Stairway to Heaven

"Stairway to Heaven" was recorded beginning in December 1970 at Island Records' new Basing Street Studios in London.[7] The song was completed by the addition of lyrics by Plant during the sessions for Led Zeppelin IV at Headley Grange, Hampshire, in 1971.[8] Page then returned to Island Studios to record his guitar solo.[5]

The song originated in 1970 when Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were spending time at Bron-Yr-Aur, a remote cottage in Wales, following Led Zeppelin's fifth American concert tour. According to Page, he wrote the music "over a long period, the first part coming at Bron-Yr-Aur one night".[9] Page always kept a cassette recorder around, and the idea for "Stairway to Heaven" came together from bits of taped music.[10] The first attempts at lyrics, written by Robert Plant next to an evening log fire at Headley Grange, were partly spontaneously improvised and Page claimed, "a huge percentage of the lyrics were written there and then".[10] Jimmy Page was strumming the chords, and Robert Plant had a pencil and paper.

The complete studio recording was released on Led Zeppelin IV in November 1971. The band's record label, Atlantic Records, wanted to issue it as a single, but the band's manager Peter Grant refused requests to do so in both 1972 and 1973. This led many people to buy the fourth album as if it were the single.[5] In the US, Atlantic issued "Stairway to Heaven" as a 7" promotional single in 1972.

"Stairway to Heaven" is described as progressive rock,[11][12] folk rock[13] and hard rock.[13] The song consists of several distinct sections, beginning with a quiet introduction on a finger-picked six-string guitar and four recorders in a Renaissance music style[14] (ending at 2:15) and gradually moving into a slow electric middle section (2:16–5:33), then a long guitar solo (5:34–6:44), before the faster hard rock final section (6:45–7:45), ending with a short vocals-only epilogue. Plant sings the opening, middle and epilogue sections in his mid vocal range, but sings the hard rock section in his higher range which borders on falsetto.

Written in the key of A minor, the song opens with an arpeggiated, finger-picked guitar chord progression with a chromatic descending bassline A-G♯-G-F♯-F. John Paul Jones contributed overdubbed wooden bass recorders in the opening section (he used a Mellotron and, later, a Yamaha CP70B Grand Piano and Yamaha GX1 to synthesise this arrangement in live performances)[15] and a Hohner Electra-Piano electric piano in the middle section.

The sections build with more guitar layers, each complementary to the intro, with the drums entering at 4:18. The extended Jimmy Page guitar solo in the song's final section was played for the recording on a 1959 Fender Telecaster given to him by Jeff Beck (an instrument he used extensively with the Yardbirds)[15] plugged into a Supro amplifier,[16] although in an interview he gave to Guitar World magazine, Page also claimed, "It could have been a Marshall, but I can't remember".[10] Three different improvised solos were recorded, with Page agonising about which to keep. Page later revealed, "I did have the first phrase worked out, and then there was the link phrase. I did check them out beforehand before the tape ran." The other guitar parts were played using a Harmony Sovereign H1260 acoustic guitar and a Fender Electric XII guitar (a 12-string guitar that was plugged directly to the soundboard); these can be heard on the left and right recording channels respectively. For live versions, Page switched to a Heritage Cherry Gibson EDS-1275 6/12 Doubleneck guitar. The final progression is a i-VII-VI (natural minor) progression (Am-G-F), a mainstay of rock music.

Another interesting aspect of the song is the timing of the lead-up to the famous guitar solo. While staying in 4/4 throughout this section, most of the accents shift to the eighth notes. This makes the rhythm figure challenging for some musicians, but adds a feeling of anticipation to the approaching guitar solo.

