowd. Gotta love when you start a song and people start clapping and jumping around already. 

And what a rich soup of rhythmic complexity! From that first 7/8 (is it 2+2+3 or 2+2+2+1) to the unbalanced verse, to what I would go so far as to call a metric modulation going from the riff to the Doo-wop. It's like a master class. 

Click the linketylink below to hear us play The Ocean in Newfane. 

Black Rover plays The Ocean