Cigarettes. You can blame them for stained teeth, black lungs and one other nuisance: the maddening ubiquity of Led Zeppelin’s classic-rock stalwart “Stairway to Heaven.”
The song, which appeared on the band’s untitled fourth album, was hardly a hit at first. When Zeppelin first played it live in March of 1971, eight months before its release, lead singer Robert Plant recalled that the audience settled “in for 40 winks.”
It wasn’t until a few years later that the eight-minute epic began to approach classic status, its prominence driven by nonstop radio play. By many estimates, it’s the most-spun rock song in history, despite never being released as a single. Which brings us back to cigarettes.
“The song became successful by accident,” says Charles R. Cross, author of the recent “Led Zeppelin: Shadows Taller Than Our Souls.” “The reason ‘Stairway’ took off was because it was a long song. I literally had 100 deejays swear to me that they only played the song because they needed a long break to go and smoke a cigarette. If it had been a minute shorter, you couldn’t have smoked a full cigarette. If it had been a minute longer, it would have been too long. It was the perfect length.”
Whether you love the song or hate it, interest in the group that recorded it never seems to dwindle. In addition to Cross’ book, two other tomes recently hit shelves: “When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin” by Mick Wall, and “Good Times, Bad Times: A Visual Biography of the Ultimate Band” by Jerry Prochnicky, Ralph Hulett and Anthony DeCurtis.
Wall chalks up the continued interest to mystique.
“Many years ago, a friend of mine said, ‘The day Deep Purple ceased to be a legend was the day they got back together.’ There’s a James Dean kind of thing. Zeppelin died, not quite in their prime, but still with it all to play for,” Wall says. “Zeppelin live in our mind as that band from the ’70s. They haven’t been around to spoil that vision.”
True enough. Aside from a disastrous appearance at Live Aid in 1985 — with Phil Collins on drums! — a 1988 Madison Square Garden anniversary concert and a single reunion show in London two years ago, Zeppelin has refused to reunite for a full tour, despite the millions the surviving members could presumably earn. And one of the reasons may have to do with “Stairway to Heaven.”
Before the song was recorded, guitarist Jimmy Page had been working on the music for years, with the idea to join acoustic and electric into an epic anthem that would “have the drums come in at the middle, then build to a huge crescendo.” Plant wrote the lyrics (which he says were “about a woman getting everything she wanted without getting anything back”) in an inspired burst, sitting in a Welsh country house called Bron-Yr-Aur — later to inspire two song titles — he was sharing with Page in 1970.
“It’s almost as if Plant, the moment he got up from writing it, he hated it,” Cross says. In later years, the singer has said he “loathed” the song. In an interview with Wall, Page recalled Plant telling him, “I wrote it when I was young, and it doesn’t feel right to sing it. I can’t relate to the lyrics anymore.”
The guitarist, however, never tired of the anthem and was constantly pushing his frontman to perform it, in part because it allowed Page to break out his double-necked Gibson EDS-1275. “Page’s love of the tune seemed to go in inverse proportion to Plant’s hate,” Cross says.
One of the reasons the band may never tour again is because Plant doesn’t want to be forced to sing “Stairway” every night. At the 1988 Garden show, the band reportedly got into a heated argument minutes before going onstage about whether to play it or not. They did perform it during the 2007 gig, but only after agreeing to Plant’s two stipulations: that the song be placed in the middle of the set, not as the finale, and that the performance be faithful to the album version, with no noodling, says Wall.
During live shows in the 1970s, the band would sometimes push the song’s length well past 10 minutes, often with a marathon guitar solo that expanded on the recorded track’s.
The original solo was laid down by Page in London’s Basing Street Studios as the musician leaned against a speaker, a cigarette tucked between the strings of his 1958 Fender Telecaster — a gift from Jeff Beck. “I winged that guitar solo, really,” Page told Wall. “When it came to recording it, I warmed up and did three of them.” He chose the first take.
“Stairway to Heaven” may have sounded wholly original at the time, but that didn’t stop charges of plagiarism from dogging the band. Throughout its career, Zeppelin had borrowed lyrics and reworked other artists’ songs without credit, including “When the Levee Breaks,” an old blues track from Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, and “Whole Lotta Love,” over which the band was sued by singer Willie Dixon.
Some critics have raised eyebrows over the similarities between the acoustic intro of “Stairway to Heaven” and “Taurus,” a 1968 song from the group Spirit. The resemblance could be dismissed as a simple coincidence, except for the fact that Zeppelin toured with Spirit in 1968 and used to cover the group’s “Fresh-Garbage” in concert.
Author Wall isn’t buying the charges. “I’ve listened to that Spirit track so many times, and to me, it’s a glancing similarity,” he says. “I can see maybe Page lifted a chord or two, but the Spirit piece is a very inconsequential piece. ‘Stairway to Heaven’ is like a cathedral. It’s a monumental piece of work. I don’t think you can credit Spirit for that.”
However the band came up with “Stairway,” maybe it’s time we all moved on. No more voting it the greatest song in the universe on every radio countdown, no more sitting beneath black lights in our rooms and tentatively plucking it out on acoustic guitars. Time to move on.
“The song doesn’t deserve [its status],” Cross says. “It’s not the band’s best song. It’s not even in their best 25 songs.” As these new books show, there was more to Led Zeppelin than that one tune — no matter how many cigarettes you can smoke during it.
reed.tucker@nypost.com