In March 1975, while on a tour of the United States, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page was asked in an interview with Cameron Crowe for Rolling Stone, about the importance of the band’s signature song, “Stairway To Heaven.” Page responded to Crowe, stating:
“To me, I thought ‘Stairway’ crystallized the essence of the band. It had everything there and showed the band at its best…as a band, as a unit. Not talking about solos or anything, it had everything there. 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.’ [Pete] Townshend probably thought that he got it with [The Who’s rock opera] Tommy. I don’t know whether I have the ability to come up with more. I have to do a lot of hard work before I can get anywhere near those stages of consistent, total brilliance.
“I don’t think there are too many people who are capable of it. Maybe one. Joni Mitchell. That’s the music that I play at home all the time, Joni Mitchell. Court and Spark I love because I’d always hoped that she’d work with a band. But the main thing with Joni is that she’s able to look at something that’s happened to her, draw back and crystalize the whole situation, then write about it. She brings tears to my eyes, what more can I say? It’s bloody eerie.
“I can relate so much to what she says. ‘Now old friends are acting strange/They shake their heads/They say I’ve changed.’
“I’d like to know how many of the original friends any well-known musician has got. You’d be surprised. They think – particularly that thing of change – they all assume that you’ve changed. For the worse. There are very few people I can call real, close friends. They’re very, very precious to me.”
“Stairway To Heaven” was the centerpiece of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album, released in 1971. The untitled LP known as Led Zeppelin IV or ZoSo contains eight brilliant songs that became essential to the band’s influential catalog.
Among the eight tracks on Led Zeppelin IV is the tenderly acoustic “Going To California,” an original song co-written by Page and frontman Robert Plant. Page played six and twelve-string acoustic guitars, along with John Paul Jones on mandolin and Plant on vocals during the January 1971 recording session at Headley Grange in Headley, Hampshire, England.
Originally believed to have been titled “Guide To California” with lyrics about earthquakes, when Page, producer Andy Johns and manager Peter Grant went to Los Angeles in February 1971 to mix Led Zeppelin IV they coincidentally experienced an earthquake.
Authors Jean Michel Guesdon and Philippe Margotin detailed the making of “Going To California” in their book, Led Zeppelin All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track:
“The music for ‘Going to California’ originated during the sessions at Headley Grange, in a stroke of inspiration on Jimmy Page’s part. ‘You didn’t have anything like a snooker table or anything like that,’ [Page said]. ‘No recreational pursuits at all. It was really good for discipline and getting on with the job. I suppose that’s why a lot of these [songs] came at Headley Grange. For instance, ‘Going To California’ and ‘Battle Of Evermore’ came out.’
“The four members of Led Zeppelin had been continuing their journey, which led them with this song to the shores of the Pacific. Just as Page’s laid-back music is reminiscent of Californian folk rock, Plant’s lyrics extol the West Coast spirit: flower power and the counterculture and creative excitement that were at their zenith in the sixties. It is a song dedicated to ‘the days when things were really nice and simple, and everything was far out all the time,’ to borrow words addressed to the crowd by Robert Plant at one of two concerts given by the band in Berkeley, California, in September 1971.
“Many years later, in 2002, Plant would provide a little more detail, telling Spin magazine that the song was, ‘Me reflecting on the first years of the group, when I was only about… 20, and was struggling to find myself in the midst of all the craziness of California and the band and the groupies.’
“The line ‘The mountains and the canyons start to tremble and shake, the children of the sun begin to awake’ alludes in all likelihood to the artistic community of Laurel Canyon, embodied in late sixties by Joni Mitchell, David Crosby, Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, Jackson Browne, and Jim Morrison.
“The first-person narrator has taken the decision to make a new start and to abandon ‘a woman unkind.’ The line ‘Someone told me there’s a girl out there with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair’ evokes Joni Mitchell, who, since leaving her native Canada, had occupied a place on the Californian avant-garde musical scene both as a musician and as a symbol of the counterculture.
“This reference in the form of a tribute is corroborated by the beginning of the fourth and last verse: ‘To find a queen without a king, they say she plays guitar, cries, and sings>’ is surely an allusion to ‘I Had A King,’ the first song on Mitchell’s debut album (Song To A Seagull, 1968).
“Both Plant and, above all, Page had fallen under the spell of the “lady of the canyon” at this time.
In a subsequent May 1975 Rolling Stone article written by Crowe, it was reported that during Led Zeppelin’s U.S. tour, Page met Joni Mitchell (who today celebrates her 80th birthday) in person for the first time at the Los Angeles restaurant The Greenhouse. A purportedly shy Page was reluctant to bother his “long-time idol” Mitchell, but eventually made an introduction, and “they enjoyed some small talk together.”
“When you’re in love with Joni Mitchell, you’ve got to write about it every now and again,” Plant purportedly once stated.
During live performances of “Going To California,” Plant would often follow the verse “To find a queen without a king, they say she plays guitar, cries, and sings” by ad-libbing a shout of “Joni!” One such example of that shout-out can be heard on a recording from 1972 that was included on Led Zeppelin’s live album, How the West Was Won. Listen to that version below:
