The most famous song in Rock music. I just played the first three bars for Nidhi ..and she recognised it instantly. Guesstimates are that this song has had an incredible 100+ years worth of airplay in the US alone since release on Led Zeppelin IV in 1971. That’s despite it being 8 min 2 secs long. The score by Jimmy Page is the largest selling sheet music of all time. The song is so complicated guitar wise, he had to create his iconic double-necked guitar so he could play it live without multiple guitar changes.

‘There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold/And she’s buying a stairway to heaven.‘ is an entire story in two sentences. The mystical lyrics by Robert Plant are partly inspired by Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, and Plant insists he gets a different meaning from the lyrics each time he hears it…and he’s the guy who wrote it! That must have been some powerful stuff they smoked back in the day!! 

‘A Date With You’ had this on often, a cut down 3 min version though. I suspect Gitanaji Iyer would have been fired if she had played the full 8 min. I have fantastic memories of hearing this with my school and college friends again and again, sometimes on repeat…a few rums down, nodding very sagely at the lyrics and going nuts at the guitar solo and then Plant’s vocals at the end leaving us enthralled. There may or may not have been interesting smoking involved?.

Unfortunately, Plant detests the song today and refuses to sing it very often, calling it a ‘wedding song’.? Apparently he once paid a radio station $10K never to play the song again. And of course, it is the basis for one of most famous plagiarism cases of all time. BTW the latest ruling from a 11-judge panel is that Led Zep did not steal the intro from Storm’s ‘Taurus’ (phew!)

This has become Led Zep’s signature tune, despite their incredible repertoire, which I’ll write about shortly ?