“Stairway Was Never That Good” — He Was Sitting at the Next Table D
April 9th, 2019. Fitzrovia, London. The Meridian Coffee House, Charlotte Street, 9:40 in the morning. The coffee house had been on this corner since 2011, which in Charlotte Street terms made it a relative newcomer. The street had been running cafes and restaurants and creative businesses since the 1800s and had the particular quality of places where the layers of occupation are still somehow present.
Where a Victorian dining room had become a Fitzrovia lunch spot had become a 1960s artist’s haunt had become the current configuration of a neighborhood that was mostly media. Partly academic and extensively caffeinated by 9 in the morning. The meridian had exposed brick and wooden tables and a chalkboard menu and excellent coffee, and the specific ambient sound of a place where people come to work on things that require thinking, which is to say a constant low murmur of conversation, and the intermittent sound of someone typing more aggressively than necessary. At a table by the window, two men with laptops, mid to late 20s. The specific energy of people in the creative adjacent industries who have made a professional identity from having strong opinions and have been rewarded enough for this to have stopped examining whether all of them are worth having.
Tom Elliot wrote a music criticism blog that had an audience of approximately 40,000 people who valued the clarity of his taste and the confidence of his assessments and a podcast with 70,000 listeners that had been profiled twice in publications Tom considered important. Dan Clark was the digital editor of an independent music publication that had in the past three years become a reference point.
the kind of outlet that people mentioned when they wanted to demonstrate. They were paying attention to what was current rather than what was canonical. Both of them were good at what they did. Both of them were having an argument about Stairway to Heaven, which was the kind of argument people in their position had regularly, often in places like this one, and which generally proceeded in the same direction.
At the table beside them, a girl with dark hair and a guitar case propped against the wall doing something on a MacBook that involved a lot of tabs and a half croissant. She was 17 years old. Her name was Nadia and she was in the second year of sixth form at a school in Islington.
And she had been at the meridian since 8:45 working on a music theory assignment that was due at 11:00 and that was going slowly because the chord analysis section required more time than she had budgeted. She had been listening to Tom and Dan’s conversation for 11 minutes without meaning to because the conversation had become at some point in the last quarter hour about something she cared about deeply and had recently been thinking about in ways that were still forming themselves into understanding.
At the table on the other side of Nadia, a man with a paperback book, a long dark coat, long silver white hair, reading glasses on the bridge of his nose. He had come in shortly after 9:30, ordered a flat white without looking at the menu, and sat down with his book in the specific manner of someone who has a settled relationship with the activity of sitting with a book in a coffee shop, which is to say, without adjustment, and without looking around.
He had been reading it or had appeared to be reading it since before the conversation at the window table had taken the direction it was now taking. He had not looked up when the argument began. He had been turning pages at the rate of someone who was genuinely reading. This channel exists for the table you don’t notice until the right moment.
Subscribe and turn on notifications before we go any further. The thing about Stairway, Tom was saying in the tone of someone offering a considered view is that it’s objectively overrated. Not bad, overrated. The mystique is entirely constructed. If you listen to it without the mythology, without knowing it was written by Led Zeppelin, without the context of the era, it’s a competent piece of music, nothing more.
Dan poured his coffee from the press. The guitar solo’s technically fine. It’s not transcendent. People call it the greatest rock guitar solo ever, and it’s not even the best solo on the album. He set the press down. The whole thing is a product of timing. If Stairway came out now as a debut single from a new band, it would get a Metacritic score in the mid70s, and people would say it showed promise.
Stairway was never that good, Tom said. He said it with the specific satisfaction of someone who has arrived at a position they find clarifying. It’s good. It’s not great. The reverence around it is nostalgia masquerading as analysis. Nadia looked at her screen. She looked at her hands on the keyboard.
She looked at the guitar case against the wall. She had been playing guitar for three years and had been in love with the acoustic introduction to Stairway to Heaven for two of those three years and had been learning it note by note in the careful and serious way she approached everything musical for the past 8 months.
