Why Zep's Stairway was smoking success
Stairway to Heaven became an icon of 1970s progressive rock music and creators Led Zeppelin because it was the right length for DJs to take a smoking break, according to writer Charles R Cross.
The eight-minute epic wasn’t released as a single when it appeared as part of the Led Zeppelin IV album in 1971, but radio presenters discovered its useful length and that’s how it got so much airplay, Cross claims.
He says: “It became successful by accident. I’ve had 100 DJs swear to me they only played it because they needed a long break to go and smoke.
“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.”
The track has notched up over 3,000,000 plays on air since its release – that’s over 45 years back-to-back. It made number 31 in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and last year Jimmy Page’s solo on the track was voted number 1 in the 100 Greatest Guitar Solos in Rock and Roll History by Guitar World magazine. It’s the biggest-selling piece of sheet music ever with an average sale of 15,000 copies a year.
But Cross says it might be one of the main reasons Robert Plant refused to take part in a Led Zep reunion tour after their one-off show at London’s O2 Arena in 2007. They did perform the track but Plant is believed to have insisted in didn’t appear at the end of the show, and wasn’t extended – in the 70s the band stretched it out to as much as 15 minutes.
The writer of Led Zeppeilin: Shadows Taller Than Our Souls explains: “Page’s love of the tune seems to go in proportion with Plant’s hate.”
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