Side B
Stairway to Heaven
It's 1970, and after Led Zeppelin's fifth American tour, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant retreat to Bron-Yr-Aur, a remote cottage in Wales. Page always kept a cassette recorder nearby and had been stockpiling taped fragments; the first part of the song came to him there one night. Months later at Headley Grange, Page strummed the chords by an evening log fire while Plant sat with pencil and paper, and much of the lyric was written on the spot.
Page had one idea: start with a fragile guitar and let the whole piece accelerate from beginning to end. Hold him to it. The opening is fingerpicked acoustic plus four overdubbed recorders, all played by John Paul Jones, the sound you've probably filed as flutes. Then electric piano, twelve-string, layer on layer. Three sections, each faster and louder than the last. You're climbing the staircase with them.
Then catch the ending. After the solo and the hard-rock sprint, everything drops away and the song closes on a single a cappella line. Eight minutes of building, and it lands right back where it started: fragile.
Did You Know?
- Did you know John Bonham doesn't play a single beat until 4:18, more than halfway through? That ache you feel waiting for the band to arrive was planned; Page told journalists early on that the drums wouldn't come in for some time as the song built toward its climax.
- Did you know Robert Plant once paid a radio station to never play it? He gave $10,000 to Portland's KBOO after a DJ promised during a pledge drive that the station would never air it, and explained it wasn't that he disliked the song, he'd just heard it before.
- Did you know the first crowd to hear it was bored? At its Belfast debut in March 1971, John Paul Jones recalled the audience waiting impatiently for something they recognized.
- Did you know it was never a single in the US? Atlantic wanted one, but manager Peter Grant refused, so fans bought the whole album instead, and it still became FM radio's most-requested song.