Stairway to Heaven

In 2007, the three living members of Led Zeppelin reunited, along with deceased drummer John Bonham's son, Jason Bonham, to play a concert in London honoring Ahmet Ertegun.  Ertegun was the late founder and president of Atlantic Records, and signed Led Zeppelin to the label in 1968.   The demand for tickets was worldwide, and unprecedented.  A reported 20 million requests were made for 18,000 seats.  Less than 9,000 names were chosen by lottery to have a chance to purchase two tickets to attend the show in person.  Sadly, I was not one of them.

The demand for this show and intimate audience size required the show be recorded.  It was announced a couple weeks ago that the concert movie, "Celebration Day" would be released in theaters on October 17, 2012, followed by DVD, Blu-Ray and CD releases of the concert in November.   Zeppelin fans the world over have begun pre-ordering media and movie tickets in to satisfy our needs to see and hear Zeppelin. 

The other day, there was a press conference with the surviving members of the band, talking about the movie, the concert, Zeppelin in general.  During the press conference, they were asked about Stairway to Heaven.

Where do you stand now with regards to Stairway? Page and Plant had different opinions about it…

Plant: “Well, I struggle with some of the lyrics from particular periods of time. The musicality and the construction of it, you know, is peerless. But maybe I didn’t feel quite the same about the lyrics later on in life, as I got further down the road. Maybe I’m still trying to work out what I was talking about… every other f***** is!” 

So, if Led Zeppelin doesn't know what the song means yet today, how can I?   I know that in this song, like many others, it comes down to a particular couple of lines.

Yes, there are two paths you can go by, but in the long run,

There's still time to change the road you're on.

Two paths. There's that whole Robert Frost thing; two roads in the woods, took the one less traveled.  But, sometimes you find you picked the wrong one.  There's no harm in admitting fault, going back and trying the other road. 

I had gone pretty far down a road.  If the two tracks diverged from the fork, I was far away from the other track.  I needed a serious course correction. A lot of what I had done couldn't be undone, so just backing up and picking the other road didn't seem a viable course.  I needed a new road, and I had to make it.  It wasn't exactly simple.  But I had time. 

On Led Zeppelin's concert film and soundtrack, "The Song Remains The Same," the song "Stairway to Heaven" is preceded with Robert Plant saying "This is a song of hope."  I found hope in those two lines.