"Stairway To Heaven" - Fifty Years

Fifty years ago today, Led Zeppelin issued its untitled fourth album, and the fourth song on that fourth LP became first in the hearts of fans of classic rock.

"Stairway To Heaven" is one of those monumental songs from the seventies that defined every form of popular music that rock has influenced or has been influenced by, from folk balladeering to the Delta blues to tight-fisted guitar-based rock.  It summed up everything rock stood for and still stands for today, with its positive message of self-discovery and enlightenment.  It proved that Led Zeppelin had a deeper message to present lyrically and musically than that in the sexually charged, blues-based songs of their previous albums or even similarly constructed songs on this fourth LP.  As I wrote back in February 2014 in my review of the album sometimes called Led Zeppelin IV, the song is "[an] ethereal epic track that brilliantly displays the complexity, the power, and, yes, the subtlety of Led Zeppelin's music as it slowly builds from an introspective musing into a searing rock performance - the proverbial iron fist in the velvet glove."

"Stairway To Heaven" came about in a rather impromptu way, with guitarist Jimmy Page writing the music over an extended time, taking it from small pieces of music that had been taped.  Vocalist Robert Plant came up with much of the lyrics while sitting next to an evening log fire at a former workhouse for the poor - the sort of place Charles Dickens wrote about - called Headley Grange, where numerous bands recorded and rehearsed. "Headley Grange was somewhat rundown; the heating didn't work," Page later remembered.  "But it had one major advantage. Other bands had rehearsed there and hadn't had any complaints. That's a major issue, because you don't want to go somewhere and start locking into the work process and then have to pull out."

The lack of heat and the Victorian ambience, along with the rustic fire in the hearth, may very well have inspired the esoteric, pastoral lyrics of "Stairway To Heaven," with their inviting images of a songbird in a tree by a brook, forests echoing with laughter, and bustled hedgerows, with the promise that if you're headed down the wrong path, "there's still time to change the road you're on."

Page built up the arrangement of "Stairway To Heaven" in much the same matter as the Beatles' "A Day In the Life," were the music started out quietly and introspectively, with an acoustic guitar and recorders (from bassist John Paul Jones); electric guitars are eventually brought in for more texture as the pace of the tempo slowly increases.  The song is firmly planted in California folk-rock when John Bonham's drums come in, but the anticipation of a full flowering still hangs heavy in the sound.  That flowering comes with an explosion of heavy rock with a melodically fluid but menacing guitar solo from Page almost in the same style as Martin Barre's solo in Jethro Tull's :Hymn 43."  (Such complex melodicism would eventually cause the punk revolt of 1976 and 1977, but that's another post.)  Plant's voice, in the middle range, mutates back into his piercing Chipmunks-on-speed vocal as he delivers the lyrics of "Stairway To Heaven" that sum up the song and the promise of rock and roll:

And as we wind on down the road,
Our shadows taller than our soul,
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold.
And if you listen very hard,
The tune will come to you at last
When all is one and one is all . . .
To be a rock and not to roll.  

The band slows down and brings the song in for a landing, with Robert Plant left on his own to recall the stairway one last time.  It rivals the crashing E major chord of the aforementioned "A Day In the Life" and the gong of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" as one of the most memorable closing moments of  a classic-rock song. Except that "Stairway To Heaven" closed side one, not side two, of the album it was on, unlike "A Day In the Life," which closed the Beatles'  Sgt. Pepper, or "Bohemian Rhapsody," which, apart from a 71-second instrumental version of the British national anthem at the very end, closed Queen's  A Night At the Opera.  Using "Stairway To Heaven" as a side one closer demonstrated that Led Zeppelin not only had more to offer on side two of Led Zeppelin IV (and it did), but had more musical surprises to come thereafter - surprises that would include straight folk ballads, reggae, danceable pop tunes, and R&B.  "Stairway To Heaven" is one of the most transcendent songs ever offered up by a major rock  band.  And no mater how overplayed it is on classic rock radio, it's a song that deserves its ubiquitous presence.     

This post is dedicated to fellow Sirius XM urban talk host and fellow Drew University alumnus Karen Hunter, who once mocked now-former House Speaker Paul Ryan for still listening to Led Zeppelin in the 2010s.  I love you too, Karen. 😛 

And now, the song . . .