Stairway, Denied
In 1971, English rock band Led Zeppelin released perhaps their best known song, Stairway to Heaven. The eight-minute, two-second hit is one that virtually everyone with even a passing knowledge of rock knows; it’s a staple of FM radio playlists, middle school dances, and “greatest song of all time” lists. It’s opening guitar riff is instantly recognizable, which is what makes the clip below very weird.
That’s from the 1992 movie “Wayne’s World.” If you’re not familiar with the movie, it’s based on a Saturday Night Live skit starring Mike Myers (in the clip above with Tia Carrere) as Wayne Campbell, a rock/metal fan who lives in his parents’ house. He doesn’t have much of a job — with his best friend, Garth Algar (played by Dana Carvey), he hosts a public-access TV show out of his parents’ basement about rock culture, but it’s mostly a lot of sophomoric jokes. The SNL sketch was very funny, so much so that it warranted a feature film and a sequel.
The joke in the clip above, though, isn’t funny — in fact, it doesn’t make any sense. The idea behind the joke is clear (but I’ll explain it anyway, just to be sure): guitar-playing wannabe rockstars would come into guitar stores and play Stairway to Heaven. And that got annoying for the people who worked there. So this particular story has a policy: you can’t play Stairway to Heaven.
Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever heard Stairway before knows, the four discordant notes that Wayne (who definitely has heard, and played, Stairway before) don’t sound anything like the opening riff to the song. The store clerk, therefore, should have never stopped Wayne, and the joke makes no sense.
What happened? $100,000.
The video above comes from the VHS release of the home video and TV release of the movie. The version in the original theatrical release is below, and you’ll notice that Wayne’s performance of the opening to Stairway to Heaven is perfect.
So why the change? It all came down to licensing. Movies can’t just us whatever music they want — the producers need to pay the music rights owners for the privilege. GQ explains what happened:
At some point after the U.S. release, Warner Music Group and Led Zeppelin refused the rights to even the first few notes of “Stairway” for broadcast, video, or foreign release, resulting in the hasty, patchy edit. “With ‘Stairway to Heaven’ we were told that we could only use two notes before we’d have to pay $100,000, so to sell that he’s gonna play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in two notes is pretty difficult,” said director Penelope Spheeris. “I don’t know this to be absolutely true, but somebody told me that in the first version of the movie we play too many notes. So they had to go back in and edit a note or two out.”
Or, change the riff entirely, as seen (heard?) in the top video, above.
But ultimately, Wayne won out. In 1968, a band called Spirit released an instrumental song called Taurus, which included a guitar riff very similar to the one at the beginning of Stairway. (You can listen to that here.) After the guitarist, Randy Wolfe, passed away, his estate sued Led Zeppelin for copyright infringement. While Zeppelin successfully defeated the lawsuit, there was enough ambiguity around the chords (which may actually date back to the 1600s) where the movie producers felt comfortable restoring the joke to its original glory. When the movie was released on Blu-ray in 2022, Wayne can be heard playing the all the right notes — until the store clerk steps in.
Bonus fact: Perhaps the most iconic part of Wayne’s World is the opening credits scene when Wayne, Garth, and their two (or three) friends rock out to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. (Watch that here, it’s great.) That helped the song do something that few songs ever do — it made the Billboard’s U.S. Hot 100 chart in three different decades. Forbes explains:
“Bohemian Rhapsody” first entered the Hot 100 in 1976, after being released as a single off the band’s 1975 album, A Night at the Opera. Despite its unconventional structure and exorbitant length for a single, the song peaked at No. 9 on the Hot 100 in 1976. “Bohemian Rhapsody” revisited the charts 16 years later, when it appeared in the iconic head-banging scene of the 1992 comedy Wayne’s World, starring Mike Myers and Dana Carvey. The film introduced “Bohemian Rhapsody” to a new generation and helped assert its status as a classic rock staple, and the song subsequently rose to a new peak of No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100.
And that’s not all. Forbes continues: “A recut of the music video featuring clips from Wayne’s World earned Queen their only MTV Video Music Award.” in this case, in the category “Best Video from a Movie.”
From the Archives: Okay, this is only kind of about Bruce Wayne, and that’s not even the right Wayne, but I don’t have anything in my archives about Wayne’s World.