by George Case
Sometimes All of Our Thoughts: What “Stairway to Heaven” Means
The great mystery that has befuddled millions of Led Zeppelin fans lies in the open-ended allusions of Robert Plant’s words for “Stairway.” The song seems to carry some kind of inner secret that can be understood if the right connections are made between the various scenes depicted in its verses, but its real attraction is in the way each different passage suggests a new direction only to be confounded by the next one, like an insoluble maze of symbolism and evocation. In Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll, “Stairway to Heaven” is described as “an unknowable song, but one that nonetheless exerts a terrible, beautiful allure.” Rock scholar Greil Marcus has compared the Zeppelin work to Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” “both in the grandeur of its sound and in its call for an escape from the Kingdom of Mammon in its words—an escape into a daydream of Druidic forests while riding the escalator up to the lingerie floor of Harrod’s.” In Hammer of the Gods Stephen Davis describes it as “an invitation to abandon the new traditions and follow the old gods,” and in When Giants Walked the Earth Mick Wall writes that “Stairway” is simply “the grandest, certainly most affecting musical statement of [Jimmy Page’s] generation.”
Page himself could make no input but could only marvel at Robert Plant’s lyrical inventiveness. “When one listens to records they always come up with their own concepts and visions, and ‘Stairway’ really allows for that. The fact that we printed them on the inner sleeve demonstrates what we thought of the song. But even with the lyrics printed on the sleeve of each album and CD, people still came up with their own interpretations. That’s wonderful…. I didn’t really get involved, but I do remember [Plant] asking me about the ‘bustle in your hedgerow,’ and saying, ‘Well, that’ll get people thinking,’ but other than that…”
The irony here, of course, is that Plant famously wrote the lines for “Stairway” in, depending on who you listen to, either a fit of genius or a burst of let’s-get-it-over-with obligation. “It was really intense,” recalled Page. “And by the time we came up with the fanfare at the end and could play it all the way through, Robert had eighty percent of the lyrics done.” Andy Johns remembered saying to Plant at Island Studios, “Hey Percy, it’s your turn to sing,” to which Plant responded, “Oh, God, really? Hang on for a sec. Play me the track again.” “He’s sitting in the back of the control room scribbling away,” the engineer recounted. “He hasn’t finished the lyrics yet…. I think there was one run-through to warm up and two takes and then he was done.” “It was done very quickly,” Plant confirmed to Cameron Crowe for Crowe’s essay in the 1990 Led Zeppelin box set. “It took a little working out, but it was a very fluid, unnaturally easy track…. There was something pushing it, saying, ‘You guys are okay, but if you want to do something timeless, here’s a wedding song for you.’” “It’s a nice, pleasant, well-meaning, naïve little song, very English” he told Rolling Stone in 1988. “It was some cynical aside about a woman getting everything she wanted all the time without giving back any thought or consideration… and then it softened up after that. I think it was the Moroccan dope.”
Given that Plant spent his formative years idolizing American music and American culture, the subjects of his songs seemed to become less American after he’d actually discovered the country as a twenty-year-old member of Led Zeppelin. The Tolkien references in “Ramble On” and the Viking saga of “Immigrant Song” presage the haunted meadows and woodlands of “Stairway to Heaven” more than anything in Robert Johnson or Moby Grape; the jaundiced portrait of “a Lady who’s sure” in the opening lines may have come after the songwriter had made several trips to the US and seen just how spoiled by affluence real Americans could be. At least as she’s characterized in the first verse, the heroine of “Stairway” is a descendant of the “Living Loving Maid,” in her materialism and vanity. Her description as a “Lady” might derive from the hippie term old lady, for a female partner of any age, and from such songs as Dylan’s “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna,” and Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon album. The phrase “stairway to heaven,” indeed, had been used before, as the title of a 1946 British fantasy film starring David Niven; there were also the songs “Stairway to the Stars” and George and Ira Gershwin’s “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” that dated from the swing era, as well as a peppy Neil Sedaka effort of 1960, “Stairway to Heaven.”
