In June 2016, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones appeared in court in Los Angeles to give evidence in a copyright trial that alleged Led Zeppelin copied the introduction of “Stairway To Heaven” from the song “Taurus” by Spirit.
That trial resulted in a legal victory for Led Zeppelin that was upheld by an appeals court in 2020.
While appearing in court in 2016, the surviving members of Led Zeppelin discussed the writing and recording of “Stairway To Heaven” and their careers. Much of their testimony, which is available through court transcripts filed by the court, remains unseen by fans.
LedZepNews previously analysed Page’s description during the trial of tapes of the writing of “Stairway To Heaven” that were played in court. Now, we’re sharing the other highlights we found from the hundreds of pages of courtroom transcripts.
We’ve slightly tidied up these quotes, removing verbatim sections where the band members misspeak or hesitate, to make them easier to read.
John Paul Jones recalls joining Led Zeppelin
“I was doing a lot of work, and probably too much work, and I think my wife could see the warning signs.”
“And she actually read that Jimmy Page was forming a group. He had left the Yardbirds and was forming a band, and she said, ‘Call him up.’ And so I did and I said, ‘Hi, Jim. Do you need a bass player?’ And he went, ‘Yeah.’”
Robert Plant defends Led Zeppelin reusing other bands’ music
“In the nest of rock ‘n’ roll and rhythm and blues, there’s always been cross-pollination without a doubt, yes. We wouldn’t have Little Richard, Larry Williams, The Beatles, all the people who’ve actually been involved with ‘Bony Maronie’ or ‘Long Tall Sally’ or, you know, ‘Short Fat Fannie’ and all that stuff. It was all moving across space.”
Jimmy Page’s massive record collection
“Just because of this trial, I’ve checked to see how many records I’ve got, and there’s a count as of yesterday and it’s 4,329 albums and 5,882 CDs. That’s a massive amount…”
Robert Plant describes Bron-Yr-Aur
“Bron-yr-Aur is a little cottage in Snowdonia. Snowdonia is in the northwestern part of — from the Irish Sea of the Welsh coast, inland. It’s the most mountainous part of northwest Wales.”
“And Bron-yr-Aur was a little cottage that belonged to some friends of my mom and dad, and when I was a kid, a little boy, I used to go with my parents there. And it was remarkable really, because everybody lives in little boxes, but there you have this house just balanced on the side of the little mountain, with no electricity, no facilities, but was a very homely place.”
“Through my childhood I went there a lot with my mom and dad, and then, basically, slowly I became adolescent and was allowed to go with the owner’s children, and on and on and on. And it’s still there now.”
Robert Plant remembers writing ‘Stairway To Heaven’
“I was in Headley Grange … in Surrey, I think it is, one evening, sitting with Jimmy Page. We were recording in this facility where you have a mobile truck which is modified, like a big horse truck, and inside it you got a kind of mobile recording studio. And out of the side of the truck you can take microphone lines, which go into the house, and you can position them in various places to get different kinds of sounds.”
“So it gives you the freedom and facility to not to be governed by time, as you would do in a normal studio here or in a town or in a city, and it means that you can work whenever you want to, however you want to, and on whatever you wish.”
“So sitting with Jimmy, we’re just sitting by the fire and ruminating and checking things out, was one thing, but we were recording and visiting lots of other bits and pieces randomly as we developed, you know, new stuff.”
“That particular evening, I sat with Jimmy by the fire, and he began playing. And I had this little couplet lyrically that, if you like, in tempo, fitted into what he was playing. So I just started developing that into two lines, then four lines, and then on, slowly, opening it up.”
“’There’s a lady who’s sure all that glitters is gold, and she’s buying a stairway to heaven. And when she gets there she knows that the stores are all closed; with a word she can get what she came for.’ Now, and on from there.”
“I think the way that the mood of the place, everything that fell from me, I was really trying to bring in that aspect of Welsh, the beauty and the remoteness of the pastoral Britain. And I’d visited it previously on albums and — like ‘Ramble On’ was a song that we played on Led Zeppelin II. And ‘That’s the Way,’ was a song which was coming from the same mind-set for me as a 22-year-old, 23-year-old kid.”
“So ‘Stairway,’ I wanted to try and bring in some of the natural, old, almost unspoken Celtic reference into a piece. So as the song developed, it became more and more evident that I could actually change and open up my contribution.”
“Meanwhile, the guys were working on stuff between themselves and opening up the song and its transition into something that was really flowering and that was quite a thing as we moved on through the song, to open it up and to turn around various parts of it and see it develop into something I couldn’t even imagine.”
“It did start rolling pretty fast, and as it rolled, it kind of buffered and it wasn’t completely complete, and some of the actual vocal pitch didn’t quite end up the way it has ended up.”
“I moved it around a bit, and I also sang out of tune a lot, because when you’re trying to get something right, you have to try to meld it round a bit. And then as the song develops, there are several different sections within it that require a different response, because the chords are different. So, yeah, it had its own tempo and own momentum, and … then it galloped.”
John Paul Jones explains the start of his career
When asked he first performed music publicly, Jones replied: “When I was 14 years old. I’m from a musical family.”
