Stairway to Heaven at 40

Green beer, corned beef and cabbage. St. Patrick’s Day. Whether you’re Irish or not, everyone “goes green” in March. The Emerald Isle figures heavily in Led Zeppelin’s storied career, too. It was here, forty years ago in March of 1971, that the band’s most famous song was performed live for the first time: Stairway to Heaven.

By 1971, Led Zeppelin had kept getting bigger and bigger. The band had been touring and recording incessantly since its formation in August 1968. All that hard work resulted in such phenomenal success, Zeppelin was obliged to play huge stadiums in order to accommodate the masses wishing to see the band perform live.

In venues like that, faceless fans became mere dots on the horizon for the band members. Longing for the intimacy and audience connection they’d previously enjoyed in smaller clubs and theatre settings, a 13-date tour was planned for the spring of 1971. The “U.K. Return to the Clubs Tour” ran from March 5 through April 1.

Whole Lotta Guts Playing in Ireland at All

Led Zeppelin chose to start the tour in Northern Ireland. Given the political/social/religious unrest there at the time, it was a very ballsy move. They could have played it safe and stayed away from the violence. But the group was known for taking calculated risks in both its music and management. Besides, they wanted to perform for the Irish people, so they kicked off their “U.K. Return to the Clubs Tour” at Ulster Hall in Belfast.

The concert opened with Immigrant Song, followed by Heartbreaker but, as usual, the band would debut material from its upcoming “untitled fourth album” which would be released in November 1971: Black Dog, Rock and Roll, Going to California and Stairway to Heaven.

As noted Led Zeppelin author and editor of Tight But Loose magazine, Dave Lewis, observed, it was “A night of firsts…the first night of the tour, the band’s first visit to Ireland, the first public performance of Stairway to Heaven”. (Dave Lewis with Simon Pallett. Led Zeppelin: The Concert File. Omnibus Press. London, England, 2005; p. 130).

The lilting ballad was over seven minutes long and it incorporated many of the elements that made Led Zeppelin such a terrific band. Jimmy Page used a recently purchased Gibson double-neck guitar for that first-ever performance. The phenomenal live arrangement was as different from the studio track on LZ IV as night and day.

Legend and Legacy

Over the years, Led Zeppelin’s masterpiece, Stairway to Heaven has often been hailed as “the perfect rock song”. The medieval, folkloric lyrics are open to interpretation or “ambiguous”, as Robert Plant explained to Robert Godwin in the latter’s book, The Making of Led Zeppelin IV.

Godwin also told me that, through the course of his research for that book, he accidentally made an important discovery. Although that fourth album had been engineered by Andy Johns, the only one who was in the studio to record when Jimmy Page laid down his solo was another sound engineer who went by the name of Digs!

Stairway to Heaven continues to dominate the airwaves and popular music culture today, forty years later. It remains the most-often requested song on FM radio. The creator of Legends of Classic Rock, Toronto-based Jeff Woods, told me that it always figures in the top three (if not in first position) of listener polls conducted by Corus Radio.

The song has been the butt of many jokes, spoofs and controversies. In the cult classic movie, Wayne’s World, a guitar shop has posted a sign warning “No Stairway” for anyone trying out its instruments. Similar signs have since appeared in many real-life axe shops!

The most infamous controversy surrounding Stairway is that of alleged Satanic back masking, which Plant and Page dismiss as total rubbish despite their well-known fascination with Celtic folklore and occultism, respectively.

Although Atlantic Records wanted to release Stairway to Heaven as a single despite its length, it was never done. As a result, millions of people have bought that untitled fourth album over the years, many of them just to get Stairway! (I confess, that’s why I bought it the first time…)

It has become an anthem for our lives, closing high school dances and celebrating both nuptials and burials. Robert Plant once referred to it as “that bloody wedding song”.

Dave Lewis recently conducted a readers’ poll, asking people to vote on their favourite live version of Stairway to Heaven. The full results can be seen on his website: http://tblweb.com Of the many known recordings (both official and otherwise), the top three were:

1) Earls Court. May 25, 1975 (official 2003 Led Zeppelin DVD version) 2) Madison Square Garden July 1973 (The Song Remains The Same soundtrack version 3) Knebworth. August 4, 1979

There will also be a commemorative 40 year look back at Stairway to Heaven in Dave’s next edition of Tight But Loose, due out in late May. To subscribe, please visit the website mentioned above.

No wonder those Irish eyes were smilin’ on March 5, 1971!

Reminders

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