After the Lady is introduced, Plant then turns to a collection of nature portraits for the next verses, all prefaced in the ballad form: There’s a sign on the wall; there’s a songbird who sings; there’s a feeling I get; if there’s a bustle; yes, there are two paths; there’s still time; and finally, there walks a Lady. The reappearance of the Lady in the song’s torrential final minute is the only resolution offered, and the alternate characters of the Piper and the May Queen rival her as enigmas. (The Piper himself may be Plant’s unconscious nod to Pink Floyd’s 1967 album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, named after a chapter in Kenneth Graham’s children’s fable The Wind in the Willows.) Following the instrumentation of Page, Jones, and Bonham, Plant starts off somewhere in the Elizabethan era—“all that glitters is gold” is from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice—then ends up with the very contemporary juxtaposition of “to be a rock and not to roll.” Any spiritual or philosophical message here is extremely vague: Instead Plant establishes a timeless mood of a preindustrial landscape where traditional pagan beliefs still have validity in the physical world. Thus the songbird conveys an intelligible message about words having two meanings; looking westward stirs his inward longing for escape; his mind’s eye shows him rings of smoke and (somehow) voices; the mysterious Piper will “lead us to reason”; the bustling hedgerow is merely the May Queen’s spring clean; your humming head merely the Piper’s call; and so on. Another aspect of the song’s setting is how it begins in a still morning where the stores are all closed, then promises that “a new day will dawn,” and concludes with shadows grown “taller than our souls,” as if the story has unfolded over the course of a day and into the evening. “Stairway to Heaven” cannot be reduced to a basic moral or idea, but Plant’s vivid pictures of a countryside epiphany seem to promote a human reintegration with the natural kingdom and a modern rediscovery of pre-Enlightenment superstition.
“Stairway to Heaven” does not carry the deep literary echoes of Bob Dylan’s most complex songs, or even the obvious tributes of the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” (Lewis Carroll), the Doors’ “Alabama Song” (Bertolt Brecht), and eventually Rush’s “Anthem” (Ayn Rand) and the Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” (Vladimir Nabokov), but it was, even so, influenced by Robert Plant’s reading. Though there are no open references to the vocalist’s favorite, J. R. R. Tolkien, the lyrics’ visions of forests, a brook, rings of smoke, two paths, and the whispering wind could come straight from Middle Earth. Others have interpreted the Lady as a distant homage to Edmund Spenser’s epic poem of 1590, The Faerie Queene, an allegorical quest where a labyrinthine forest has “So many pathes, so many turnings seene / That which of them to take, in diverse doubt they been,” and “Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call: / The gentle warbling wind low answerèd to all.” Even Plant’s interjection, “I got some good news,” before Bonham’s drum entry in live versions of the song, suggests the biblical “Good News” delivered by Jesus Christ.
In interviews, Plant spoke of Scottish folklorist Lewis Spence’s 1949 book The Magic Arts in Celtic Britain as a recent study of his whose details later seeped into “Stairway.” Spence, an eccentric who also took seriously Atlantis legends and those of other lost civilizations, was a conscientious historian of the occult, and The Magic Arts is an impressive catalogue of mythology from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In it, he writes of the dragons once believed to dwell underneath the Welsh Mount Eryri (Snowdon), near where the cottage of Bron-yr-Aur was later constructed. As well, he
notes that an Irish manuscript of the twelfth century, The Book of the Dun Cow, tells of the fort of Scatha, a Caledonian sorceress, which held a magical cauldron and gold and silver treasures, and of how various Balkan, Norse, and Celtic stories describe glass heavens accessible only by steep mountains or hillsides. Spence also comments on a long-ago “Battle of the Trees” as told in poems from the fourteenth-century Welsh Book of Taliesin—a title Plant may have connected with Deep Purple’s 1968 album The Book of Taliesyn. Plant told critic Robert Palmer that his upbringing in the English Midlands affected his poetics as much as any other influence. “You don’t have to have too much of an imagination or a library full of books if you live there. It’s still there. On a murky October evening, with the watery sun looking down on those hills over some old castle and unto the river, you have to be a real bimbo not to flash occasionally.”
