“A different type”: The song Jimmy Page said had the best energy
There’s a certain sense of immediacy whenever Jimmy Page went into the studio to make a Led Zeppelin record.
The band had all the time in the world to make the record that they wanted, but when listening to the way that they interacted with each other, each riff seemed to grab you by the throat the minute that Page started playing them on ‘Good Times Bad Times’ or ‘Communication Breakdown’. But beyond being one of the best rock and roll bands to ever exist, Page was far more interested in capturing a feeling in the room whenever the red light came on.
Then again, half the reason why a lot of those Zeppelin records worked is because of Page’s ear for production. No one else could reproduce the sounds that he heard in his head, and while Eddie Kramer was there to oversee the sessions, he was always working in tandem with Page at the board, whether that was putting the delayed echo on Robert Plant’s voice at the end of ‘Whole Lotta Love’ or turning in some of the finest guitar parts that Page ever made like on the solo to ‘Heartbreaker’.
At the same time, a lot of what Page played didn’t need to be completely dead on to have an effect on people. All great rock and roll should be at least a little bit messed up in some way, and many of their best albums come from the subtle Easter Eggs that were left in the mix, whether it’s the phone ringing in the middle of ‘The Ocean’ or when the band is almost floating trying to get the groove down in the middle of ‘Black Dog’.
All that contributes to a song lasting for generations to come, and Page wanted to have a certain effect on people outside of writing a catchy tune. He had done that part of his career, and by the time they had begun work on some of their masterpieces. Their fourth album was already poised to be one of their best after spending some time on the road, but after going away to write pieces of the record, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was everything that Page had been building towards since he started the band.
No one in their right mind would have thought that an eight-minute song would have fit anywhere on the radio, but Page wasn’t concerned with radio appeal in the slightest. They were an album-based band, and this was the kind of song that took the listener on a journey within the span of eight minutes, to the point where it feels like an entire day has come and gone in the time it takes to bring the song back down to Earth.
And while Page did have a soft spot for the urgency in a lot of Zeppelin’s early stuff, there was nothing that was going to take ‘Stairway’ away from him, saying, “There’s going to be a different type of energy relative to touring. But I think there was an energy on the fourth album and Physical Graffiti and whatever. You talk about the energy on the second album, what energy is more important than ‘Stairway’?”
But that kind of energy might be what turned Robert Plant off the tune after one too many times singing it. Anyone else would consider a record like that to be their crowning achievement, but whereas Page was definitely proud of what they had done, Plant didn’t want to define himself through one song that made him look like a lounge singer as he started to sing it again in his twilight years.
Regardless of what the legacy of ‘Stairway’ holds, though, there’s no doubt that it’s going to be forever linked to the band that redefined what rock and roll could be for millions of people. The Beatles had dared everyone to dream when they put out their first records, but Zeppelin were the ones who helped give the genre a kick in the ass once the Summer of Love had come to an end.
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