“I have an image of Robert sitting on a radiator,” said Richard Cole. “He was working out the words to ‘Stairway’ while John Paul pulled out a recorder. Whenever they went into prerecording, John Paul would come down with a carload of instruments, usually different acoustic instruments.”
“We always had a lot of instruments lying around, so I picked up a bass recorder and played along with Jimmy,” Jones recalled. “Later at Island, I multitracked the recorders to get it right.”
“It was done very quickly,” Plant said of “Stairway.” “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.’ ”
A wedding song “Stairway to Heaven” is not, but a song about real versus fake spirituality it does appear to be. Although Plant has always stressed the ambiguity of his lyric, he has also said that the lady of the song’s opening line is “a woman getting everything she wanted without giving anything back”— someone for whom the stairway in question is a materialistic fast track to spiritual grace. The idea that you can “buy” some ascension to Nirvana would naturally be abhorrent to a “dated flower child” such as Plant.
“It’s like she can have anything forever, so long as she doesn’t have to think about it,” the singer has said. “[But] good will prevail over the whole thing and logic will reign and all that….” For Plant, “Stairway to Heaven” was about “potential optimism.” “Lyrically it’s saying that if you hold tight, you can make it all right,” he explained. Introducing the song at Madison Square Garden in The Song Remains the Same, he announced that it was “a song of hope.”
Given Plant’s interest in magic and mythology— he’d been poring over books by British antiquarian Lewis Spence, including The Magic Arts in Celtic Britain—the musical setting Page and Jones had devised for the song made it perfect for a lyric that reads like a fairy tale. The imprint of American blues had never been so absent in a Led Zeppelin song. “It’s … incredibly English,” Plant admitted. “It sounds almost medieval. At times it sounds like, you know, you want to have swirling mists.”
“Robert is just very much in sympathy with the vibe of my music,” Page told Mick Houghton in 1976. “There’s a certain amount of discussion, but usually it’s just there naturally. I’m sure I could write down on a piece of paper how I visualized a piece of music before Robert writes the lyrics, and they would match up. It comes back to the chemistry of the group.” Page told Houghton that after Plant had written “Stairway to Heaven,” “there was just no point in my writing any more lyrics since I wasn’t going to top anything like that.” Significantly, the song’s lyrics were reproduced on the sleeve of the album, the first occasion on which any Zeppelin lyrics had appeared on an album cover.
“I always knew [Robert] would be [the main lyricist],” Page told Dave Schulps, “but I knew at that point that he’d sort of proved it to himself, and he could sort of get into something more profound than just, say, subjective things … and I was relieved because it gave me more of a chance to get on with just doing the music.”
“It just knows that there’s so many different twists and turns to everyone’s life,” Plant said of “Stairway.” “If you keep a diary or you express yourself in any way, you refer to it. Writing songs kind of tells you how you were at the time—at least how you were projecting yourself at various points in time.”
The “medieval” feel of Page’s delicate intro is underscored by the recorders that John Paul Jones played alongside him, transporting us as they do to some hazy pastoral scene out of, say, Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene. Susan Fast also notes “traces of 16th/early 17th century Tudor music” in the chords and arrangement.
When Page brings in his 12-string electric, however, the feel shifts instantly, as though ushering us out of the misty, distant past into the amplified present. The song thus begins the ascent to its frenzied climax, complete with the passionate solo—over chords borrowed from Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower”—that Page only managed to nail in an overdub at Island Studios, having abandoned the attempt at Headley Grange.
“He was trying to get the guitar solo for 3 or 4 hours,” Andy Johns recalled of the session at Headley. “It started to worry me because time after time he would say, ‘What do you think?’ and I’d say, ‘Not bad,’ meaning it needed work. Eventually, when he asked me yet again, I sort of cracked and said, ‘You’re making me paranoid!’ And he said, ‘No, you’re making me paranoid!’ and we had a big argument. It made me realize he was as insecure as anyone.”
