Everyone loves a campfire, especially if you are at Camp, sitting around the firing with friends. I was lucky enough to work at Camp Tadma in Connecticut for a couple of years when I was young – and boy did we have a blast. As a member of the waterfront staff, I spent the entire summer sleeping in a tent only 100 feet from the water. We taught swim lessons, supervised boating, and life-guarded free swims every day. It doesn't get much better than those days on Tadma Pond. During free swims, we would play a radio that hung off a nail on the lifeguard tower; back then, we were tuned to WCCC in Hartford. The station played what today we would call "classic rock," but back then, most of the music was no more than ten years old. It was 1976, and that year the summer's daytime soundtrack was often Steely Dan's The Royal Scam, an album I have written about multiple times in the past, and one of my very favorites even today.

Early evenings at Camp Tadma usually included a group gathering in the dining hall or around the Council fire, but by 10 pm, we were usually back at the waterfront camp, lighting our own campfire, kicking back, and waiting for the stroke of midnight. It was at 12 am on WCCC that they would play, without fail five nights a week, what has been called one of the greatest rock anthems in history—Stairway to Heaven. Rolling Stone called this song, "the rock anthem that all other songs are measured against." It was written by Led Zeppelin's guitarist Jimmy Page and vocalist Robert Plant in 1971 and was released on their unnamed fourth album, usually called Led Zeppelin Four, which most people consider to be their best work.

Stairway to Heaven runs eight minutes, unusually long for a popular rock tune, which explains why it was never released as a single. This song has paid a lot of bills for the band over the years—Led Zeppelin Four sales exceed 37 million copies. Even sheet music sales for Stairway to Heaven has surpassed the 1 million copies sold—everyone wants to play it. Twenty-five years after its release, the song was still being played thousands of times a year on the top classic rock stations. There are critics who said the song was "satanic in nature" when played backward, but an experimenter did just that, and he later remarked it still sounded like Stairway to Heaven, only in Urdu. In 1991, Esquire Magazine called the tune's lyrics "absolute nonsense." Finally, the song was included on the first Wayne's World Movie, where a sign at Wayne's favorite music shop proclaims to all of the budding Jimmy Pages, "No Stairway to Heaven." So, I guess it's a tune that you either love or hate. I suspect most love it.

When I do a search for the song on Spotify, the results are astonishing—there are many, many covers, along with an R&B tune with the same name. Zappa does a version that is a fun quasi-parody; Pat Boone butchers the tune with too many flutes and spoken words on his album, In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy; Yes keyboard-ist Rick Wakeman does a remarkable solo piano instrumental version; reggae Zeppelin cover band, Dread Zeppelin does a powerful dub version; and guitarist Stanley Jordan plays an ethereal interpretation only he could pull off. While these covers are all interesting in their own way, the original is always the best.

So, we're back at the campfire at the Camp Tadma waterfront, the fire is crackling, and the announcer on WCCC tells us it's 12 midnight, and the first notes of Page's double-necked Gibson breaks the silence. We were in Heaven. You can do it tonight—light a campfire in your fire pit after it gets dark, pull out a big Bluetooth speaker, call up Spotify, and throw on Led Zeppelin Four. At midnight, you know what song to play.

This month's playlist is a collection of Stairway to Heaven renditions. Most good, some not so (but intriguing nonetheless). Listen here https://tinyurl.com/yaew84y6

Steve Chase lives and listens to his music in Unison.