The eight-minute acoustic-to-electric meditation on bustles and hedgerows, among other things, has become the 800-pound gorilla of the classic rock song repertoire.
More than any other, it’s the one song that evokes the phrase “album-oriented radio”, and it’s the one song that, at least according to Wayne’s World, guitar store owners have banned because every would-be Jimmy Page just has to have a crack at it.
It’s the great rock-and-roll albatross, the song nobody can stand and yet frequently tops the surveys of the greatest rock song ever recorded.
In the 1976 concert movie The Song Remains the Same, recorded over three gigs at Madison Square Garden, after the line “and the forests will echo with laughter….” Plant exuberantly engages in a bit of unrehearsed crowd work, crying, “Does anybody remember laughter?”
For anyone who has seen the movie, the phrase can function as an automatic killer laugh line when the conversation hits an unexpected lull or needs that extra bit of non-sequitur levity—it communicates that you know your rock and roll history but also that you can deflate a bit of rock and roll grandiosity. Even when the listener doesn’t get the exact reference, somehow Robert Plant or someone like him is evoked, in all of his 1970s bombasity, idealism and excess.
Apparently, Plant himself cringes every time he hears it.
It’s the paradox of Plant: a golden god in tight denim, worshipped for his mystique but forever haunted by a single goofy off-script moment. “Does anybody remember laughter?”—a phrase tossed to the crowd in a haze of stage sweat and myth-making—somehow outlived its context, mutating into a punchline, a meme, and a kind of sacred embarrassment. You can practically hear the bongwater gurgle in the background as it echoes across dorm rooms and midnight radio shows, both revered and ridiculed in equal measure. It’s as if the spirit of Spinal Tap possessed him mid-riff and refused to leave.
In Mick Wall’s When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin, the following story is told: “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 [2007]. 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 DVD and How the West Was Won and now found himself working with Robert on the re-jigged The Song Remains the Same, recalls how ‘Jimmy wasn’t that bothered this time around it seemed but Robert was really insistent on being there with me. 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.”
Thus, we see the high price of being a rock and roll icon—people will love and fondly remember even the stupid things you say…