Not that Page was any less nervous when the time came to record “Stairway” at Island in early February. “I get terrible studio nerves,” he admitted in December 1971. “Even when I’ve worked the whole thing out beforehand at home, I get terribly nervous playing it—particularly when it’s something that turned out to be a little above my normal capabilities. My [nerve] goes.” To Ritchie Yorke, he confessed, the stress was such that “I might as well be back years ago making all those dreadful studio records.”
Watching Page struggle in the big Studio One room on Basing Street was a young tape-operator named Richard Digby-Smith. “Page was playing acoustic guitar sat at the front with four tall baffles that completely enclosed him,” Digby-Smith recalled. “There were no windows at all, and you couldn’t see in or out; it was just like a little square. Jones was to the right of him playing Moog bass, which was the industry standard at the time. You know, it was a keyboard, Moog keyboard bass. Bonzo just sat at the back, you know, waiting for that bit where he comes pounding in….” To Digby-Smith’s ears, it sounds “faultless” from beginning to end.
“They run up the stairs for the playback,” the former tape-op continued. “Sounds wonderful. Bonham says, ‘That’s it, then!’ But Pagey’s quiet. He’s a man of few words anyway. His hand’s on his chin, he’s going ‘Mmmm, mmmm’—you never knew what he was thinking. So Bonham looks at him and says, ‘What’s up?’ And Page says he’s convinced that they have a better take in them.
“Well, Bonham’s not best pleased. ‘This always happens—we get a great take and you want to do it again.’ They go back down. Bonzo grabs his sticks, huffing, puffing, muttering, ‘One more take and that’s it!’ He waits and waits until he makes his grand entrance and, of course, when the drums come in, if you thought the one before was good, this one is just explosive. And when they play it back, Bonham looks at Jimmy, like, ‘You’re always right, you bastard.’ ”
When John Paul Jones had overdubbed three recorder parts (baritone, tenor, soprano) for the song’s intro, it was finally time for Page to record his solo. “He did three takes,” Digby-Smith said. “He didn’t use headphones; he monitored the backing tracks through speakers, which was how the classical soloists who used that studio did it.”
The sight of Page leaning against a big orange speaker, cigarette dangling from his mouth as he played, was one Digby-Smith never forgot. “We played him back through them as loud as possible,” the former tape-op remembered. “He just leaned up against the speakers with his ear virtually pressed against them … and rattled out that solo. He was the epitome of cool.”
“I winged it every time,” Page claimed of the three “quite different” solos he played. “I’d prepared the overall structure of the guitar parts but not the actual notes. I did all those guitars on it; I just built them up. That was the beginning of my building up harmonized guitars properly.”
Instead of playing the solo on a Gibson Les Paul, the preferred Page guitar of the time, Jimmy opted for a 1958 Fender Telecaster of the type he’d routinely played in the Yardbirds. “I steered away from the Les Paul because it was all sort of there giving it all to you, the sustain and stuff….” Instead, one can hear Page almost fighting with the guitar, strangling it to get the notes he needs. In March 2006, the readers of Total Guitar magazine voted “Stairway” the best air guitar solo of all time, beating s
olos by Hendrix, Clapton, and Brian May to the honor.
When it was finally completed, “Stairway to Heaven” was every bit the milestone Page had hoped for—the pomp-rock climax of Led Zeppelin’s ambition at that point in its career. “That really sums it all up,” he told Stuart Grundy and John Tobler. “It’s just a glittering thing, and it was put together in such a way as to bring in all the fine points, musically, of the band in its construction.” He added that he would “have to do a lot of hard work before I can get anywhere near those stages of consistent, total brilliance again.”
While Zeppelin recorded several other multisection epics through the ’70s—“No Quarter,” “The Song Remains the Same,” “Kashmir,” “In the Light,” “Achilles’ Last Stand,” “Carouselambra”—the band never topped this Everest of progressive rock. Live, “Stairway” became the centerpiece of Zeppelin’s act, especially after Jimmy Page acquired his famous double-necked (12-string and 6-string) Gibson SG in order to play it.
