The Led Zeppelin ad-lib that Robert Plant will always regret: “He winced”

It is difficult now to remove the association between the lead singer and the chief lyricist. We have become so used to the two effortlessly combining that you can forget that during rock’s heyday, a lot of the singers fronting your favourite groups were more dedicated vocalists than lyricists. As such, your mileage on Robert Plant as a lyricist may vary.

To most, he’s the majestic Led Zeppelin frontman whose love of classic blues forms contrasts with his dedication to fantasy and JRR Tolkien in fascinating ways. There’s a vocal minority, however, that gets tripped up whenever Plant tries to overextend himself. As it happens, one of those people is Plant himself, who, like any self-respecting Brit, has routinely winced at the number of cringeworthy things he did and said, and even recorded, as part of one of the biggest bands on the planet.

It can be somewhat comforting that one of the most famous men in the rock world can still find himself intolerably embarrassing from time to time. Who hasn’t heard themselves back on a recording and wished they had never uttered a single word, or captured a glimpse of themselves dancing at a party and hoped that the world would end the next second?

One of Plant’s most notorious ad-libs, a dicey moment for any non-natural lyricist, came during the band’s 1976 concert film The Song Remains The Same. During the apex of ‘Stairway to Heaven’, just after Plant sings the line “And the forests will echo with laughter”, Plant calls out, “Does anybody remember laughter?” The concerts themselves took place in 1973, but fans truly got the brunt of Plant’s call once The Song Remains The Same hit movie screens three years later.

According to Mick Wall’s book When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin, the remastering and reissuing of the film in 2007 ground to a halt once Plant rewatched his call out in ‘Stairway to Heaven’. Even though it was an iconic part of the film, Plant wanted to excise it from the new cut of the film.

“Planning was meticulous, with all the remixing of the new DVD and CD of The Song Remains the Same and track sequencing and artwork for Mothership completed by May,” Wall writes. “Unlike the DVD and How the West Was Won package of 2003, where Page was in charge of every aspect of production, this time Plant took the helm. Kevin Shirley, the talented young South African producer who had worked with Jimmy on the DVD and How the West Was Won and now found himself working with Robert on the re-jigged The Song Remains the Same.”

“Jimmy wasn’t that bothered this time around, it seemed, but Robert was really insistent on being there with me,” Shirley stated. “When we came to that bit on ‘Stairway to Heaven’ when he ad-libs, ‘Does anyone remember laughter?’ he winced and asked if we could delete it. I said, ‘No, you can’t erase that, it’s what people remember, part of history!’ So he very reluctantly allowed me to keep it in. There were a couple of other smaller ad-libs that I did take out for him here and there—a few of the baby, baby, babys—just to keep him happy.”

Keeping Plant happy was probably what allowed the 2007 version of The Song Remains The Same to see the light of day. But Shirley was right: if the call-out was removed, it would have been immediately recognised by fans. Instead, Plant has to live with his in-the-moment decision to beg his audience to remember laughter.