Some of Led Zeppelin’s canonical numbers endure with an immortality that will live on beyond their creators.
Surrounding their classic 1969-1975 tenure, Led Zeppelin’s holy LPs, smattered around their stadium-strutting live shows, capture the era’s rock in all its archetypal essence. From stirring anthemic power to cartoon parodies that punk would later excoriate, each record teems with a template aura, muscling its way to the fore of one’s vinyl collection boldly stating: “If you want to understand rock in all its profundity and silliness, listen to me!”
In their pomp, frontman Robert Plant would think nothing of bellowing the sensual and powerhouse croons of ‘Whole Lotta Love’, ‘Rock and Roll’, and ‘Immigrant Song’, but as time rolled on, a celebrated solo career and collaborations with Alison Krauss have brought a new creative terrain and vitality few of his peers can profess to enjoy.
Alongside the maturity that comes with everyone’s passage of time, can certain numbers in Led Zeppelin’s lauded oeuvre serve as such a time capsule, it’s just impossible to do justice live after all those years?
It was a question put to Plant back in 1995. A year from the celebrated No Quarter ‘unLedded’ live album and TV project with MTV, he and reunited Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page had sat with People’s Michael Small for an unpublished feature, eventually unearthed for the I Couldn’t Throw It Out podcast series. Spotting a stark omission from their setlist at the time, Small had probed why exactly the mythic ‘Stairway to Heaven’ had been left off their repertoire for the orchestra-backed world tour that year.
“Well, if there is anything of a rebel left in me, I guess I cannot just go on the road for the sake of the people who pay the tickets,” Plant bluntly confessed. “I’m here to please myself primarily. And although it was a cute and pretty song at a certain point in time, lyrically, which is my responsibility, it’s not relevant to me anymore”. Plant reached into Zeppelin’s songbook and plucked a highlight from the Physical Graffiti double-LP that still held vitality in his estimation: “Whereas ‘Kashmir’, in all its newfound glory, certainly is lyrically and emotionally and musically.”
Typically closing their shows as the finale to their encore, ‘Kashmir’ perfectly suited their Middle-Eastern and acoustic reimagining of Led Zeppelin’s numbers, as well as marked a testament to Page’s exotic and ethereal arrangements that always lent a sophistication to their work far removed from some of the era’s total arena rock stereotypes.
Yet, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ sees Led Zeppelin step further into the world of fantastical mysticism that’s ironically infinitely less alien or foreign than a cut like ‘Kashmir’, fluted harmonies and folk guitar more suited to John Howe or Alan Lee’s paperback illustrations to The Lord of the Rings than the stirring escapism of sex and rock excess, nicely wrapped in a little Norse or esoteric mythology.
It’s a song that stands as their defining cut, however. Epic yet artificial, rousing while sagging with showy spectacle, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is a document of what Led Zeppelin were able to achieve over any revealing insight into their creators’ souls.
