There’s no question Jimmy Page would have the final say in everything Led Zeppelin did.
They were a musical democracy in many respects, but seeing how Page helped put everything together, nothing was going to get past him whenever the group got into the studio. He had the schematic of every tune in his mind whenever he entered the studio, but he knew there were a few moments where they went far beyond anything that he could have imagined when he first started playing guitar.
Because looking through Zeppelin’s catalogue, they were bound to be far more than the typical blues band. The Yardbirds started Page on his musical journey, but when they started transitioning over to pop, he quickly found out that life wasn’t for him. He wanted to make projects that were a lot more interesting that didn’t need to be for the mainstream market, and he quickly adopted the album as his next medium.
Sure, ‘Whole Lotta Love’ would get released as a single and even did respectably well on the charts, but Page always wanted their albums to be the final statement. They didn’t want to give interviews for the sake of analysing every one of their songs, and the mystique around Zeppelin was half the reason why a lot of people kept returning to hear the strange sounds of a tune like ‘Kashmir’.
But right when the critics could have called them pretentious, their fourth album is where they all decided to call their bluff. Zeppelin were far from a band that lived and died on the hype of the group, and by releasing a record that had no mention of them on the cover and zero promotion, they still managed to make one of the tightest records of their entire career. And, really, is there any way to talk about the album without mentioning ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
Doing so has become a cliché at this point, but ‘Stairway’ is one of the few songs that have been etched into rock history and still sounds fantastic. Tunes such as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and ‘Hotel California’ have joined its company on the Mount Olympus of rock and roll, but listening to the song still feels like a journey from beginning to end, especially when Page builds to that final screaming solo.
Although Zeppelin were at their height at the time, Page felt that there was no eclipsing what they had done with ‘Stairway’, saying, “That song was our single most important achievement. It was a milestone for us. When everybody heard that one, they realized we were the sort of band that was going to keep coming up with new things. I’m glad that we’re now more recognized for that than ‘Whole Lotta Love.’ We’re not just another hard-rock English group and ‘Stairway to Heaven’ proves it.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be the best Zeppelin song, though. There are more songs that are downbeat that can hit people at the right time, but the reason why the band dared to reach for greater heights on songs like ‘Kashmir’, ‘Ten Years Gone’, or ‘Achilles Last Stand’ can all be traced back to when they got away with an eight-minute masterpiece on one of their records.
And for all the critics that were calling Zeppelin a flash in the pan, ‘Stairway to Heaven’ was always the moment when they shut the hell up. The tastemakers could talk all they wanted to about rock and roll, but there’s nothing that gets in the way of a great song that reaches millions of people.
