I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same

I watched the film The Song Remains the Same

At the midnight movies when I was a kid

At a Canton, Ohio 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-neck 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" low 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 forgotten 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 lay 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 undeserving 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'd hurt him

He stood up, his glasses 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 cheer leading

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 divorces 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 '92

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