Stairway to Heaven: Length Matters

While I was still in college, I landed a professional radio job at a station in White Plains that played lots of Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Streisand, etc.  Wasn’t my preferred music, but hey, it was a paying gig.  It was also the overnight shift, and it’s there that I learned to treat any long song – even if it was a song I hated – as a friend.

“MacArthur Park” by Richard Harris?  Even for this radio station, it was an abysmal track – all that wailing about leaving a cake out in the rain.  But at 7 minutes and 30 seconds, “MacArthur Park” became a regular part of my rotation.  You gotta understand, seven and a half minutes in the middle of an overnight shift is an eternity: enough time for a bathroom break, to decide whether your next jolt of desperately-needed caffeine would come from the disgusting coffee or the lukewarm Coke, and still have time to change the reel-to-reel tape that was running on our Easy Listening sister station in the room next door. 

Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven” was not something I could play on that station, but if I could’ve, I would’ve.  Often.  Because it is a full 8 minutes long.  Man, you could power nap all through the recorders and fairies and hedgerows, and just wake up when Robert Plant started wailing away at the end.  No wonder WPLR in New Haven played the song every night –yes, every single night for many, many years – at midnight. 

Now, I’m not saying that “Stairway To Heaven” got airplay just because it gave the jocks in the studio a break.  People liked it.  At least the first few hundred times they heard it.  But in the 70s, radio made hits, and the deejays, who in those days were still allowed to pick their own music, really liked a song that made the hour go by just a bit faster.  So “Stairway” was the deejay’s friend.  As was “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” (8:30), or virtually anything else from Meat Loaf’s Bat Out Of Hell recording.  Late night deejays played the full version of Boston’s “Foreplay/Long Time” because it was 7:47, while their daytime counterparts would go skip the foreplay and go right to the song.  And if you heard someone trot out Iron Butterfly’s “Inna Gadda Da Vida,” well, that probably meant the deejay’s girlfriend was paying a visit.  (And at 17 minutes long, no one was skipping the foreplay.) 

Anyway, I think “Stairway” is not one of Zeppelin’s better songs.  It’s not even their best long song.  That title goes to “Kashmir,” a better tune, a more thoughtful and well-constructed song, and… a righteous 8:28 long!  

What do you think of Zep’s classic tune?  Seven minute of heaven or late-night filler? 

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