Stairway to Heaven

Continuing my theme of writing about 40-year-old music, this quarter I'll be talking about Led Zepplin's "Stairway to Heaven." It's not my favorite song, and it hasn't been on my radar for too long, but it's pretty good. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it's "pretty okay." Sorry to all you hardcore Zepplin fans out there.
It has been called the most famous rock song ever, although I'm not sure I believe that. Surely there are some Beatles tunes that are more famous? They were kind of well known.
"Stairway to Heaven," has a slightly creepy, very eerie tune and lyrics which at least sound meaningful, which is the main thing after all.
Because of Rock 'n' Roll's one-time stigma of rebelliousness and generally immoral shenanigans, "Stairway to Heaven" has been (and still is in some quarters) accused of having demonic influences. In particular, there have been (slanderous!) allegations that if one plays the song backwards satanic messages can be heard.
I am not particularly interested in the occult--it seems silly and possibly psychologically harmful if false and definitely harmful if true, so what's the point? But I really wanted to know if there was any truth in it, and anyway it sounded amusing to listen to a song backwards. I decided to investigate.
So I mentioned it to a friend. A friend I knew had recording-manipulation software. He promptly took his "Stairway to Heaven" and loaded it into the program. We listened to it forwards and then he flipped it around and we listened to it backwards.
The result was interesting. It turns out that songs are generally listened to front to back for a good reason, vis, that they sound really odd the other way. Backwards Robert Plant is an interesting sound. It still sounded like music, which I suppose makes sense: notes are essentially the same forwards and backwards. But it sounds like really, really weird music. This was no doubt partly caused by the fact that backwards words are gibberish, but there was other stuff also. My friend, for instance, recalls that the sounds started quiet and 'faded' into loudness. One could definitely see how this could be played in an evil temple deep underground, the odd resonance and sinister harmonies being reflected in the flickering of the flaming skull lamps. I must admit that I thought it sounded
But you're all wanting to know whether there was real Satan stuff, not just atmosphere. Well, there was one part where we could kinda hear the words, "My sweet Satan," but 'Satan' was fairly indistinct and you  really had to want to hear 'sweet'. There was a 'j' sound which didn't belong there at all. That was it. There was nothing else in the song at all.
If one did want to encode subliminal messages into a song, one could do a better job than this.
It was a fun investigation all around, made better by the fact the I now realize my music library could be twice as big as it currently is if I just also listened to all of the songs backwards.
That's my Christmas (or other winter-centric holiday of your choice) present to you all. Happy Holidays.