Stairway to Heaven (1971)

Performer: Led Zeppelin                                        Writer: Jimmy Page & Robert Plant
Album US Chart Position: #2                                 Label: Atlantic Records
Musicians: Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and John Bonham

When I was in school our local radio station ran a program every New Year’s Eve in which they would broadcast the top one hundred songs of the year, playing the number one song right at the stroke of midnight. And every year that I can remember listening to that program, the number one song was “Stairway to Heaven.” I have absolutely no idea how they tabulated the rankings, but for nearly a decade it didn’t matter what trends in music were happening, Led Zeppelin held the top spot with one of the most unique and distinctive songs in rock history. For me, however, there were lots of negative things associated with the group and I never made any effort at the time to seek out and listen to their music. For one thing, I didn’t really get it, and still don’t. One of my favorite moments from the History of Rock and Roll is when Pete Townsend says that he never understood Zeppelin and what they were trying to do. That made me feel vindicated--though frankly I never understood The Who either. The other thing was seeing a religious program on the Trinity Broadcast Network when Paul Crouch, Jr. did a three-hour program on backward masking and “Stairway to Heaven” was the featured song at the end of the show, revealing all kinds of demonic messages in the song when it was played backward. For a long time I would still feel a frisson of evil whenever I listen to it, but thankfully those days are gone and I can hear it for what it is.

The song begins with a fingerpicked acoustic guitar by Jimmy Page, and then is joined by twin, overdubbed recorders by John Paul Jones. There is a melancholy sadness to the chord progression, and when Robert Plant enters with the vocals the recorders drop out. The lyrics talk of a lady looking to buy her way into to heaven. Innocuous enough on the surface, but somehow warped into a message of evil by the religious right, when it could easily enough be interpreted as a cautionary tale. When the second verse comes around the recorders come back in. Page ends the first section with some double-time picking and the recorders then drop out for the duration. When the electric twelve-string comes in it is strumming the same minor chords over the top of the acoustic, and later picks out a rhythm similar to the opening when Plant goes into another verse. During this section Jones plays his bass part on the electric piano. The second section ends with John Bonham playing a simple fill before he enters playing a basic rhythm, but doing some more intricate work at the ends of the verses, while Jones is on his bass guitar. The final section begins with what could only be described as a fanfare on the electric guitar, with accents by the bass and drums. This leads right into a wonderful guitar solo by Page, supported by some great fills by Bonham. At the end of the solo Plant comes back in over an almost a march-like feel with accents on one and two for two bars and syncopated accents for the next two. At the end of the song Page bends into octaves up and down the neck before the music dies completely and Plant finishes by singing the title.

The song was never released as a single; at just over eight minutes long it certainly wasn’t going to get any AM airplay, though that wasn’t an issue on FM stations which resulted in the massive airplay the record received. It was the last cut of the A-side of Zeppelin’s fourth album, untitled but usually referred to as Led Zeppelin IV. The album was released at the end of November in 1971, and eventually climbed to the number two spot on the U.S. album charts early the following year. The group never really had any significant singles success in the U.S., being more of an album band where fans weren’t going to be satisfied with a couple of three-minute edits of their songs. “Stairway to Heaven” was pressed as a promotional single for radio stations, with the same song on both sides, and has since become a valued collectors item. A lot has been written about this song, but the most interesting thing to me is the way it was composed, with Jimmy Page piecing together snippets of things he was working on, but with the idea of creating an epic song that would increase in volume, speed, and intensity throughout. What’s also interesting is the reactions of the two composers to the song now. For Page, it’s the best thing he ever wrote, and feels that it represents everything the band was about. For Robert Plant, however, it’s more akin to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird,” something that has been so overplayed that it has lost its meaning. While entities like VH1 or Rolling Stone have put songs above it in their lists of all time great rock songs, like my childhood radio station “Stairway to Heaven” will always be number one to me.