Jimmy Page has likened the song to an orgasm.[17][18]

The inaugural public performance of the song took place at Belfast's Ulster Hall on 5 March 1971.[15] Bassist John Paul Jones recalls that the crowd was unimpressed: "They were all bored to tears waiting to hear something they knew."[19]

The world radio premiere of "Stairway to Heaven" was recorded at the Paris Cinema on 1 April 1971, in front of a live studio audience, and broadcast three days later on the BBC.[20] The song was performed at almost every subsequent Led Zeppelin concert, only being omitted on rare occasions when shows were cut short for curfews or technical issues. The band's final performance of the song was in Berlin on 7 July 1980, which was also their last full-length concert until 10 December 2007 at London's O2 Arena; the version was the longest, lasting almost 15 minutes, including a seven-minute guitar solo.

Jimmy Page used a double-necked guitar to perform "Stairway to Heaven" live.

When playing the song live, the band would often extend it to over 10 minutes, with Page playing an extended guitar solo and Plant adding a number of lyrical ad-libs, such as "Does anybody remember laughter?", "And I think you can see that" (as seen in the film The Song Remains the Same), "Does anybody remember forests?" (As seen on the live performance in Seattle 1977), "wait a minute!" and "I hope so". For performing this song live, Page used a Gibson EDS-1275 double neck guitar so he would not have to pause when switching from a six to a 12-string guitar.

By 1975, the song had a regular place as the finale of every Led Zeppelin concert. However, after their concert tour of the United States in 1977, Plant began to tire of "Stairway to Heaven": "There's only so many times you can sing it and mean it ... It just became sanctimonious."[21]

The song was played again by the surviving members of Led Zeppelin at the Live Aid concert in 1985;[15] at the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary concert in 1988, with Jason Bonham on drums;[22] and by Jimmy Page as an instrumental version on his solo tours.

The first few bars were played alone during Page and Plant tours in lieu of the final notes of "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You", and in November 1994 Page and Plant performed an acoustic version of the song at a Tokyo news station for Japanese television. "Stairway to Heaven" was also performed at Ahmet Ertegun Tribute Concert at the O2 Arena, London on 10 December 2007.

Plant cites the most unusual performance of the song ever as being that performed at Live Aid: "with two drummers (Phil Collins and Tony Thompson) while Duran Duran cried at the side of the stage – there was something quite surreal about that."[15]

Footage of the song being played live is preserved on the band's concert film The Song Remains the Same, featuring a performance from Madison Square Garden in 1973, and on the Led Zeppelin DVD, featuring a performance from Earls Court Arena in 1975. Official audio versions are also available on The Song Remains the Same's accompanying soundtrack, on Led Zeppelin BBC Sessions (a performance from London's Paris Theatre in 1971) and on How the West Was Won (a performance from the Long Beach Arena in 1972). There are also hundreds of audio versions which can be found on unofficial Led Zeppelin bootleg recordings.

"Stairway to Heaven" is often rated among the greatest rock songs of all time.[1][2] According to music journalist Stephen Davis, although the song was released in 1971, it took until 1973 before the song's popularity ascended to truly "anthemic" status.[23] As Page himself recalled, "I knew it was good, but I didn't know it was going to be almost like an anthem ... But I knew it was the gem of the album, sure."[24]

"Stairway to Heaven" continues to top radio lists of the greatest rock songs, including a 2006 Guitar World readers poll of greatest guitar solos.[25] On the 20th anniversary of the original release of the song, it was announced via U.S. radio sources that the song had logged up an estimated 2,874,000 radio plays.[5] As of 2000, the song had been broadcast on radio over three million times.[26] In 1990, a St. Petersburg, Florida station kicked off its all-Led Zeppelin format by playing "Stairway to Heaven" for 24 hours straight.[27] It is also the biggest-selling single piece of sheet music in rock history, clocking up an average of 15,000 copies yearly.[15] In total, over one million copies have been sold.[26]

Jimmy Page told Rolling Stone in 1975, "We were careful to never release it as a single,"[28] which forced buyers to buy the entire album.[29] Despite pressure from Atlantic Records, the band would not authorise the editing of the song for single release, making "Stairway to Heaven" one of the most well-known and popular rock songs never to have been released as a single. It did, however, appear on two promotional discs in the United States, one of them featuring the 7:55 track on each side, and the other as a 7-inch 33​¹⁄₃ record produced for jukebox operators with "Stairway to Heaven" on one side and both "Black Dog" and "Rock and Roll" on the other. Other "single" appearances were on an Australian EP, and in 1991 as an added bonus with a 20th anniversary promo book.

