You Know, Sometimes Words Do Have Two Meanings

Album: Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin IV (Zoso), 1971

Best Track: "Going to California"

Lasting Memory: Mrs. Hite, my freshman high school English teacher assigned a parody for homework one time. Everyone in the class had a week to rework a recognizable song, poem or passage from literature into a comedic send-up of the original work or something in popular culture.

I can't remember what any of my classmates parodied, but I'm sure all their attempts at humor were subpar in terms of both effort and effect.

My parody, "Escalator to Men's Wear," -- a word-for-word rewrite of "Stairway to Heaven" -- killed. Or maybe it sucked. I'm sure it was better than this, at any rate. (Want to kill a few hours and your very soul at the same time? Google "Stairway to Heaven parody" and click away.)

The point of my anecdote is that at the age of 15, I was already familiar enough with "Stairway" to reproduce every word word from memory and inured enough to its epicness that I believed I could muck around with it. Overfamiliarity and jadedness are not the appropriate responses to great works of art, and for as much as people have been trying to take it down a peg or three over the past three decades, "Stairway to Heaven" is a great work of art.

Commercial radio being what it is, though, programmers have to play the song until people get tired of hearing it. Before people get tired of hearing it, they stop actually listening. The song appears daily, like the mail, and it's just another part of what happens. That's a shame, but isn't so much of life?

Looked at another, but no more positive, way, it could be claimed that since wistfulness and regret are what "Stairway" is all about, the karmic balance has been struck.

What troubles me more than people not actually hearing "Stairway" anymore is how some people only want to hear "stairway" and nothing else. Does the song need to be played everyday? Does Classic Rock RNR 92 need to have the 5 o'clock "Get the Led Out" block every weekday? Is there anything sadder than a 60-year-old guy in the mall wearing a Zoso t-shirt?

You know it's been a long time since he rock 'n' rolled or did any hopping in the Misty Mountains. His every movement and expression betrays the fact that the black dog of depression hangs over him and that not even going to California could keep his levee of normality from breaking.

But since Led Zeppelin will be with us for as long we're here, we have to fight the battle evermore to pick up the two, three, or four sticks of our remaining original awe and enjoyment of what Led Zeppelin produced on its fourth studio album without becoming the sad caricature of the aging fan.

Good luck.

Up Next: Led Zeppelin, The Song Remains the Same, 1976

P.S. You see what I did with those last two paragraphs, working all the song titles in? Clever, that is. I probably got an "A" on Mrs. Hite's parody assignment.