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 And I was mesmerized by everything The Peter Grant/John Paul Jones dream sequence scenes The closeup of the mahogany double-neck SG And though I love 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 John Bonham's drums But even more, I liked "No Quarter" low Fender Rhodes' hum I don't know what happened or what anyone did But 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 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 into clocking 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 a 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 colours the school issued them Parroting passed-down phrases and cheerleading I got a recording contract in 1992 And 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 forty-six years now, I cannot break the spell I'll carry it throughout 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 now, the scenes with Peter Grant and John Bonham Are different from when I think about the dust that fell upon them I got a friend who lives in the desert outside Santa Fe And I'm going to visit him this Saturday Between my travelling and his divorces And our time not being what it was It's been fifteen 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
