There is nothing in the rock and roll rulebook to suggest you must love everything you or your band ever produces. The competitive nature of the music business often leads people to believe that an artist thinks every single note they ever release is a worthy contender for their best work. The truth is, countless musicians have fallen in and out of love with their profession and the tracks they create within it on an almost daily basis. John Lennon bashed The Beatles, Kurt Cobain hated Nirvana’s biggest hit, and Robert Plant has a serious issue with perhaps Led Zeppelin’s most famous song.
Robert Plant’s relationship with ‘Stairway To Heaven’ is complicated. Although many people consider the track Led Zeppelin’s magnum opus, the song’s actual singer disagrees. Astonishingly, he even donated $10,000 to a radio station in a plea to stop them from playing the rock behemoth. It was a move that rubber-stamped his disdain for the mammoth rock hit.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find a rock lover who doesn’t have a special place in their heart for ‘Stairway’. After all, it’s eight minutes of undeniable pure songwriting brilliance, completed by a guitar solo so beloved it has been officially banned in guitar shops across the globe. Across the song, Led Zeppelin encapsulates everything that made them the dynamic group that successfully guided music to a new dimension.
However, in 2019, Plant spoke about how ‘Stairway’ is a track that he could no longer relate to, but he did admit that he could admire the song, even if only from afar. While sitting down with UCR as part of their ‘Nights’ radio show, Plant said: “The construction of the song, the actual musical construction, is very good. It’s one of those moments that really can stand without a vocal and, in fact, it will stand again without a vocal, I’m sure, because it’s a fine piece of music.