The group's recording of this song also appeared as the sole Led Zeppelin track in the 1977 Atlantic Records two-LP promotional sampler album We've Got Your Music, marking the first time that Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" made its official debut appearance in an American-released various artists compilation collection.

In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine put it at number 31 on their list of "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". An article from 29 January 2009 Guitar World magazine rated Jimmy Page's guitar solo at number one in the publication's 100 Greatest Guitar Solos in Rock and Roll History.[30] Since 2001, the New York City-based classic rock radio station Q104.3 has ranked "Stairway to Heaven" No. 1 on their annual "Top 1,043 Classic Rock Songs of All Time".[31]

The song is quoted in The Comic Strip episode "Bad News Tour" (1983) by Vim Fuego (played by Ade Edmondson) "I could play "Stairway To Heaven" when I was twelve. Jimmy Page didn't actually write it until he was twenty-two. I think that says quite a lot."

Plant once gave $10,000 to listener-supported radio station KBOO in Portland, Oregon during a pledge drive after the disc jockey solicited donations by promising the station would never play "Stairway to Heaven". Plant was station-surfing in a rental car he was driving to the Oregon Coast after a solo performance in Portland and was impressed with the non-mainstream music the station presented. Later asked "why?", Plant replied that it wasn't that he didn't like the song, but he'd heard it before.[32]

Over the years, some people have considered that the song's opening guitar arpeggios bear a close resemblance to the 1968 instrumental "Taurus" by the Los Angeles-based rock band Spirit, written by Spirit guitarist Randy California.[9][33] In the liner notes to the 1996 reissue of Spirit's self-titled debut album, California wrote: "People always ask me why 'Stairway to Heaven' sounds exactly like 'Taurus,' which was released two years earlier. I know Led Zeppelin also played 'Fresh Garbage' in their live set. They opened up for us on their first American tour."[34][35]

In May 2014, Spirit bassist Mark Andes and a trust acting on behalf of California filed a copyright infringement suit against Led Zeppelin and injunction against the "release of the album containing the song" in an attempt to obtain a writing credit for California, who died in 1997.[36] A lack of resources was cited as one of the reasons that Spirit did not file the suit earlier; according to a friend of California's mother, "Nobody had any money, and they thought the statute of limitations was done ... It will be nice if Randy got the credit." If the Spirit lawsuit had been successful, past earnings due to the song—estimated at more than US$550 million—would not have been part of the settlement, but the publisher and composers may have been entitled to a share of future profits.[37][38]

On 11 April 2016, Los Angeles district judge Gary Klausner ruled that there were enough similarities between the song and the instrumental for a jury to decide the claim, and a trial was scheduled for 10 May. The copyright infringement action was brought by Michael Skidmore, a trustee for the late guitarist, whose legal name was Randy Wolfe.[39] On 23 June, the jury ruled that the similarities between the songs did not amount to copyright infringement.[40] In July, Skidmore's attorney filed a notice of appeal against the court's decision.[41][42][43] In March 2017, the verdict was appealed, with a main argument being that the jury should have been able to hear a recorded version of "Taurus".[44][45] On 28 September 2018, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit allowed the appeal, vacating in part and remanding to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California for a new trial on several evidentiary and procedural issues.[46] On 10 June 2019, the Ninth Circuit granted rehearing en banc, meaning the case will be reheard by a larger panel of eleven judges.[47][48]

