The gospel according to Led Zeppelin: Is Jesus the ‘Stairway to Heaven’?
When Ian Anderson spoke about Jethro Tull going on tour with Led Zeppelin, he admitted that while he enjoyed watching them play, he liked to stay “outside the orbit of their nightly shenanigans.” For Anderson, this meant drugs, drink and parties; however, other people, more sceptical people, will have interpreted such a comment as Anderson confirming the satanic ways of a band who were surely in cahoots with the devil.
Drinking blood, human sacrifice and all sorts of stories surrounding secretion followed Led Zeppelin like a shadow. The fact of the matter was that your average listener could not fathom that mortal men could rock that hard, and therefore, Led Zeppelin must have sold their souls to the devil. This led to variations of satanic worship throughout their tours and hidden messages worshipping the devil buried within their songs.
Led Zeppelin wasn’t alone in these accusations. The ‘Satanic Panic’ was a very real thing, as conservative households around the States were convinced that rock bands’ sole purpose was to pollute the minds of the young and easily manipulated. This meant that songs were layered with hidden messages that acted as odes to the devil himself.
One of these songs, if you can believe it, was ‘Stairway to Heaven’. A smooth track that inspires hope and is borderline euphoric was once interpreted to be an evil number written out of love for pure evil. It seems funny to look back on it now, but some people thought that if you took brief passages of the song and rewound them, they contained hidden messages from the devil.
The truth is that storytelling was a huge part of Led Zeppelin’s writing style. They frequently drew from themes of religion and mythology to create picturesque backdrops for their songs, which would take listeners on a real spiritual journey. Lyrics were supposed to be more than just words and instead actively represent something otherworldly.
For instance, their famous track ‘Immigrant Song’ borrowed heavily from Nordick mythology but actually told the story of when the band played a show in Iceland. “We weren’t being pompous; we did come from the land of the ice and snow,” said Robert Plant when discussing the track. “We were guests of the Icelandic Government on a cultural mission. We were invited to play a concert in Reykjavik, and the day before we arrived, all the civil servants went on strike, and the gig was going to be cancelled.”
He continued, “The university prepared a concert hall for us, and it was phenomenal. The response from the kids was remarkable, and we had a great time. ‘Immigrant Song’ was about that trip and it was the opening track on the album that was intended to be incredibly different.”
It begs the question, if these story-laden songs had real-world meaning, what was the rationale behind ‘Stairway To Heaven’? Is it Led Zeppelin’s actual interpretation of the gospel? Or is there another meaning attached to it?
What is the meaning behind ‘Stairway To Heaven’?
If you were to assign a literal meaning to the song, you could argue that this is Led Zeppelin’s interpretation of gospel. The band had drawn from religion in the past, and ‘Stairway To Heaven’ is their most hopeful use of such themes. The outro feels as uplifting as praise songs, which has led some people to believe the stairway in question is a representation of Jesus, as he acts as people’s pathway to eternal life.
While this is an incredibly sweet interpretation of the lyrics that people can undoubtedly run with if they would like to, it wasn’t what Plant was thinking of at the time of writing. Plant has admitted that he believes one of the reasons that the song is so famous and has withstood the test of time like it has is because of how abstract the lyrics are and, therefore, how open to interpretation they are. “Depending on what day it is, I still interpret the song a different way,” he admitted, “And I wrote the lyrics.”
The lyrics’ openness to interpretation made Robert Plant want to stop playing the song after a while. After a lot of negatives in his life, like being involved in a car crash and losing one of his children, he found the ambiguity and hopefulness in the song “naïve”. As a result, Led Zeppelin stopped playing the song live, and the track has been left by the wayside ever since. It still resonates in the hearts of rock lovers across the planet, though.
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