The song John Paul Jones called the first version of ‘Stairway to Heaven’
It’s hard to think of the legacy of Led Zeppelin without looking at ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
They had their the track record of being one of the greatest rock and roll bands of all time, but over eight minutes, they had firmly solidified themselves as songwriters rather than the traditional hard rock outfit that everyone else was trying to be circa 1971. But if you were to ask John Paul Jones, the bones of their masterpiece were already taking shape long before Jimmy Page came up with the classic riff.
I mean, even Page admitted that the riff itself wasn’t entirely original. He felt that the whole thing was a poor man’s version of playing a Bach piece, but even if it does have more than a few similarities to other tunes, there’s a reason why no other song sounds like ‘Stairway’. This is the closest to a musical journey that any band ever made at that time, but when talking about the song, the structure is as important as the actual notes.
There are technically “verses” if you want to look for a linear pattern, but by and large, no part of the song follows the typical pop song formula. It’s about trying to make every section feel like a new musical vignette in lots of ways, and when looking at the intro compared to the guitar to the rocking finale, all of them could have been fodder for one classic tune before making one super-song.
But in terms of how the instruments are arranged, Jonesy knew a lot more about what the band needed. He was always the unsung hero behind all of Zeppelin’s greatest tracks, and aside from the beautiful flute parts that he added to this tune, he knew that this track had to be treated almost like a classical piece of music. It had different moods that needed to be captured, but that wasn’t all that different from their first musical ventures.
The core of the band was already based on blues covers, and it didn’t take long for them to transform a song like ‘How Many More Times’ into one of the heaviest tunes in their catalogue. When looking back on ‘Stairway’, though, Jones remembered that the original incarnation of the song felt more at home when they were working on the track ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’.
The Joan Baez track is still a fine piece of Zeppelin’s catalogue, but Jones knew that all the bones of ‘Stairway’ could be found there, saying, “‘Stairway’ embodies a lot of what Led Zeppelin was about. It actually had a sort of precedent in a song on the first album called ‘Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You,’ which had many of the same elements: the acoustic start, the build and the sort of “heavy” end.”
Admittedly, there are a few similarities, but whatever they had started on their debut record they perfected by the time they tried it all over again for their untitled fourth outing. Not every piece of the song is exactly perfect, but when taken together as a whole, it’s hard to think of a better guitar solo than what Page played or a better frontman to deliver those final screams in the back half of the tune than Robert Plant.
While Jones’s role tends to fade into the background a lot of the time, the fact that ‘Stairway’ remained the quintessential Zeppelin song for him meant a lot more than most people realised. This was the band trying their best to go beyond rock and roll, and in the process they managed to create the kind of song that will outlive all of them. Because when the next phase of civilisation comes across this kind of tune, they will be listening to the days when rock and roll had the power to change the world.
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