A Bloomberg Businessweek article shortly after that decision noted that a Ninth Circuit judge's interpretation of the laws implied that key elements of many classic rock songs, including "Stairway to Heaven", that were recorded prior to 1978 were not protected by copyright to begin with. The panel declared that the scope of copyright for those songs is limited to what was included in the deposit copy of the song's sheet music provided to the Copyright Office; at trial Page had testified that the deposit copy included neither the intro that was under dispute nor his guitar solo. Bloomberg reporter Vernon Silver found that the deposit copies of other classic rock songs from that era, such as "Hotel California", "Born to Run" and "Free Bird", include only the song's basic chords, lyrics and melody, without any solos or other distinctive musical touches. Copyright law experts could not say whether those elements are copyrighted or not; Led Zeppelin's lawyers have argued they are even if not included in the deposit copy. Silver made an electronic mashup of several of these elements from different songs and included it with the article.[49]

On 9 March 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of Led Zeppelin, in that "Stairway to Heaven" does not infringe on the copyright of "Taurus". Among its point, the full Ninth Circuit used their decision to overturn the controversial "inverse ratio rule" which it had relied over the past several decades in past copyright rulings, stating "Because the inverse ratio rule, which is not part of the copyright statute, defies logic, and creates uncertainty for the courts and the parties, we take this opportunity to abrogate the rule in the Ninth Circuit and overrule our prior cases to the contrary."[50][51] This verdict immediately applied to pending cases within the Ninth: a long battle over Katy Perry's "Dark Horse" in which a jury had found against her for US$2.8 million was overturned a week after the Ninth's verdict in "Stairway to Heaven", in part of the Ninth's new finding and that in the case of "Dark Horse", the similarity argument weighed heavily on the inverse ratio rule.[52]

In a January 1982 television program on the Trinity Broadcasting Network hosted by Paul Crouch, it was claimed that hidden messages were contained in many popular rock songs through a technique called backmasking. One example of such hidden messages that was prominently cited was in "Stairway to Heaven".[53] The alleged message, which occurs during the middle section of the song ("If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now...") when played backward, was purported to contain the Satanic references "Here's to my sweet Satan / The one whose little path would make me sad whose power is Satan / He'll give, he'll give you 666 / There was a little tool shed where he made us suffer, sad Satan."[54]

Following the claims made in the television program, California assemblyman Phil Wyman proposed a state law that would require warning labels on records containing backward masking. In April 1982, the Consumer Protection and Toxic Materials Committee of the California State Assembly held a hearing on backward masking in popular music, during which "Stairway to Heaven" was played backward. During the hearing, William Yarroll, a self-described "neuroscientific researcher", claimed that backward messages could be deciphered by the human brain.[55]

The band itself has for the most part ignored such claims. In response to the allegations, Swan Song Records issued the statement: "Our turntables only play in one direction—forwards." Led Zeppelin audio engineer Eddie Kramer called the allegations "totally and utterly ridiculous. Why would they want to spend so much studio time doing something so dumb?"[56] Robert Plant expressed frustration with the accusations in a 1983 interview in Musician magazine: "To me it's very sad, because 'Stairway to Heaven' was written with every best intention, and as far as reversing tapes and putting messages on the end, that's not my idea of making music."[57]

(*) designates unordered lists.

A different version of this song by Led Zeppelin is featured on the remastered deluxe 2CD version of Led Zeppelin IV. Titled "Stairway to Heaven (Sunset Sound Mix)", it was recorded on 5 December 1970, at Island Studio, No. 1, in London with engineer Andy Johns and assistant engineer Diggs. This version runs 8:04, while the original version runs 8:02.[83]

The British band Far Corporation released a version of "Stairway to Heaven" in late 1985. It was the first single from their debut album, Division One. Their rendition became an international Top 20 hit, reaching number eight in the United Kingdom and number nine in Ireland.[84] The following year it charted at number 16 in South Africa and number 89 in the United States.[85][86] The song became their greatest hit.

• List of cover versions of Led Zeppelin songs
• List of Led Zeppelin songs written or inspired by others

• NPR Fresh Air audio interview with Robert Plant, who comments on various covers of the song, the lyrics and writing it.
• Jimmy Page: How we wrote Stairway to Heaven at BBC
• Sold on Song, "Stairway to Heaven" at BBC Radio 2