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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

(Continued from page 1)

Does "Stairway to Heaven" possess these qualities? Absolutely not. The guitar army, yes, that is there. But this song is not just atypical of Zeppelin's music, it is unique among their epic tracks in that it privileges melodic/lyrical development at the expense of rhythmic exploration and timbral/psychoacoustic experimentation.

It also doesn't help that the lyrics appear to be an index of a confused mind. If, for instance, the lady at the beginning of the song is a fool (she believes, after all, that she can buy a stairway to heaven), then why at the end of this long and winding lyrical road is she shining white light and showing us how everything still turns to gold? Some critics have turned themselves inside out trying to prove that this must be a different lady. Cultural-studies theorists will see this is an "open" text. Industry bean counters will notice that its ambiguity is the key to its popularity.

Let's be clear about just how aberrant this track is, in the context of the Zeppelin oeuvre: In Almost Famous—Cameron Crowe's airbrushed account of the 1970s rock scene—it is "Stairway," naturally, that the young aspiring rock crit plays to his uptight mother when he wants permission to cover the beauty and the debauchery that was Led Zeppelin on the road. (The scene is available as a bonus feature on the DVD.) If the Crowe character had played his mom "Dazed and Confused" (or worse, "Gallows Pole") one imagines that she would have said no.

As Erik Davis points out in his unsurpassed book on the fourth album, "Stairway" is so familiar to us that it's a real challenge to listen to it. "Stairway" live suffered from the comparison with the warm acoustic guitar layers of the studio recording that are stuffed deep inside our collective aural memory. "Stairway" is also one of the few tracks that loses something essential from the absence of bass guitar when played live: Whereas usually John Paul Jones' dexterity at the keyboard bass pedals and John Bonham's ocean-deep kick drum fill the gap at the bottom of the sound, here the inevitable comparisons with the lushness of the studio version leave Zeppelin sounding like a lame cover band.

So, will the audience hear "Stairway" on Dec. 10 and will Zep reunite? We can expect a yes to that first question, but the business of reconstructing the band as a live unit could be protracted. While Page and Jones are keeping their options open, Robert Plant, the man who has said that he no longer wants to sing "Stairway" and who has the most to lose from a reunion (he has a successful solo career) is the key. The deciding factors lie in some combination of art and industry—how much Plant enjoys Dec. 10 multiplied by what he stands to gain from the new publishing deal.

The stakes are very high. Zeppelin, even in its heyday, was a notoriously inconsistent proposition, and today the "Zeppelin mystique" has been passed on to many new generations of music fans for whom live Zeppelin is a digital video experience. A new album and tour could seal their reputation as bigger (and much more important) than the Rolling Stones, or … it could expose that mystique as a mere facade. Page, Plant, and Jones are highly intelligent men who have to balance aesthetic and financial decisions in the face of extraordinary demand. The Web site for the London show's 20,000 tickets received more than 1 million hits. One hopes they will remember that all that glitters is not gold.

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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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