Ramble On

The song where Zeppelin's two selves — the acoustic wanderer and the electric hammer — occupy the same three minutes without reconciling. It opens fingerpicked and gentle, Bonham famously keeping time on what sounds like a guitar case or a stool rather than a kit, all brushed clicks and slaps, so the rhythm feels domestic, portable, like something played in a hallway. Then the choruses detonate: full band, Page's chords blooming outward, Plant's voice leaping an octave. The lyric is Tolkien filtered through the blues traveler's oldest excuse — he's got to ramble on, sing his song, and the girl he was searching for was taken by Gollum in the darkest depths of Mordor. It should be ridiculous; it works because Plant delivers the fantasy with the same ache a bluesman gives a woman who caught a train. That fusion — English pastoral myth grafted onto American form — is essentially the band's whole thesis, stated here in miniature. The bassline is one of Jones's best, melodic and roaming under everything. It's a leaving song more than a longing one, and it belongs to the first hour of any long trip: bags in the trunk, nothing decided, the road doing the deciding.