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Stairway to StardomIf Led Zeppelin reunites, will they play the song that almost destroyed them?

By Andrew Goodwin
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2007, at 12:19 PM ET
Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Click image to expand.

Led Zeppelin, which is reuniting for a one-off charity gig in London on Dec. 10, appears to be positioning itself to make the Biggest News in the History of Rock: a new album and world tour—a prospect described by Billboard's Ray Waddell as "like twenty Super Bowls rolled into one." While there are still many obstacles to a Zeppelin tour, the most vexing may be that Robert Plant will have to overcome his reluctance to sing the song that has done the most damage to the band. Yes, "Stairway to Heaven."

Variously described as "a song of hope" (Plant), "an optimistic song" (Jimmy Page), and "a wedding song" (these words popped into Plant's mind as he was finishing the lyrics—his unconscious muse tipping him off to the mixed blessing that he had just received), "Stairway to Heaven" remains the closest thing Zeppelin has to a hit, as it was their policy not to release singles. In 1971, when the band refused to edit the song into four minutes of radio-friendly pop, stations simply started playing the whole track, and it soon became the most requested song on rock radio.

It also turned Zeppelin into a joke. It was "Stairway" that branded Zeppelin as spaced-out mystics. It was "Stairway" that drove them to the madness of the absurd fantasy sequences in their movie The Song Remains the Same. It was "Stairway" that sold them to a mass audience that found it amusing to hold lighters aloft throughout the song, perhaps under the understandable impression that they were attending a concert by the Moody Blues. Plant has disowned "Stairway." But "Stairway" would be an essential component in any set list constructed by a band calling itself Led Zeppelin.

The first rungs of the stairway were borrowed from the band Spirit (their song "Taurus" is clearly the inspiration for the opening chord sequence), for whom Zeppelin had opened on their first American tour, in 1968-69. By the time of 1970's Led Zeppelin III, Page was convinced that the band needed to work on an extended composition—his one criticism of III is that it lacked "a long track." And so "Stairway" was pieced together, over two or three years, until its appearance on the untitled fourth album, which was intended to show the group's critics that the music would sell itself, even encased in a sleeve that made no mention of the band or an album title.

Plant seemingly realized that he'd written some kind of classic, and Page saw "Stairway" as Plant's coming-of-age as a lyricist. They had high expectations for the song. It had gone down well in concert before the album was released, and Page decided to print the lyrics to this one song on the inner sleeve—the first time Zeppelin's lyrics had been used on album artwork. "[The] moment at which the stairway to heaven becomes something actually possible for the audience would also be the moment of greatest danger." So wrote no less an authority on the dangers of transcendence than William Burroughs. The quote is from a 1975 interview with Page in the rock magazine Crawdaddy. Burroughs was thinking of the risks posed to an audience by overexposure to the magical energy of Zeppelin's music. If that strikes you as hyperbolic, then we can assume that you have not listened to "When the Levee Breaks" under the headphones for quite some time.

Page had developed a new approach to rock, based on a multilayered "guitar army" (his words), ragalike uses of sevens and fives in meter, insistent drones drawn from folk music, and hypnotic, shifting cycles that swirled around you (during the elongated endings to "Celebration Day" and "Out On the Tiles" on Led Zeppelin III), and which sometimes sucked you right under (the sublime closing minutes of "When the Levee Breaks"). The notion of a new magic art—trance rock based on non-Western scales and nonstandardized song architecture coupled with odd bar structures—had already occurred to Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, to George Harrison of the Beatles, and to the Grateful Dead. But Jimmy Page was the first to harness these ideas to the tantric possibilities of the modern recording studio.

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Andrew Goodwin is a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco. He teaches a class on Led Zeppelin and is writing a book about the band's music. He also blogs at http://www.professorofpop.blogspot.com/.
Photograph of Led Zeppelin by Rusty Kennedy/AP Photo.
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Comments from the Fray editor

As with all music commentary there is no absolute truth (yeah, really, guys, there really isn't), but ER33 had a theory about the lady; fsilber says "The nonsensical lyrics don't matter, because on AM radios no rock lyrics are intelligible"; and Richard Noggin made us laugh with his version of what happens if you play the song backwards. But the post below seemed to offer the most acute response in the fewest words.

Comments from the Fray

Okay, not their best song, totally over-exposed, lyrics are indeed a bit spacey and pretentious, doesn't sound anywhere near as good when performed live… and if you are my age it was blaring out of the speakers of the first car you ever owned as you smoked a joint with that girl who just might "go all the way" as you cruised the neighborhood on a hot humid Saturday night. It's not the song, it's the memories.

--damon2

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