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From : vzqk50
Added: Oct 19, 2009
From Wikipedia: The recording of "Stairway to Heaven" started in December 1970 at Island Records' new Basing Street Studios in London. The song was completed by the addition of lyrics by Plant during the sessions for Led Zeppelin IV at Headley Grange, Hampshire, in 1971. Page then returned to Island Studios to record his guitar solo. The song originated in 1970 when Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were spending time at Bron-Yr-Aur, a remote cottage in Wales, following Led Zeppelin's fifth American concert tour. According to Page, the instrumentals were written by him "over a long period, the first part coming at Bron-Yr-Aur one night". Page always kept a cassette recorder around, and the idea for "Stairway" came together from bits of taped music. Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones explained that, following the song's genesis at Bron-Yr-Aur, it was presented to him: [Page and Plant would] come back from the Welsh mountains with the guitar intro and verse. I literally heard it in front of a roaring fire in a country manor house! I picked up a bass recorder and played a run-down riff which gave us an intro, then I moved into a piano for the next section, dubbing on the guitars. "I do have the original tape that was running at the time we ran down "Stairway To Heaven" completely with the band. I'd worked it all out already the night before with John Paul Jones, written down the changes and things. All this time we were all living in a house and keeping pretty regular hours together, so the next day we started running it down. There was only one place where there was a slight rerun. For some unknown reason Bonzo couldn't get the timing right on the twelve-string part before the solo. Other than that it flowed very quickly." The song's opening guitar arpeggios are strikingly similar to the guitar line from the instrumental track "Taurus" by the American band Spirit, for whom Led Zeppelin toured as support act in 1968. The first attempts at lyrics, written by Led Zeppelin vocalist Robert Plant next to an evening log fire at Headley Grange, were partly spontaneously improvised and Page claimed, "a huge percentage of the lyrics were written there and then". Jimmy Page was strumming the chords and Robert Plant had a pencil and paper. Plant later said that suddenly, "My hand was writing out the words, 'There's a lady is sure [sic], all that glitters is gold, and she's buying a stairway to heaven'. I just sat there and looked at them and almost leapt out of my seat." Plant's own explanation of the lyrics was that it "was some cynical aside about a woman getting everything she wanted all the time without giving back any thought or consideration. The first line begins with that cynical sweep of two hand ... and it softened up after that." The lyrics of the song reflected Plant's current reading. The singer had been poring through the works of the British antiquarian Lewis Spence, and later cited Spence's Magic Arts in Celtic Britain as one of the sources for the lyrics to the song. In November 1970, Page dropped a hint of the new song's existence to a music journalist in London: It's an idea for a really long track.... You know how "Dazed and Confused" and songs like that were broken into sections? Well, we want to try something new with the organ and acoustic guitar building up and building up, and then the electric part starts.... It might be a fifteen-minute track. The complete studio recording was released on Led Zeppelin IV in November 1971. The band's recording label, Atlantic Records was keen to issue this track as a single, but the band's manager Peter Grant refused requests to do so in both 1972 and 1973. The upshot of that decision was that record buyers began to invest in the fourth album as if it were a single. A handful of rare original seven inch promos were pressed at the time, accompanied by a humorous in-house memo (Atlantic LZ3), which are now extremely sought-after collectors items. [edit] Music The song consists of several distinct sections, beginning with a quiet introduction on a finger picked 6 string guitar and three recorders[12] (ending at 2:15) and gradually moving into a slow electric middle section (2:16-5:33), before the faster hard rock final section (5:34 to the end). Page stated that the song "speeds up like an adrenaline flow". Written in the key of A minor, the song opens with an arpeggiated, finger-picked guitar chord progression with a chromatic descending bassline A-G#-G-F#-F. John Paul Jones contributed overdubbed wooden bass recorders in the opening section (he used a Mellotron and, later, a Yamaha CP70B Grand Piano and Yamaha GX1 to synthesize this arrangement in live performances) and a Hohner Electra-Piano electric piano in the middle section.
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