I watched the film
‘The Song Remains the Same’
At the midnight movies when I was a kid
At a Canton,
Oh mall with friends
One warm summer weekend
Jimmy Page stood tall on screen
I was mesmerized by everything
The Peter Grant and
John Paul Jones dream sequence scenes
The close-up of the mahogany Double SG
And though I loved the sound of the roaring Les Paul
What spoke to me most was
‘Rain Song’ and ‘Bron-Yr-Aur’
And I loved the thunder of Jon Bonham’s drums
But even more I like
‘No Quarter’s Fender Rhodes’ hum
I don’t know what happened
or what anyone did

From my earliest memories
I was a very melancholic kid
When anything close to me at all in the world died
To my heart, forever,
it would be tied
Like when my friend was thrown from his moped
When some kind of a big truck back-ended him
And when the girl who sat in front of me in remedial
Was killed in an accident one weekend
and quickly forgot about at school
And when we got the call
that my grandmother passed
The nervous tension
I’d been feeling for months broke
And strangely I laughed
Then I went to my bedroom
and I laid down
And in my tears and in the heaviness of
everything I drowned
Though I kept to myself
and for the most part was pretty coy
I once got baited
and had to clock some underserving boy
Out on the elementary school playground

I threw a punch that caught him off-guard
and knocked him down
And when I walked away the kids were cheering
And though I grinned deep inside,
I was hurting
But not nearly as much as I hurt him
He stood up,
his glassed broken and his face was red
And i was never a schoolyard bully
It was only one incident
And it has always eaten at me
I was never the young schoolyard bully
And wherever you are,
that poor kid,
I’m so sorry
And when I grew older
I learned to play guitar
While everyone else was throwing around a football
Wearing bright colors the school issued them
Parroting passed down phrases and cheerleading
I got a recording contract in 1992
From there my name,
my band and my audience grew

And since that time so much has happened to me
But I discovered I cannot shake melancholy
For 46 years now I cannot break the spell
I’ll carry it through my life
and probably carry it down
I’ll go to my grave with my melancholy
And my ghost will echo
my sentiments for all eternity
And now when I watch
‘The Song Remains the Same’
The same things speak to me
that spoke to me then

Except that now the scenes with
Peter Grant and Jon Bonham

Are different when I think of the deaths
that fell upon them
I got a friend who lives in the desert
outside Santa Fe
I’m going to visit him this Saturday

Between my travels and his divorce
and our time not being what it was
It’s been 15 years since I last saw him
He’s the man who signed me back in 1992
And I’m going to go there
and tell him face-to-face - ’thank you’
For discovering my talent so early
For helping me along in this beautiful musical world
I was meant to be in