She was not the kind of person who interrupted strangers. She was 17 and introverted in the specific way of people who have learned that their interior life is more vivid than their social one and who manage the gap between the two with care, not with anxiety exactly, but with a kind of studied economy, the economy of someone who has learned that not every thought needs to be said aloud, and that most of the time the world does not require their input.
She was also at this moment in the grip of something she did not have a name for, but that function like the feeling you get when you hear someone say something false about something that matters to you and cannot decide whether correcting them is worth the social cost. She spent approximately 30 seconds deciding. She decided it was.
Sorry, she said, I wasn’t trying to listen, but Stairway to Heaven isn’t overrated. It’s the acoustic section alone has a chord sequence that she looked at their expressions and recalibrated slightly. I know it’s a cliche to defend it, but if you actually look at the composition, the way the sections build and change character, it’s not.
It’s fine, Tom said in the voice of someone indicating that the conversation was being participated in by someone who had not been invited to join it. The composition is serviceable. The intro is nice, but the structure follows a formula that’s common to a lot of late60s and early 70s rock. What makes people feel like it’s more than that is the context they bring to it, not the music itself.
The chord sequence in the introduction, Dan said pleasantly, is primarily based on a minor and related substitutions. It’s not harmonically complex. The descending bass line is effective, but it’s not original. You can hear precursors in earlier folk and classical writing.
He said this with the fluency of someone who has decided that fluency is a form of authority. You’re defending your emotional response to it, which is fine. What we’re talking about is whether the music justifies the cultural position it occupies. Nadia looked at her hands. She was not experienced enough yet to know how to counter fluency with content, how to have the argument at the level the argument was being had rather than at the level of feeling, which was where she was being implicitly told to stay.
She was 17 years old, and the introduction to stairway had been the thing that made her understand that a guitar could do something a human voice couldn’t, and that what it could do was hold a feeling in the air for longer than a voice could hold it. and she did not yet have the technical language to say this as a counterargument rather than as a statement of personal experience.
She picked up her quasant and looked at it rather than at Tom and Dan. She was 17 years old and she knew when an argument had been closed before she had finished making her point, and she knew that continuing it from this position was not going to produce anything useful. She was done.
From the table on the other side, the man with the silver white hair set his book down on the table with the specific deliberateness of someone who is no longer reading. He looked at the two men at the window table. He looked at Nadia. Then he looked back at the window table. The descending bass line in the introduction, he said, is not borrowed from folk or classical precedents.
It’s a specific construction. the A minor to G major to F major movement with the chromatic inner voice. The movement from a to G sharp to G that appears in very few places before 1971. He said this at the same volume as the rest of the conversation, the volume of the room. The chord shapes are not common substitutions.
If you play them through at the correct voicings rather than reduced chord names, the harmonic content is considerably more complex than a genre label suggests. He picked up his coffee. The guitar solo, he continued, is played in a specific mode mixelyian, not standard pentatonic, that affects its character in ways that get lost when it’s described as technically fine.
The way it develops over 16 bars is not formulaic. The emotional quality you described as the product of context is in part the product of those specific technical decisions. The two things are not easily separated. He looked at Tom. He looked at Dan. You’re welcome to dislike it. He said that’s not what we’re talking about.
We’re talking about whether the reverence is justified by the music. I’d argue it is not because of nostalgia because the construction supports it. He picked up his book. The coffee house continued its low murmur. A person came through the door, shaking rain from a jacket, and ordered at the counter.
The chalkboard had been updated to include a daily special that involved cardamom. Tom looked at Dan. Dan looked at his laptop, then at the man with the book, then back at his laptop. The specific expression of people who have been countered on factual ground by someone who knows the material well enough to correct them without heat, using the vocabulary of the subject rather than the vocabulary of disagreement, and who has then returned to reading a book as though nothing significant has occurred. Okay, Dan said, some of those points are fair. The mixelyian thing, I hadn’t thought about that. He said it with the specific evenness of someone who is capable of absorbing a correction and deciding to accept it rather than argue it, which is a quality that is rarer than it should be in people who write criticism for a living. Tom looked at the man with the book. He looked at the
silver hair, the dark coat, the reading glasses, the large hands resting on the book’s cover. He was good at his job and the part of his job that was not having strong opinions was being able to read a room and he was reading this one and the room was suggesting that he had been having the argument with less information than he needed.
