I have told this story many times. When I was a young kid, I was given a hand-me-down stack of 45 rpm records and a portable record player. I lived out in the country and I had no older siblings or cool friends or anything like that giving me advice about music. All I had was this stack of records.
It was a great stack of records, and it shaped my musical tastes for the rest of my life. It was all rock ’n’ roll and country from the 1950s and 1960s. Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Monkees, Johnny Cash, girl group hits, some surf instrumentals.
And there was a 1960 record by Neil Sedaka, called “Stairway to Heaven.” This song predated Led Zeppelin by many years, and was a rollicking late 1950s type of rock ’n’ roll number with sweet pop lyrics about the singer’s girl being a “heavenly angel,” so he builds a… Stairway to Heaven.
I played these records endlessly. I wore out their grooves. I knew every record inside and out and by heart. I never listened to the radio because I disliked current music and whatever was Top 40 at the time.
Several years later, I was thirteen years old and took my acoustic guitar to a local coffee shop in my hometown in Columbia, Missouri, for my first live performance ever. They had a Wednesday night open mic night, and I nervously walked up to the microphone and started playing my Buddy Holly, Johnny Cash and Elvis songs.
A few minutes in to my first-ever live performance, a heckler yelled at me: “PLAY STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN!”
There was a pause, as I had never been heckled before. But I didn’t fret! I KNEW HIS REQUEST!
I began playing Neil Sedaka’s “Stairway to Heaven” with the greatest joy and passion a thirteen-year-old could muster. I was killin’ it!! I was kicking some open-mic ass!
About halfway through my Neil Sedaka classic, I looked at the people in the audience. Everyone in the crowd had their mouths open, and when I finished the song, the audience was completely silent.
It was as if the rest of my life had been cast in stone at that very moment.
A few years later, hanging out with older high school kids, I finally heard Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.” What a terrible, nauseatingly pompous and excruciatingly long song. There weren’t even any baritone saxophone solos! I still don’t get it.
Today, Neil Sedaka passed away. I tip my hat to the king of Brill Building pop, rest in peace, good sir, and thanks for pointing my life in a wonderful and odd direction. May you find your own Stairway to Heaven, safe journeys to the other side.
