Led Zeppelin Refused To Release This 1971 Song As A Single — It Defined A Generation Anyway

It's eight minutes long. It takes almost a minute for the vocals to begin. It takes over four minutes for the drums to kick in. It's through-composed, meaning it's written in sequential, non-repeating fashion, not verse-chorus fashion. Nothing about Led Zeppelin's 1971 masterpiece, "Stairway to Heaven," screams single, but Atlantic Records still wanted it released as a single. Zeppelin refused.

This is the barebones backstory behind Zeppelin's odyssey to end all odysseys, "Stairway to Heaven." So much has been said about this song, so much musical worship lavished upon it, so many superlatives doled out, that it's practically impossible to conceive of rock history, or even 20th-century musical history, without it. No matter that some boomers are sick to death of "Stairway to Heaven" and would rather forget it, the song not only defined a generation, but proves that 1971 was classic rock's greatest year by far. And yet, Zeppelin never intended it to be a single. 

Zeppelin wanted "Stairway to Heaven" to remain couched within the entirety of their fourth, untitled studio album, commonly called "Led Zeppelin IV." They wanted the album to be an album, listened to on the whole, not a fragmented assemblage of pop ditties. They also didn't want the song shaved down to radio-friendly length. Thankfully, radio DJs loved "Stairway to Heaven" and played it anyway. Atlantic Records even followed suit by shipping 1972 promo versions to stations in the U.S. Thus, a legend was born and fostered.

As far back as 1975, Led Zeppelin guitarist and "Stairway to Heaven" composer, Jimmy Page, knew that the song was special; this is why the band didn't want it to be a single. As Page told Rolling Stone at the time, "It had everything there and showed the band at its best ... We were careful never to release it as a single. It was a milestone for us. Every musician wants to do something of lasting quality, something which will hold up for a long time and I guess we did it with 'Stairway.'"

Page's words are so true that "Stairway to Heaven" took off without any marketing effort from the band or their label. The song's extremely thoughtful structure, moving passages, and lyrics evocative of "the remote, pastoral Britain" (per Robert Plant on ABC News), dug its way into the souls of DJs who delivered it to the public. They did their job so well that one baby boomer on Reddit says the song was, " ... inescapable. If you were an adolescent at the time, [the song] was famous the way water or the sun or gravity is famous." Another testimonial from a college radio worker on The Straight Dope Message Board states that every DJ at the station played it in 1971 to wrap up their shows. "Stairway to Heaven" even helped convert Zeppelin naysayers to believers.

At present, "Stairway to Heaven" helped "Led Zeppelin IV" sell 37 million copies. According to ChartMasters, the album is the 10th-best-selling album of all time in terms of pure sales. That's all thanks to a song that Zeppelin wanted to stay unexposed, like a secret too precious to tell.