Are there moments when someone has defended something you love with such specific accuracy that you understood it better afterward? Tell me in the comments. I read everyone. Nadia was looking at the man with the silver white hair. She had been watching the last two minutes of the conversation with the expression of someone for whom something has just been demonstrated that they needed to see demonstrated.
She looked at the man. She looked at his book, which was turned toward her slightly, the title visible. She looked at his face. She looked at the reading glasses and the large hands and the long silver white hair. She looked at his hands. She had been playing guitar for three years.
She knew what guitarists hands looked like, not the hands of someone who played occasionally, the hands of someone for whom a guitar was the primary instrument of thought. She understood, not immediately, but over the 20 seconds during which he turned a page and settled back into his book, what she was sitting next to.
She did not say anything. She went back to her music theory assignment, but she stayed at the table for another 40 minutes, longer than she had intended, not because she was still working, but because the room felt different from how it had felt before. When the man left approximately 20 minutes later, he had gone back to his book after the exchange and read until his coffee was finished.
He stopped at her table. He did not say anything about the conversation or the two men at the window. He looked at her guitar case, “The way guitarists look at guitar cases, reading the shape of what’s inside.” “What are you working on?” he said. She told him about the theory assignment.
She told him about the guitar, which she had been playing for 3 years. She told him about the acoustic introduction she had been learning for 8 months, more slowly than she had expected, because the voicings kept not coming out the way they sounded on the record. Play it slowly, he said, slower than you think you need to.
The voicings matter more than the tempo at this stage. Don’t rush the chromatic inner voice in the third bar. Give it the time it’s asking for. He reached into his coat pocket and set a guitar pick on her table, dark, worn to an asymmetric thinness on one side. The shape of the pick affects the way you attack the bass strings.
It changes the notes character. Experiment with the angle. He put his coat on. Then he was gone into the Charlotte Street morning. Nadia looked at the pick. She looked at the door. She looked at Tom and Dan at the window table. They had seen the exchange and were now doing the arithmetic with the specific expression of people who have just understood the full dimensions of what happened in the last 40 minutes.
Not with embarrassment exactly, but with the particular quality of someone who has argued a position in front of a person who had the most legitimate possible claim to the counterposition and who has just realized this. Dan had his phone out. He was looking at something on the screen and then at the door through which the man had just left.
She put the pick in the zip pocket of her guitar case. She packed up her things. She went to her sixth form college and she played the introduction to Stairway to Heaven in the practice room at lunch. Slowly, the voicings correct. The chromatic inner voice in the third bar given the time it needed. It sounded different.
It sounded like what it was. Nadia is 22 now and has been studying music formally for 4 years. She plays guitar and composes. She teaches on the side at a Saturday program for young musicians in Islington. When her students discover Stairway to Heaven, and they always do, they always will, she plays it for them at the correct tempo with the voicings correct, and then she explains exactly what is happening in the third bar.
The pick is in the zip pocket of her current guitar case, where it has lived since April 2019. She plays with it sometimes. The asymmetric wear is different from the way her own picks wear, which is to say it is a record of someone else’s specific angle and pressure. A physical record of how someone else has spent 60 years approaching a string.
She keeps it for the same reason she keeps anything because some things are irreplaceable and deserve to be where you can find them. If this story found something in you, subscribe and turn on notifications. This channel exists for the next table. The one you don’t notice until the moment you need it.
What piece of music has been defended for you by someone who understood it better at exactly the moment you needed it? Tell me below. I read every single comment. Jimmy Page once said, “I believe that music is the most universal language. The acoustic introduction to Stairway to Heaven has been played in every country on earth by players who learned it before they could play anything else and by players who came to it after decades of playing everything else.
It has been inside the hands of people who will never be famous and people who will always be. That is not nostalgia. That is what it means to write something that lasts. See you in the next one.
