buying a stairway to heaven

Led Zeppelin. Dolly Parton. What do the two have in common? Well, they both produce music. The number of letters in their names are the same. Led Zeppelin wrote "Stairway to Heaven" and Dolly Parton covered it.

This is where things go awry. Led Zeppelin, the "definitive heavy metal band," imbued the song with more metaphors than perhaps any other popular rock song. This is why it continues to be the number one song on countless radio station countdowns across the country. One of these metaphors happens to be about a rock. A rock that does not roll. This brings to mind the genre itself: "Rock and roll."

Perhaps Dolly Parton missed the point. For whatever reason she decided to change the meaning of the song into something more literal. Dolly's version includes extra verses such as this:

You can't buy it, you can't borrow,
You've got to walk it straight and narrow.
Stairway to heaven, stairway to heaven.
Stairway to heaven.

And this:

Oh, the great almighty dollar leaves you lonely, lost and hollow.
You can't fool yourself forever, you gotta work to get to heaven.
Stairway to heaven.
If we listen and hold fast,
To every question that we asked,
The truth will come to us at last.
And she's buying a stairway to heaven.

These added explanatory verses take from the mystery of the original by revealing what Dolly believes the song is supposed to be about: literally buying a stairway to heaven. Furthermore, you can't get there if you don't walk the stairway straight and/or narrow. This is a little too literal for me.

She claims she got permission for these changes, and part of me wants to believe her. I liked Dolly's version until I hit the ~5:20 mark and heard the one-word change that ruined it for me.

"To be a rock and not to roll" has been changed to "to be a rock and not a roll". Seriously. Come on now. What is the point of that change? Was it just ignorance? If so, how is it possible to be that ignorant? The lyrics are in the liner notes to the original Led Zeppelin compact disc. There are 1,980 pages, according to google, that have the right lyrics. There are 27 pages that have the other version. Most of those are lyrics to Dolly Parton's version of the song, so subtract those and you come up with perhaps 5-10 pages that have the wrong word in a transcription of Led Zeppelin's version of the song.

This leads me to believe that either Dolly knew that it was wrong and made a concious decision to change it, or merely made a mistake and sang the wrong word. Perhaps she was hungry. Perhaps she saw a roll in the corner of her eye in the recording studio that day. But to juxtapose a rock and a roll.. It is beyond me.

I don't dislike Dolly Parton. I think she's talented. Up until five minutes and twenty seconds into the song her version is great. But after hearing that one sentence, my reality shifts and I am struck dumb for a few minutes each time I hear it.

Please, Dolly. Tell me why. WHY. OH GOD, WHY.

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"Dolly is dead to me. :P" - Zin