“Stairway to Heaven” is one of those polarizing songs; you either love it or hate it, or you love to hate it, or maybe you hate that you love it. Possibly you once loved it and now you hate it because you worked at a Guitar Center at any time between the time it was released and today, where you had to listen to some kid poorly play through the whole thing on guitar at least once during every shift you were there, realizing your dad was right and you should’ve finished college and gone on to Med School or Law School, so you wouldn’t be living in this rockin’ retail hell.
Regardless, it’s a hell of a song that has been played over and over and over for good reason. It’s epic and huge. It feels like a rock opera and the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy crammed into 8 or so minutes.
Led Zeppelin was formed in 1968 in London after the Yardbirds dissolved following a grueling tour and the departure of most members. Guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist Chris Dreja were authorized to use the Yardbirds name and assemble a new lineup to fulfill concert obligations in Scandinavia later that year.
The last two Yardbirds asked singer Robert Plant to join after their first choice, Terry Reid, declined. Fortunately, Plant also brought soon-to-be-legendary drummer John Bonham from their former group, Band of Joy. John Paul Jones soon replaced Dreja on bass when Dreja chose photography instead of rock and roll.
The new lineup finished the Scandinavian tour as “the New Yardbirds” and went to work on a new album. However, before its completion, they would have to come up with a new band name, as Dreja had sent a cease and desist letter to Jimmy, who was only supposed to use the name to finish off the last tour. In a very roundabout way, they came up with the name Led Zeppelin after Page initially wanted to name the band Lead Balloon, and the rest is rock history.
If we were to hit the fast-forward button a few years to 1970, we would land on the band creating their fourth studio album, which they decided didn’t need a name, but fans would unofficially refer to as Led Zeppelin IV. A rose by any other name and such…
Page and Plant were staying in a remote cottage in Wales, working on an epic of a song from bits Page had pieced together from tape recordings he had been working on, and Plant largely improvising or spontaneously writing a majority of the lyrics while Page strummed along. It took more than a month to record and finish the song, and it would be described as blending Progressive Rock, Folk, and Hard Rock.
The song consists of three distinct sections: an acoustic finger-picking ballad that transitions into an electric section, where a lengthy guitar solo leads into a faster, hard-rocking section, before gradually dissolving back into soft vocalizations and fading into nothingness. It’s a lot, it’s long, it’s cool, and if you have the time to sit through it all, it takes you on a wild, whimsical journey.
It’s a song that has been covered to death, mostly by aspiring teenage guitarists sitting with their guitar teachers or alone in their bedrooms, but the covers often fall short of the original. It’s a great example of an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, but it doesn’t mean that it can’t be fixed or improved upon.
An example of someone else trying it and absolutely blowing the darn thing’s socks off is when Ann and Nancy Wilson of the band Heart are joined John Bonham’s very own son, Jason, on drums, as well as what feels like a small army of other unnamed singers and musicians, perform it live on stage at the Kennedy Center Honors in December 2012.
By the time Ann is belting out that famous ending bridge, the sound and energy are so rockin’ and raucous that I thought the Mayan calendar was right: the world was ending in a crash and crumble.
We’re getting ahead of ourselves, though. The audience is silenced, the famous opening notes on the guitar are plucked, the three living members look on from the balcony, and along with everyone else, they sit enveloped in whatever feelings this opening stirs in them. Contemplative and thoughtful expressions all around, the flicker of a contented smile on many.
The sisters let that feeling settle in for two minutes. We feel the energy start to shift. Movement amongst the members of the audience as they are shaken from their internal worlds and brought back into the moment.
The climb begins, the strings trickle up through the notches in our spines, as more and more musicians join in. A huge choir is illuminated as they help lift Ann’s voice into the heavens, and Jason cracks into one of his father’s signature heart-pounding drum fills. There are so many musicians on stage joining in that it feels like some behemoth is waking from a slumber, unperturbed since nineteen-seventy-something.
The camera cuts back up to the Zeppelin boys as they each exchange multiple teary-eyed smiles at one another. It’s incredibly emotional, and we are reminded why a song that many feel is played out holds so much power and an unshakably deep-rooted place in rock history.
Obama is also there; the cameraman, or producer, or whoever wanted us to see that he and Michelle are enjoying the show as well, apparently. By the time we get through the solo, the choir and Ann are bringing the house down in chorus with the line “there’s a lady we all know,” we see Robert Plant overtaken with emotion, blank-faced and eyes welling over with tears.
The song comes to its inevitable decrescendo, and everyone finally gets a moment to release that breath they’ve been holding in. There’s a reason this version has almost 200 million views. It’s epic. It’s a reminder of why we fell in love with this song at whatever time in our lives.
It’s almost on par with the 2004 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame performance of George Harrison’s song “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” where Prince demonstrates how a guitar solo should make us feel, or Jimi Hendrix’s version of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”, which Bob himself tried to start playing live after Hendrix passed. Its emotion and timelessness create a magic beyond plain words.