Night Flight

Don’t know why but I’ve been thinking a lot about this song over the past few days. Haven’t heard it in a couple of months, if not years. It’s not one of my favorite Zep tunes (probably, if I stacked ’em all up best to worst, it’d fall right in the middle somewhere), so I can’t explain it.

Really dig the tone of that organ thingie, plus those clean strummed chords (A to D, or something similar?). And Plant’s frantic, frenetic warblings during the chorus (… oh-oh-oh, oh, yeah, huh, c’mon, meet in me in the morning …) still give me shivers, some three decades after I first heard it. Good stuff.

However – and it’s a big however – I hate, hate, hate the ending. The last thirty seconds. While I like the standard blues riff normally (though less and less as I’ve grown more proficient on guitar over the years), here it sounds out of place to me ears.

Here is what I would do with those last 30 seconds (after 3:05, in the audio version below).

Revisit the opening couple of seconds, with John Paul Jones laying down those sick organ chords and Bonham tapping the hi-hat. Then the drums come in, as well as Jones’ bass line, getting more and more intense with each bar of music that flows by. Page starts off with the clean one-strum chords, then does some trills and hammer-off thingies. Another track has some distorted power chords, gradually crescendoing in volume. On top of all this, which gets busier and busier, louder and louder, Jimmy starts soloing. Not call-and-response soloing, like “Black Dog,” but layered soloing, lines harmonizing with each other, lots of tremolo. Then, some fierce pentatonic runs.

After 60 seconds of this, the sound of a jet plane whooshing by bubbles up into the mix, overtaking the whole band output, climaxing in a two- or three-second Doppler-effect effect and then –

Silence, as the next track on the CD, “The Wanton Song”, cues up.