| I watched the film The Song Remains the Same
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| At the midnight movies when I was a kid
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| At a Canton, Ohio mall with friends
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| One warm summer weekend
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| Jimmy Page stood tall and screamed
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| And I was mesmerized by everything
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| The Peter Grant and John Paul Jones dream sequence scenes
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| The close-up of the mahogany, double-neck SG
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| And though I loved the sound of the roaring Les Paul
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| What spoke to me most was «Rain Song» and «Bron-Yr-Aur»
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| And I loved the thunder of John Bonham’s drums
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| But even more, I liked «No Quarter’s» low Fender Rhodes hum
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| I don’t know what happened or what anyone did
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| But from my earliest memories, I was a very melancholic kid
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| When anything close to me at all in the world died
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| To my heart, forever, it would be tied
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| Like when my friend was thrown from his moped
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| When some kind of a big truck back-ended him
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| And when the girl who sat in front of me in remedial
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| Was killed in an accident one weekend and quickly forgotten about at school
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| And when we got the call that my grandmother passed
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| The nervous tension I’d been feeling for months broke
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| And strangely, I laughed
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| Then, I went to my bedroom, and I laid down
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| And in my tears and in the heaviness of everything, I drowned
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| Though I kept to myself and for the most part was pretty coy
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| I once got baited into clocking some undeserving boy
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| Out on the elementary school playground
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| I threw a punch that caught him off-guard and knocked him down
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| And when I walked away, the kids were cheering
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| And though I grinned, deep inside, I was hurting
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| But not nearly as much as I’d hurt him
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| He stood up, his glasses broken, and his face was red
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| And I was never a schoolyard bully
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| It was only one incident, and it has always eaten at me
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| I was never a young schoolyard bully
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| And wherever you are, that poor kid—I'm so sorry
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| And when I grew older, I learned to play guitar
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| While everyone else was throwing around a football
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| Wearing bright colors—the school issued them
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| Parroting passed-down phrases and cheerleading
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| I got a recording contract in 1992
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| From there, my name, my band, and my audience grew
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| And since that time, so much has happened to me
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| But I’ve discovered I cannot shake the melancholy
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| For 46 years now, I cannot break the spell
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| I’ll carry it throughout my life and probably carry it to Hell
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| I’ll go to my grave with my melancholy
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| And my ghost will echo my sentiments for all eternity
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| And now, when I watch The Song Remains the Same
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| The same things speak to me that spoke to me then
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| Except now, the scenes with Peter Grant and John Bonham
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| Are different when I think about the deaths that fell upon them
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| I got a friend who lives in the desert outside Santa Fe
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| And I’m going to visit him this Saturday
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| Between my travels and his divorces and our time not being what it was
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| It’s been fifteen years since I last saw him
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| He’s the man who signed me back in '92
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| And I’m going to go there and tell him face-to-face, «Thank you
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| For discovering my talent so early
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| For helping me along in this beautiful musical world I was meant to be in» |