Led Zeppelin IV by Barney Hoskyns

Author:Barney Hoskyns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2006-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

5

THE TUNE WILL COME TO YOU AT LAST

“I DON’T want to tell you about it in case it doesn’t come off,” Jimmy Page told NME in April 1970. “It’s an idea for a really long track on the next album…. We want to try something new with the organ and acoustic guitar building up and building up to the electric thing.”

Having composed the intro for it at Bron-Yr-Aur in the spring of that year, Page continued to work on the “really long track” throughout 1970. Using an eight-track studio he’d installed in his Pangbourne boathouse, he spent many hours working out the different sections of what became “Stairway to Heaven,” layering 6- and 12-string guitars with the aid of a recording unit called the New Vista.

“It was the deck from the Pye mobile that had been used to record things like the Who’s Live at Leeds,” Page recalled. “We’d used it to record our Albert Hall gig. I’d been fooling around with the acoustic guitar and came up with the different sections, which I married together. So I had the structure and then I ran it through Jonesy.”

Although the band recorded an early instrumental version of the track at Island Studios in December 1970, “Stairway” at this point had no lyrics, nor was it structurally complete. Returning to it in Hampshire, Zeppelin slowly solved the problems it posed. “It may not make a lot of sense,” Page remembered, “but it was quite a complicated song to actually get across to everybody.”

Talking to Stuart Grundy and John Tobler in 1983, Page recalled the piecemeal process in more detail. “When we were recording it,” he said, “there were little bits, little sections that I’d done, getting reference pieces down on cassette, and sometimes I referred back to them if I felt there was something that seemed right that could be included. I wanted to try this whole idea musically, this build toward a climax, with John Bonham coming in at a later point—an idea [that] I’d used before—to give it that extra kick.”

The night after the mobile truck arrived at Headley Grange, Bonzo and Plant adjourned to the pub, leaving Page and Jones to write out the music for the complete version of the track. Bootleg tapes show the two men working out the transition from the song’s bridge to its final solo, as well as Jones trying out keyboard parts on an electric piano.

“Both Jimmy and I were quite aware of the way a track should unfold and the various levels it would go through,” Jones noted. “We were quite strong on form…. I suppose we were both quite influenced by classical music, and there’s a lot of drama in the classical forms.”

The following evening, with Jones and Bonham taking a night off—driving to London for a party at the Speakeasy club—Page and Plant sat together in Headley Grange’s drawing room. “Jimmy and I just sat by the fire; it was a remarkable setting,” Plant recalled. “I mean, Hawkwind was probably humming in the background.

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