Led Zeppelin’s road through hell over 'Stairway to Heaven'

A US court last week reinstated a ruling that said British rockers Led Zeppelin didn’t steal part of their legendary song ‘Stairway to Heaven’ from another band. However, it was far from the first time the 1971 classic has been the subject of a dispute. Here are some occasions when Led Zeppelin faced hell because of ‘Stairway to Heaven’.

Plagiarism: Two years before Zeppelin released ‘Stairway to Heaven’, singer-guitarist Randy Wolfe and his band Spirit came out with the song ‘Taurus’. Wolfe, also known as Randy California, died in 1997, but a trustee for his songs has argued that Stairway’s signature riff infringes on Spirit’s copyright. However, a jury decided went with Zeppelin’s lawyers, who argued that what little the two songs had in common — a chord progression and a descending chromatic scale — were musical elements too basic to be protected by copyright.

Boring: Today, it may seem far-fetched to think that a song that’s widely considered the greatest rock song of all time was initially thought to be boring. But when they played it for the first time, the crowd was unimpressed. Bassist John Paul Jones recalls it thus: “They were all bored to tears waiting to hear something they knew.” Not just the crowd, even members of the band weren’t too pleased. Led Zeppelin’s frontman Robert Plant himself said, “I don’t consider there was anything particularly special about it.”


Backmasking: Backmasking is a recording technique whereby a sound or message is recorded backward into a track. While nobody would notice anything amiss when the track is played normally, playing it backward would reveal these hidden messages. It was said that Zeppelin had Satanic messages hidden into this track. But while nothing was conclusively proven, Plant denied it all: “Who would have ever thought of doing that? You’ve got to have a lot of time on your hands to even consider that.”