    
The Soulful Mr T
Citizen
Username: Howardt
Post Number: 2299
Registered: 11-2004
| | Posted on Tuesday, August 1, 2006 - 8:20 am: | 
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Overcrowded Stairway to Heaven
Ian Gittins, Friday July 28, 2006, The Guardian
Another week, another cover of Stairway to Heaven. Cult Mexican duo Rodrigo y Gabriela's version of the classic Led Zeppelin track sees the hoary bluster of the original transformed into a delicate, flamenco-hued jazz instrumental. The musical dexterity is laudable - but the subject matter is hardly original. More than 100 artists have covered the portentous Stairway since Robert Plant and Jimmy Page penned it in 1970, including stars of the calibre of Frank Zappa, Dolly Parton and, famously, Rolf Harris. Rodrigo, however, had a more esoteric inspiration. "I saw jazz guitarist Stan Jordan play it in a very distinctive tapping style, so I decided to cover it," he says. "It is a very spiritual song. To be honest, I don't really understand the words."
The perennial fixation with Stairway to Heaven is baffling, written as it was at that peculiar early 1970s point when prog and hard rock bands sought to express profound and eternal truths via widdly guitar solos, head-banging and epic lyrical doggerel. Even 35 years on, Plant's cryptic fable of songbirds, pipers and spring-cleaning May Queens bustling in hedgerows remains gloriously impenetrable. Naturally, such pseudo-mystical gale-force gibberish has not diminished the song's popularity. Stairway to Heaven regularly tops radio station polls to find the greatest rock song ever, despite having never been released as a single. It's also the acid test of every bedroom guitar virtuoso, with over 1.2m copies of its sheet music sold worldwide to date.
Rodrigo talks of approaching Stairway with "respectful enjoyment", but previous covers have ranged from overawed adulation to subversive mockery. 1980s LA glam rockers Great White, who accidentally burned down a Rhode Island club with their pyrotechnic display in 2003, killing 100 people, were previously best known for their note-perfect but witless Xerox of the tune. Frank Zappa subjected Stairway to a characteristically flippant reggae reading in his live set, as did one-joke Zep tribute band Dread Zeppelin. Dolly Parton adopted a more earnest approach, replacing some of the song's more convoluted mysticism with Christian homilies on her country cover. German pop svengali Frank Farian brought us Boney M and Milli Vanilli, and in 1985 assembled a supergroup, The Far Corporation (if a supergroup can be said to contain three members of Toto and Jeff Beck's drummer), which took Stairway into the UK Top 10. Eight years later, Rolf Harris's wobbleboard kitsch repeated the feat. Stairway to Heaven's utter lack of irony renders it vulnerable to parody, and Christian crooner Pat Boone milked it on his 1997 album In a Metal Mood (which also spawned the lounge take on Black Sabbath's Crazy Train that doubles as the theme to The Osbournes). Aptly-named US AOR star Richard Cheese has performed a similar evisceration.
Tiny Tim, Elkie Brooks, US soft rockers Heart and the London Symphony Orchestra have also ascended the Stairway, rendering it risible, sentimental, overwrought and, well, symphonic, respectively. American singer Jano launched a baroque techno assault on the song in 2002, surprisingly picking up a Native American Music award (Nammy) for her efforts.
The reliably gnomic Plant says little about these various tributes, but has let it be known that his favourite Stairway homage is a 1970s novelty hit by San Francisco band Little Roger and the Goosebumps, which mixed the track with the theme from cult comedy show Gilligan's Island.
Rogue pockets of the internet boast a Stairway "cover" by Jimi Hendrix, but this claim is arguably weakened by the fact that Hendrix died weeks before the song was written. So, having tackled this venerable rock behemoth, what next for Rodrigo y Gabriela? Bat Out of Hell? Bohemian Rhapsody?
"Ah, no," says Rodrigo, with a chuckle of distaste. "If you are to find respectful enjoyment, then the song has to be - how do you say? Worth it."
Stairway to Heaven is out Mon 31 on Rubyworks
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