“There’s this fanfare toward the solo,” he recalled, “and Robert comes in after that with this tremendous vocal thing. At the time, there were quite a few guitars overlaid on that, and I must admit I thought—I knew—it was going to be very difficult to do it on stage, but we had to do it, we really wanted to do it, and I got a double-necked guitar to approach it.” (Jones, meanwhile, was forced in concert to reproduce the three multitracked recorders on the “Stairway” intro on a Mellotron that recalled the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin.”)
“Stairway” was received enthusiastically almost from the day of its live debut at Belfast’s Ulster Hall on March 5, 1971. In America, one show in particular—at the LA Forum on August 21—convinced Page that the song would become a classic.
“It’s a long track when you think about it,” he said. “You know how difficult it is when you go and hear a concert and hear a number from a band for the first time, and that’s quite a long time to concentrate on something. I remember we got a standing ovation from a considerable amount of that audience, and we went, ‘Wow!’ [We] didn’t realize that people would latch on to it, but from testing the gauge of it like that, it was an early reaction. We thought, ‘That’s great, fabulous.’ ”
But if Page saw “Stairway” as a classic—“an apex, lyrically”—the song’s lyricist was more diffident as to its qualities. “I don’t consider there was anything particularly special about it,” Plant said almost churlishly. “The only thing that gives it any staying power at all is its ambiguity.”
“It was a nice, pleasant, well-meaning, naive little song, very English,” the singer added in 1988. “It’s not the definitive Zeppelin song. ‘Kashmir’ is. I’d break out in hives if I had to sing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in every show.” The singer claimed he’d only agreed to perform it at the Atlantic anniversary show that year “because I’m an old softie and it was a way of saying thank you … but no more of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for me.” (Plant did, however, perform an acoustic version of the song on Japanese TV when he and Page were promoting No Quarter: Jimmy Page and Robert Plant Unledded in 1994.)
Jimmy Page has long been the song’s most strident champion. Where Plant refused to sing the song after the band’s demise, the guitarist continued to perform it as an instrumental. In 1983 and 1984, he concluded a series of charity concerts with “Stairway,” delighting fans who could have cared less about Plant’s absence.
The critics have tended to take Plant’s side, however. Ever since Lester Bangs described “Stairway to Heaven” as “a thicket of misbegotten mush,” the song has been regarded as—at best—a colossal joke, a pseudoclassical epic that’s impossible to take seriously. When, in the film Wayne’s World, Mike Myers enters a guitar shop and observes a sign that says, simply, “NO STAIRWAY,” he is making fun of the countless Page wannabes who have lurked in every suburb and small town in middle America. The Stonehenge-withdwarves scene in This Is Spinal Tap was in part a lampoon of Zeppelin’s medievalist pretensions. Twenty-two spoof versions of “Stairway,” including a hit rendition by Rolf Harris, appeared on an Australian compilation in 1993. The Butthole Surfers titled a 1988 album Hairway to Steven.
True, “Stairway” became the template for the slow-building, multipart “power ballad” that came to grace the repertoire of every hard rock and AOR band in America. But its status as rock’s ultimate “long track” makes it hard to hear properly, obscuring both its beauty and its power.
“Stairway” has also been tainted by the risible charges of satanic allusion that have accompanied Jimmy Page throughout his career. In 1981, for instance, a Michigan minister named Michael Mills claimed that phrases such as “Master Satan” and “serve me” were embedded in the song’s grooves.
Page had little truck with such interpretations. For him, as with all of Led Zeppelin’s music, the track was first and foremost about feeling. “Those records were extremely emotional,” he said. “If that’s the way they interpret it, if that deep intense emotion was satanic, then they’ve got no idea what we’re about.”
* * *
Page may have regarded “Stairway to Heaven” as the “apex” of Led Zeppelin’s career to date, but it was the 7-minute “When the Levee Breaks” that represented for him the “high point” of the group’s fourth album.
Written by blues singer Memphis Minnie and her husband, Kansas Joe McCoy, shortly before they left Tennessee for Chicago in the economically disastrous year of 1929, “Levee” told of the devastating floods that had swamped the south in the ’20s. “Cryin’ won’t help you, prayin’ won’t do you no good,” Minnie had sung. “When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move.”