There is no key to unlocking the puzzle, but a puzzle it will always remain. If “Stairway to Heaven” had shorter or simpler music, or if its lyrics took on the more typical rock ’n’ roll topics of love or sex, it would have had little of its eventual impact. Plant’s words for the song, however randomly scrawled down from a jumble of pop-folk stereotypes, perfectly complement the stateliness of Page’s slow orchestration. The “meaning” of the track is elusive and, according to the author, wasn’t written with one in mind, but it is delivered with such sincerity it can only convince the audience of a deeper purpose. Likewise, the disjointed conjurations of medieval and pastoral idioms make little sense when read literally, but are expressed as if they carry a vital message for an entire generation. As it turned out, they did.
The Forests Will Echo: How “Stairway to Heaven” Has Affected Led Zeppelin’s Reputation
You don’t have to be a fan of Led Zeppelin to know the band’s most popular song. “Stairway” has taken on a life of its own since its appearance on Led Zeppelin IV in November 1971, and is now one of the most significant documents of the rock ’n’ roll era: timeless hymn or overblown embarrassment, classic or cliché, love it or hate it, “Stairway to Heaven” is Zeppelin’s unchallenged magnum opus and a milestone of popular culture.
“Every musician wants to do something of lasting quality,” Jimmy Page told Cameron Crowe in 1975, “something which will hold up for years, and I guess we did it with ‘Stairway.’” “I think that song is great,” said Robert Plant thirty years later. “If I listen to it objectively, from a distance, I really enjoy it.” “‘Stairway’ embodies a lot of what Led Zeppelin was about,” confirmed John Paul Jones in 1990. “It’s a good tune, for a start.” Indeed, “Stairway to Heaven” is Zeppelin’s signature, inextricably identified with the four musicians and with the rock music of the period. Rolling Stone magazine has listed it as number thirty-one in its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”; it is included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s “500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll”; it has earned a place in the Grammy Awards Hall of Fame; and Page’s guitar solo itself has been cited as the number one best in rock ’n’ roll in Guitar World. The song’s opening arpeggios are a mandatory hurdle for beginning pickers, and FM radio listeners in North America have regularly voted “Stairway” as the Greatest Rock Song Ever through countless on-air request lines for over three decades. It has been respectfully covered by artists as diverse as jazz guitar maestro Stanley Jordan, country queen Dolly Parton, and soul diva Mary J. Blige, translated into a symphonic edition by the London Symphony Orchestra, and given a tongue-in-cheek treatment by artists such as Dread Zeppelin, Pat Boone, and Tiny Tim. Never released as a single, “Stairway to Heaven” is nonetheless estimated to have been broadcast over three million times on radio stations around the world. The record it highlighted has sold almost 40 million copies internationally. The total value of its earnings in royalties from all sources has been estimated at $562 million US.
“Stairway” was first performed live by Led Zeppelin on March 5, 1971, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and was played in every single completed Zeppelin concert thereafter. In Berlin on July 7, 1980, a fourteen-minute rendition was the final song (before encores) of the intact Led Zeppelin’s last show. Its US debut during the 1971 summer tour of North America quickly alerted the band to the significance of what they’d come up with. At Los Angeles’s Inglewood Forum on August 21, more than two months before Led Zeppelin IV was released, Jimmy Page remembered a “sizeable” standing ovation after the piece was premiered. “I thought, ‘This is incredible, because no one’s heard this number yet. This is the first time they’re hearing it!’ It obviously touched them, you know.” The unique qualities of “Stairway to Heaven” were made manifest by the double-neck Gibson EDS 1275 six- and twelve-string guitar Page had acquired to play it, giving the performances a memorable visual as well as musical component. A live version was highlighted in the Song Remains the Same film and album, and the solo artist Page played an instrumental rendition for his 1983 arms concerts and his 1988 Outrider tour. The song was also heard at Led Zeppelin’s Live Aid and Atlantic Records anniversary reunion shows in 1985 and 1988, respectively, although Robert Plant had become leery of singing it and at the latter event almost refused to do so. By Zeppelin’s one-off 2007 gig “Stairway to Heaven” had nearly worn out its welcome as a touchstone for musicians and audience alike.