“I was performing with my father’s trio as a bass player and also I was playing organ in church and I was choir master, as well,” he added.
“Professionally, I was in smaller bands when I was 16. We were doing local dances and then also American Air Force bases often around the country in England,” he continued.
Jones said he joined a band when he was 17. “There was a fairly major band. We had three Top 10 instrumental hits and toured in England, nowhere else.”
“It was named after the two stars. They were Jet Harris and Tony Meehan, who were, in fact, the rhythm section for another band called The Shadows, which was a much bigger affair.”
“Tony Meehan, who was the drummer of that band, was also a record producer, and I played on his sessions. And I also became an arranger, a musical director for Andrew Oldham and various other people and then started just doing a lot of sessions.”
“I was musical director for Mickie Most,” Jones said. “That was probably the most productive time. That was arranging and playing for Herman’s Hermits, Donovan, Lulu. I did ‘To Sir With Love.’ Herman’s Hermit, I did ‘A Kind of Hush,’ ‘No Milk Today.’ Donovan, I did ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man,’ ‘Mellow Yellow,’ all those arrangements. I’m playing on them, too.”
Jimmy Page explains the original concept for ‘Stairway To Heaven’
“The original concept that I had was for a piece of music that would basically go through many moods and changes and basically be like a reveal as it was opening up, building towards … well, actually, it would start with the acoustic guitar, and then it would have the electric piano.”
“I knew it was going to be a song, even though I’m thinking about it as music, because Robert and I were working so in sync with musical compositions in that time. So basically it was going to be something which opened up, and as I said, there’s going to be the acoustic guitar, the electric piano, and then there would be electric 12 strings that would come on underneath, blaring underneath the verses.”
“So basically the thing is layering with extra instruments, and then it would go through eventually to something that I always nicknamed the fanfare, which I think we’ve heard before, that term, in the court, and that would lead into the solo. All the time this whole thing is accelerating and getting more intense, it’s getting more intense, and then after the solo, then it would come to the sort of grand finale, the climax of the whole piece.”
“And, as I say, the idea of it was to basically start off with something which was more whimsical, if you like, but ending up with this huge sort of roll at the end, and on the journey through it, the drums would come in separately, and the bass, and et cetera, et cetera, electric 12 strings.”
Why the Sunset Sound mixes weren’t used for Led Zeppelin’s fourth album
Jimmy Page told the court that the only Sunset Sound mix released on Led Zeppelin’s fourth album was “When The Levee Breaks”.
“When Andy and I brought the mixes back to London … the sound system in Sunset Sound was very, very colourful, the speakers, and when we played them back in the little, well, it’s like a listening room at Olympic Studios, it sounded very flat and just very mid range.”
“They didn’t have the complete dynamics of everything that we had put into it, what we could hear. And at that particular point of time, there had been stories about tapes getting demagnetized, and we thought maybe something had happened to the tapes in the transfer.”
“Now, the tapes are these multitracks, and then you mix down to a two-track quarter inch. And this is what we’re referring to. In fact, all of the tapes could have had … something might have happened to them. But in actual fact, we sort of went about remixing it anyway, because some of the mixes weren’t quite as up-to-speed.”
“It was all done in a short space of time over here in L.A., and it was one of those things, well, let’s redo it, because, A, it sounded strange over there. But what actually happened was, then we remixed everything, and I couldn’t equal the mix that was in my mind from the ‘When the Levee Breaks.’ And in actual fact, we sort of opened up the EQ on it, which is the treble and the bass expanding, and it was there, and we hadn’t topped what we’d done at Sunset Sound, so we used it. But actual fact, the mix of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in England was superior to the Sunset. It was different, but, you know, it worked for the time.”
How Jimmy Page realised the song ‘Taurus’ by Spirit sounds similar to ‘Stairway To Heaven’
“It was after the internet comparisons came up, which is a few years ago. My son-in-law brought it to my attention that there was a comparison of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and a Spirit song, and I said that I’d like to hear it.”
“I don’t do the internet or the computer, so he played it to me. And initially, what happened was that there was some music there which I’ve never heard before, like an orchestra, and I said, ‘Well, what is this?’ And then it goes into the sort of rundown on acoustic guitar. And he said, ‘This is the Spirit song.’”
“So I knew that I had never heard it before. But what I did do, within a week of that, I went to the location where all my records are and I thought, you know, ‘I’ll have a look,’ because he — well, basically, ‘I’m going to have a look and see what Spirit records I’ve got.’ And what happens is — I know that in my mind that there were two records that I had, which is the second album and the third album, and then it turns out that I’ve got the Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus and even a Spirit live album, which is like a double album. I mean, I have no recollection of that whatsoever. But there is this album, the first album. I don’t know how it got there or anything.
“My son-in-law brought it to my attention. I don’t do the internet, so I’m not like anybody else in here, because most people go on the internet and they see what’s trending and all this sort of stuff. I don’t do that, so he brought it to my attention.”
more great info on the creation of stairway with all this new information adds to another chapter in the led zeppelin story on another note what i wouldnt give to have a nose at jimmy pages record collection