‘Stairway to Heaven’: The moment Jimmy Page knew he’d written a hit
Writing music is always a leap of faith. Songwriters and composers can spend weeks, months, or even years perfecting a new piece of music only to have it torn to shreds by critics. Even the composer’s own enthusiasm for a song is an unreliable indicator of its quality. How enjoyable a song is to play and how enjoyable it is to listen to are, after all, two very different things. More often than not, the best songs are those that surprise their creators, as was the case with Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
Led Zeppelin started working on ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in early 1970, having decided to create a grand epic to replace their well-worn concert centrepiece ‘Dazed and Confused’. Jimmy Page, the group’s enigmatic guitarist, strung the song together in the eight-track studio installed in his boathouse, where he spent weeks experimenting with different guitar lines.
He clearly got pretty carried away because, by April, he was informing journalists that the track was a 15-minute behemoth of a thing that built towards a Wagnerian “climax”. After 18 months of constant touring, the song we know today finally started to emerge, with Page and Plant retreating to the 250-year-old Welsh Cottage Bron-yr-Aur to complete it in peace. Looking back on the track during an interview for the BBC, Page said: “The idea of ‘Stairway’ was to have a piece of music, a composition, whereby it would just keep on unfolding into more layers, more moods. The subtlety of the intensity and the overlay of the composition would actually accelerate as it went through on every level, every emotional level, every musical level, so it just keeps opening up as it continues through its passage.”
The song’s sped-up time signature was described by Page as a “cardinal sin” for the former session musician, but it worked a treat. Still, it wasn’t until the song was given its US live debut in 1971 that Led Zeppelin were alerted to the song’s unique brilliance. The band performed the song to an American audience for the first time on August 21st at the Inglewood Forum, two months before the release of Zeppelin IV. Page would later recall the song receiving a “sizeable” standing ovation after its premiere. “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.”
You can revisit one of Led Zeppelin’s greatest live renditions of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ below.
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