Indeed, the very familiarity of “Stairway” has become the biggest strike against it. Plant has said that “there’s only so many times you can sing it and mean it,” adding that “in all honesty, there are songs, and there are books, and there are moments, and there are people that belong to particular times in your life, and then it’s gone…. Some good things just go so far round and round and round that in the end you lose perspective of what they really have.” Since it became an FM radio standard, comedians have poked fun at its high regard among pot-smoking suburbanites endlessly requesting it on their local stations: “Yeah, could you play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ by Led Zeppelin? Like, I have every one of their albums, but I’m too stoned to put it on the turntable.” Others have dismissed it as the worst example of rock ’n’ rollers’ sophomoric attempts at philosophy, a banal confusion of obscurity for intellectual depth. In 1992 a special edition of Life magazine, “Forty Years of Rock ’n’ Roll,” named “Stairway to Heaven” as four of the top five worst songs of the 1970s (the other was “Muskrat Love” by the Captain and Tennille). Humorist Dave Barry has written that “I seriously believe that ‘Stairway to Heaven’ would be a much better song if they cut maybe 45 minutes out of it,” and that, along with “Hey Jude,” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird,” and Eric Clapton’s “Layla,” “I know these are great rock classics; I’m just saying that after a while they get to be really boring rock classics whose primary musical value seems to be that they give radio DJs time to go to the bathroom.” Barry also quotes musician Tim Rooney’s list of the ten requests Top 40 cover bands hate most: “Stairway” occupied five spots, while Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Proud Mary” took two, and “Louie Louie,” “Free Bird,” and “Feelings” filled out the rest. The New York Times’s Howard Hampton has described “Stairway” as “stunningly ubiquitous… a colossus of drug-inspired kitsch, melding the ethereal with the histrionic.” In a Rolling Stone review of U2’s 1984 live album Under a Blood Red Sky, the “bone-crushing arena-rock riff” of “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” a song with a similar A-minor chord progression to the Zeppelin classic, was praised by Christopher Connelly as “‘Stairway to Heaven’ for smart people.”
The overexposure of “Stairway to Heaven” has meant that, ultimately, too many listeners hear its reputation rather than its music. In the same way that The Godfather is shown on late-night commercial TV, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy adapted for ad jingles, George Orwell’s Animal Farm taught to bored high school students, and van Gogh’s Sunflowers reproduced on coffee mugs, “Stairway” has been taken far out of its original context and has suffered the indignity of being received as a golden oldie rather than as a serious work of art. It is easy to joke abou
t reverent radio broadcasters and awestruck, lighter-flicking teenagers, but harder to return to the work’s actual content and consider it as a performance rather than a punch line.
Like many well-known rock songs, too, the Led Zeppelin anthem has been freighted with more importance than it was originally intended to bear. Robert Plant’s hasty stream-of-consciousness transcription of its lines is now one of those Rock Legends that have been far more greatly venerated by fans than by their creator. According to Mick Jagger, Keith Richards first considered the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” as “just a silly kind of riff,” while Eddie Van Halen said of his pivotal “Eruption” guitar solo that “I just didn’t think it would be something we’d put on a record,” and Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday” began life with a working title of “Scrambled Eggs.” John Lennon once confessed, “I suppose I’m so indifferent about [the Beatles’] music because most other people take it so seriously…. It’s nice when people like it, but when they start ‘appreciating’ it, getting great deep things out of it, making a thing of it, then it’s a lot of shit…. It just takes a few people to get going, and they con themselves into thinking it’s important.”