The Led Zeppelin song Robert Plant paid a radio station $10,000 to stop playing

There is nothing in the rock and roll rulebook to suggest you must love vppeverything you or your band ever produces. The competitive nature of the music business often leads people to believe that an artist thinks every single note they ever release is a worthy contender for their best work. The truth is, countless musicians have fallen in and out of love with their profession and the tracks they create within it on an almost daily basis. John Lennon bashed The Beatles, Kurt Cobain hated Nirvana’s biggest hit, and Robert Plant has a serious issue with perhaps Led Zeppelin’s most famous song.

Robert Plant’s relationship with ‘Stairway To Heaven’ is complicated. Although many people consider the track Led Zeppelin’s magnum opus, the song’s actual singer disagrees. Astonishingly, he even donated $10,000 to a radio station in a plea to stop them from playing the rock behemoth. It was a move that rubber-stamped his disdain for the mammoth rock hit.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find a rock lover who doesn’t have a special place in their heart for ‘Stairway’. After all, it’s eight minutes of undeniable pure songwriting brilliance, completed by a guitar solo so beloved it has been officially banned in guitar shops across the globe. Across the song, Led Zeppelin encapsulates everything that made them the dynamic group that successfully guided music to a new dimension.

However, in 2019, Plant spoke about how ‘Stairway’ is a track that he could no longer relate to, but he did admit that he could admire the song, even if only from afar. While sitting down with UCR as part of their ‘Nights’ radio show, Plant said: “The construction of the song, the actual musical construction, is very good. It’s one of those moments that really can stand without a vocal and, in fact, it will stand again without a vocal, I’m sure, because it’s a fine piece of music.

“Lyrically, now, I can’t relate to it, because it was so long ago. I would have no intention ever to write along those abstract lines any more.” Plant’s disparaging comments about ‘Stairway’ were met with surprise, but in 2002, he made a more significant revelation when he said that once he donated $10,000 to a radio station for it to stop playing the track.

The station in question was KBOO, which is a listener funded, non-profit radio channel in Portland. Plant was driving to a show in Lincoln City and stumbled upon the station, instantly falling in love with the weird blends of alternative music they were playing.

“KBOO had this amazing music,” the former Led Zeppelin singer told NPR in 2002. “It was kind of a mixture of sad outtakes of doo-wop and a very droll DJ, who sounded like somebody from Marin County in 1967. I thought, ‘This is great. I gotta pull over and listen to this.’”

“The guy came on saying they were looking for sponsorships,” Plant added. “You know, ‘Please send in $10’ (or $15 or whatever), and if people did that, KBOO would promise never to play ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ ” While the track has been given icon status over the years, that popularity has naturally encouraged detractors too, with Plant seemingly one of them, and also willing to put his money where his mouth was. “So I called him up and pledged my money. I was one of the KBOO sponsors,” he confessed.

While most singers’ egos would suffer if the station they were listening to begged listeners to pay them to stop playing their most famous song, Plant has never been wired like that.

If there’s one person who could quite happily never listen to ‘Stairway To Heaven’ again, it’s Robert Plant. Paying $10,000 to make sure it never got aired on the station is a step too far even in Plant’s playbook, you’d presume, but his love of supporting independent music ventures and his hatred for ‘Stairway’ aligned beautifully on this occasion.