He’s Buying the Stairway to Heaven
Led Zeppelin, "Stairway to Heaven," and slow dancing? Well, yeah, sorta. That trifecta has been bothering Drew for decades. His cathartic essay brings the wonder to a conclusion - sorta.
By Drew Gallagher
HUMORIST
For many people born after 1953, the Led Zeppelin song Stairway to Heaven is weighted with unusual importance in their lives. When I was in junior-high and high school, every dance was concluded with this eight-minute “slow” song, which is only slow dance material for about the first half of the song. When John Bonham starts in on drums at the 4:20 mark, all dancing couples should have broken apart and said their goodnights. Of course, we did not do that even though the music dictated otherwise. We danced in the same small circles, just a bit faster.
Dances at that age were already wrought with anxiety, and dancing eight minutes with anyone is a long time especially when you are deathly afraid of poking out of your corduroys.
Who you danced with for Stairway to Heaven made all the difference in the world at that time. That was the finale of the evening, and if a schoolmate agreed to dance with you for 8 freakin’ minutes it meant something special, until you went into school on Monday and the magical world of Zeppelin returned you to homeroom and an origami flower designed to let you know if your dance partner liked you or wanted to just be friends based upon the machinations of said origami. (Add the art of Japanese folding paper to the social media casualty list.)
Besides the song’s second-half plunge into stadium rock jam as anathema to romance on the dancefloor, the lyrics were equally troubling in creating mood:
There’s a feeling I get when I look to the West
And my spirit is crying for leaving
In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees
And the voices of those who stand looking.
Should we pull the fire alarm? Are the friends who didn’t get a last dance partner standing and looking and wanting to leave early to go get a booth and a slice of pizza at Bruno’s before it gets too crowded?
I, however, am not a musician. I am only a lyricist on one song for the Alternative/Folk Rock/Indie band Salt Hill and that is merely a co-writing credit, so I thought it best to reach out to musicians who might have a deeper perspective on the song’s place in our collective consciousness and the cultural import of Stairway to Heaven as slow song.
Jordan Medas played bass in the Virginia-based band Carbon Leaf before becoming a music teacher in Spotsylvania County for eight years. (Here is a YouTube video of the greatest Carbon Leaf song of all-time:
I asked Medas, now East Coast Soccer Chaplain Manager for Soccer Chaplains United, what his memories were of Stairway to Heaven and the dances of his adolescence.
“Sad to say, I think I only attended two dances in middle school and high school, including my own prom,” he said by email. “I was kind of that kid that thought he was “too cool” for school dances, only to find out I was not as cool as I thought. It’s funny, I remember Stairway to Heaven as the song all the kids played in the guitar store or they played when they were trying to show off for other kids, so yeah, I would definitely have found that an odd choice for a school slow dance.
“I wonder if DJs misinterpreted ‘heaven.’ I mean the song does point toward the subject of the song, and by extension the listener, the idea of heaven. Perhaps for a DJ in that era, the idea of heaven was a middle school or high school relationship and not taking it any deeper than that.”
Fredericksburg’s own brilliant singer and songwriter, Karen Jonas, agreed that in hindsight it was an odd selection for slow dancing. But apparently, like Medas and unlike me, she has not given it much thought in the years since school dances in Damascus, Maryland, where she grew up.
“I had never thought about it,” said Jonas. “But I guess nothing defines the confusion of slow-dancing high school love quite like the Mellotron parading as a pan flute choir.”
Jonas’ newest album, The Rise and Fall of American Kitsch, is available here and features a number of songs that would be much more conducive to slow dancing than Zeppelin.
(Note: Jonas was a recent guest on the New Dominion Podcast. Listen below)
Though Medas and Jonas were both very kind in entertaining my quest for meaning c. 1983, I was starting to think that maybe my inner turmoil was unique to me and not a broader reflection of societal concerns of what we, collectively, once slow-danced to.
In a moment of quiet despair, at a birthday party (so it was neither quiet nor was I despairing, but it sounds better), I mentioned the confounding import of Stairway to Heaven to Dave Kolar, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Mary Washington.
“I do remember you asking me about that song at the birthday party,” said Dr. Kolar. “And yes, I remember every dance in junior high and high school ending with that song and thought it was an odd selection by the DJ. However, I thought it was equally odd that you would bring that up at a birthday party with no preamble. You’ve obviously given this a lot of thought.”
I did not want Dr. Kolar to think that I was fixated on the slow dances of my youth and the role that Stairway to Heaven played, but I also wanted to make certain that it did not reveal a deeper subconscious truth as reflected in my extensive learning during Psychology I and II while at Mary Washington.
“Do you think it meant I had an Oedipal Complex?”
“Not unless your mother listened to Led Zep IV…a lot,” he said before hiding behind the excuse that he had to go teach a class which was not on Freud.
What Dr. Kolar was able to confirm was that the final four minutes of Stairway to Heaven had no place in a dance as a slow song and that it was a phenomenon that obviously plagued an entire nation, since he grew up and went to school in California. To quote the eloquence of Jimmy Page:
Ooh, it makes me wonder,
Ooh, makes me wonder
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