10 Rock Covers That Improved Classic Songs
1. When the Levee Breaks - A Perfect Circle
For most of the early fans of rock and roll, it will always come back to the blues. If you were to take any of the greatest rock and roll guitarists of all time, most of them will tell you that they had the same starting point of just learning a classic blues turnaround to kick off their guitar career. A lot can change in 50 years though, and the blues started to look a lot different once A Perfect Circle tried their hand at it.
While most fans would recognize When the Levee Breaks as the epic closer to Led Zeppelin IV, it began as a blues standard about the tragedy of a flood engulfing a town. Though Zeppelin had already made the track sound borderline apocalyptic with the sound of John Bonham's drums, what Billy Howerdel and Maynard James Keenan do with it almost makes it sound like it's being beamed in from another world, as some kind of warning of the oncoming danger.
As much as APC has always been Howerdel's baby, the real glue that ties everything together is the programming done by James Iha of the Smashing Pumpkins, which makes the whole song feel extremely tense and on the verge of collapse at any moment...kind of like that levee. If the blues is where all of this started, their performance of this song at Red Rocks is a good indication of where the blues might be headed as the years go on.