The song became successful by accident. [I] had 100 DJs swear to me that they only played the song because they needed a long break to go and smoke a cigarette. If it had been a minute shorter, you couldn’t have smoked a full cigarette. If it had been a minute longer, it would have been too long.
Charles R. Cross, Led Zeppelin’s biographer, on “Stairway to Heaven” [NYP]
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