The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: "Stairway to Heaven"
May 1993
"Stairway to Heaven" takes a detour down under. Don't be alarmed now…
Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" is the snowcapped peak of pop music, its Mount Kilimanjaro, its Mount Fuji, gleaming and majestic. But almost twenty-two years of radio overkill—not to mention the countless times one's had to endure it at bar mitzvahs, high school dances, weddings, and, for all I know, funerals—have turned it into another sort of mountain, the kind inside a glass paperweight that snows when you tum it upside down. It's a magnificent piece of music, but it's moved from transcendence to pure corn.
"The song tells, in poetic terms, of a mythographic lady's quest for spiritual perfection," Stephen Davis says in Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga (not a bad book, but really—"mythographic"?). "She is a paradigm of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Robert Graves's White Goddess, and every other Celtic heroine—the Lady of the Lake, Morgan Le Fay, Diana of the Fields Greene, Rhiannon the Nightmare." I always thought she was just a foil for a typical hippie critique of materialism, but never mind; fans used to argue over the mystery of the number, then not long ago it was solved. "The first three lines of Led Zeppelin's 1971 rock classic 'Stairway to Heaven' speak of a lady who's sure 'all that glitters is gold' and who is 'buying a stairway to heaven,'" Malcolm Gladwell of the Washington Post reported in 1991. "This, according to social scientists, is a clear reference to drug use. Acapulco gold. Buying a means to get high in the sky."
Don't feel bad if, as Gladwell puts it, you didn't "get it." As he went on to say, "When a team of California psychologists recently surveyed a group of several hundred teenagers, none of the students who listed 'Stairway to Heaven' among their favorite tunes made the association between the lyrics and drug use."
Right about here you're supposed to make some crack about the decline of American public education—and maybe also wonder who makes this stuff up. I mean, you don't really think a story like this would have gotten any ink if it'd been "a team of Ohio psychologists," do you? Even though there survives a priceless 1967 photograph of Robert Plant representing something called the Midlands Flower People and carrying a sign that reads LEGALISE POT, I still don't think this is what he had in mind when he wrote the words to "Stairway to Heaven." From the evidence of Stairways to Heaven, neither do any of the various artists who were invited, blackmailed, bribed, seduced, or otherwise convinced to participate. They take the song as an icon: by now, altogether self-referential and absolutely without content. They take it as their task to knock the icon off its stand, to bring it down to earth. And they fail.
The Stairways project goes back a couple of years, to when The Money or the Gun, a now defunct Australian satirical TV show starring Andrew Denton, began running a weekly "Stairway to Heaven" parody. The idea was to cover every conceivable genre, and the results are sometimes so perverse as to render the whole notion of genre unstable. There are tributes within tributes on this record, to the point where you may walk away (or run screaming) with the sense that pop music is completely interchangeable. Robyne Dunn does the song as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"; the B-52’s tribute band Rock Lobsters does it as "Rock Lobster," with Stephen Wade offering a flesh-crawling impersonation of Fred Schneider (why anyone would want to devote himself to sounding like Fred Schneider is a question best left to a team of Australian psychologists); Elvis impersonator Neil Pepper does it as "Viva Las Vegas"; the Australian Doors Show does it as "When the Music's Over"; the Beatnix do it as "I Want to Hold Your Hand."
The main diversion during these cuts is reading Andrew Denton's liner notes. "Philip's guitar cuts through our parachute of complacency like a buzz saw from hell," he writes. “‘If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow’ cuts like a rusty knife through a puppy's throat." "Harriott rips Wagner from his grave and through his putrefied flesh tells, in four minutes, the Thatcher-Reagan story as it really went down." It's kind of disappointing to find Denton's "NB" at the end of the insert booklet: "The author wishes to acknowledge Rolling Stone, issues 426, 439, & 472, which—in true rock & roll style—he has freely sampled throughout these liner notes for purposes of street credibility.”
But the set builds its own momentum. After a few tracks it seems as if the song itself—its implacable hugeness, the alchemy by which Led Zeppelin transformed pretentiousness into mass popularity and then mass popularity into grandeur—has captured the performers, sucking them into its maw. Version after version starts off dull and perfunctory. Within a minute, though, a strange momentum has taken over, as if opera singers Sandra Hahn and Michael Turkic, punks Toys Went Berserk, comedy act Barry Crocker and the Doug Anthony Allstars, and even ancient Aussie music-hall wobble-board hero Rolf Harris have been seized by the irresistible desire to push the tune as far as Led Zeppelin pushed it, and in their various ways, they do.
The Whipper Snappers are Annette Crowe, on vocals and bass, and Joy Howard singing and playing guitar, plus a second guitar and drums. They kick off like a third-rate down-under Primitives imitation. Voices are flat, and interest on their part is nil. Soon they're flying, and so are you; you're hoping they won't stop. The voices twist around each other, the guitar takes the tune, gives it back. You realize the girls could be singing a cappella in their apartment, for all the professionalism in the performance; you can't tell if it's a great song that's inspired them to make this music or if the song has disappeared into their ordinariness, and you'd be a fool to care.
Listening to Stairways to Heaven, I wondered, version by version, if there'd be any reason to play it more than once. Only a track or two may draw you back on its own terms, but the whole is a spooky comedy act: a real testament to how completely a composition can be taken over by its fans without its authors losing a thing. Put the disc on when friends are over, and they'll be irritated or they'll be laughing; someone will tell you it take it off. Let it play, and soon enough you'll be talking about pop music as if you couldn't live without it, as if you never did.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, May 1993
"it's moved from transcendence to pure corn"
Seems dismissively apt but then turns out one persistingly cool aspect of "corn" is its pedestrian grasping and flailing for the transcendence in "Stairway to Heaven." Like that.
Stairway is one of those songs where if it’s your favorite or least favorite song you never need to hear it again