For Led Zeppelin, “When the Levee Breaks” stood with “Black Dog” as a necessary counterweight to the fourth album’s more ethereal moments. Swampy, almost grungily primeval, “Levee” was a second dose of heavy blues that returned the band to their 12-bar roots. Placing “Black Dog” and “Levee” at each end of the record was surely intentional: Not for nothing did Jimmy Page describe “When the Levee Breaks” as “sucking you into the source.” (Zeppelin matched the sheer dread of “Levee” only one more time, on Physical Graffiti’s astounding “In My Time of Dying.” But they stayed truer to their blues animus than the Rolling Stones did: There was nothing like “In My Time of Dying” on It’s Only Rock ’n Roll or Black and Blue.)
“The denouement of [the album] is not some misty peak,” wrote Erik Davis, who sees “Levee” as “Zeppelin’s definitive blues song on record … Instead we fall away from myth and return to the root, to matter, to a dirge of the earth.”
“If ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is how you get there,” noted Chuck Eddy, “ ‘When the Levee Breaks’ is how you get back.” “Levee,” said Eddy, is the Stairway to hell.
Zeppelin took Minnie’s Delta woes and turned them into a massive, driving beast of a track, Page’s grinding slide riffs meshing with Plant’s squalling harmonica and forced forward by the mightiest drum sound ever captured on tape. The brutal, elemental drone of “When the Levee Breaks”—rivaled only by the awesome “Kashmir,” recorded at Headley Grange 3 years later—never ceases to astonish.
The ambience of Headley Grange had everything to do with the song’s power. “We tried to record it in a studio before we got to Headley Grange, and it sounded flat,” Page recalled. “But once we got the drum sound at Headley Grange, it was like, ‘Boom!’ ”
It was actually a new Ludwig kit, delivered to the Grange halfway through the sessions, that Bonham played on “Levee.” “It must have been in the hands of the gods, really,” Page said. “We would say, ‘Wait until the drum kit arrives and everything is going to be fine.’ ”
According to Andy Johns, while Page, Plant, and Jones took a pub break, he and John Bonham set the new kit up in the hallway. “We’d been working on another song, and there was a lot of leakage from the drums,” John Paul Jones recalled. “So we moved [them] out into the hall where there’s a big stairwell.”
Johns
then hung two ambient Beyer M160 stereo microphones over the kit, one 10 feet up, the other about 20. “[Bonzo’s] kit was very well-balanced internally,” the engineer remembered. “Each drum’s volume was consistent with the others. In the truck, I put him into two channels and compressed the drums.” Johns then ran the resulting signal through the Binson echo unit he’d used on “The Battle of Evermore,” the effect instantly blowing his mind.
“I remember sitting there thinking it sounded utterly amazing,” Johns remembered. “I ran out of the truck and said, ‘Bonzo, you gotta come in and hear this!’ And he came in and shouted, ‘Whoa, that’s it! That’s what I’ve been hearing!’ ”
By this, one can only assume Bonham meant what he’d been hearing in his head all through the sessions—like some Platonic ideal of how hard rock drums should sound. The primordial thwack of the “Levee” beat, with its fat, booming echo, was almost industrial in density—in Lester Bangs’s words “a great groaning, oozing piece of sheer program music.” No wonder the band delayed the entrance of Plant’s vocal for almost a minute and a half.
“There was a secret to it [that] we just stumbled across, really,” Plant said. “[It] was just one [sic] microphone—and the revelation of finding out that that one microphone did more than about 35 in a studio [that] set the mood. It was enthusiasm.”
“I had a whole concept of how this thing was going to end up,” Page said. “But it just so happened that we put a mike into the hallway, which—as it was a three-story house with the stairs going all the way up—had all this beautiful space. So, on the second landing was just a stereo mike, and the sound was just phenomenal. That was it—it was going to be the drum song. As soon as it was set up, it was the one we went for, and it worked.”
“Bonzo started playing and we said, ‘Jesus, will you listen to that sound,’ ” John Paul Jones recalled. “Then we started the riff and that’s how the song came about—through experimentation.”
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