Album: Benji (2014)

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
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