No One Cares. Just Shut The Fuck Up

[Mushroom]

Rick Beato's analysis is the only way I can listen to Stairway to Heaven for the millionth and first time

[Terry]

Rick Beato's analysis is the only way I can listen to Stairway to Heaven for the millionth and first time

I sort of had a visceral negative reaction to that tune for a good twenty-odd years, starting in the mid-1990s.

Mostly because I had overplayed it starting back in the late-1970's when I started listening to it via hand me down vinyl from older relatives, throughout the 1980's. And back in the 1980's local rock radio would overplay it, along with the umpteen other Stairway clone songs other bands had released in the wake of it starting in the 1970's (your Dream On/Freebird/More Than A Feeling type-stuff). And then the tune started being repeatedly called The Best Rock Song Of All time by Rolling Stone-type music mags. And you had all that bizarre early 1980's backward masking The Lyrics Are A Call To Worshipping Satan blather. And all the Will Led Zeppelin Reform And Perform The ALL TIME ULTIMATE LIVE VERSION OF IT, Man!! reunion speculation from the mid-1980's through the early 1990's.

It got to the point where if I was listening to the radio and I heard the first few bars of it, I'd change the station. Like, yeah, great song, but after hearing it a million times and hearing people talk/write about it a million times I don't EVER need to hear this song again.

Maybe, I dunno ...ten or so years ago, it came on the radio and I listened to it for the first time in a long time (my Zep IV cd having long been collecting a/c dust) and it was just what it had always been, that being a great song. Once you strip away the whole over adulation of it ('it' being THE CELESTIAL ROCK HYMN OF ALL TIME), it remains a great song.

Not even my personal favorite Zeppelin song, but a great song. Plant said something in an interview once about it being a nice English song with a beginning, middle and end.

I always kinda liked the Dread Zeppelin version of it and the Frank Zappa live version of it (where he replicates the guitar solo with a horn section) best out of anything involving the song post-1980. I also took a snarky enjoyment in how badly Page, Plant, Jones and Company flubbed it during Live Aid in 1985. Those three renditions of it at least injected a bit of humor around it. Like, relax. It's just a tune and not some Holy Rock n Roll Scripture.

[FORD]

On the other hand, there's always "Stairway to Gilligan's Island"....

[Mushroom]

Back in the 80's, I remember KGB (killer green bud?) FM on terrestrial radio in San Diego would have the annual top 500 countdown on Memorial Day weekend or something like that.. Stairway to Heaven was #1 for too many years.

[FORD]

Yeah... KZOK did that top 500 thing at the end of the year. Stairway was always #1. Ususally followed by Layla, Free Bird and all the other 8+ minute songs of that era.

[Terry]

On the other hand, there's always "Stairway to Gilligan's Island"....

I remember a bud of mine who I used to jam with back in the mid 1980's playing the opening bars of Stairway and singing those Gilligan's Island lyrics over them.