Mike Keneally : Someone posted a video from Vienna in 1988 of us playing it. And someone posted some sound check footage of us from Philadelphia too. That blew my mind and felt like a time machine.
The story of that one was: Frank had decided during rehearsals that he wanted to play Stairway To Heaven. He asked, ‘OK…how does it go?’ He was aware of it but hadn’t heard it. Robert, Scott, Chad and I performed the best Stairway To Heaven we could so Frank could hear the song. He was like… ‘those changes during the guitar solo are really boring. A minor, G, F.’ He tried soloing over it. The thing of one minor down to flat 7 to flat 6 was like a harmonic prison. Anytime he was trying to get something going over it, it was not an inspiring progression for him. He kept trying to do solos. I knew the solo, and would play it at rehearsal when Frank wasn’t there. At one of the rehearsals, alto saxophonist, Paul Carman came over and asked me to show him the solo as he wanted to play it together with me. What a great idea! I showed him. That night, when Frank came to rehearsal, he started to improvise a solo over the solo section but Paul and I blasted over him with the solo in unison as a surprise for Frank. He didn’t know we were going to do it. Frank stopped soloing, turned around and looked at us, and he just stands there and smiles and watches us do the whole thing. He halted the band at the next section where the vocals come back in, and said, ‘OK…show it to the rest of horn section.’ We spent the next hour and half going through the solo so the rest of the horn section could write their own charts of the music. Frank said we’d play it like that. It was a remarkable moment.
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