Buying a Stairway to Heaven
If everything good happened fifty years ago, then everything bad took us back a step twenty years ago. Fifty years ago, when I was but a pup heading to start college at Cornell, I would have gotten a D on my Rock n’ Roll report card. I was liking things like Elton John and Bread with some Jim Croce and Cat Stevens thrown in to balance the rough and tumble with the ethereal. I’m not sure any of that even qualifies as Rock n’ Roll. In 1974 the Righteous Brothers gave us If There’s a Rock and Roll Heaven and claimed that heaven to be populated by Jimmy, Janice, Jim Croce, Otis, and Bobby Darin (really, Mack the Knife?). I think the Righteous Brothers were not so Rock and Roll Righteous and only got two out of five of their heavenly citizens right. Jim, Otis and Bobby may have made it to heaven but they were definitely on a different floor from Hendrix and Joplin. I’m sure this commentary will cause some lively debate, but the thing that no one would debate is whether Led Zeppelin would be at the top of the Rock and Roll Heaven list when they head in that direction.
It suddenly occurred to me that there was a perfect and authoritative source for such musings, and that would be the inductee lists by year for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Sure enough, all three of my denigrated musicians above (Jim, Otis and Bobby) made it in before Jimmy and Janis, and yes, even before Led Zeppelin, who only made it in 1996 versus being in the category of, say, Otis, who was in the Class of ‘89. So much for my opinion on the Rock and Roll hierarchy.
But, nonetheless, Led Zeppelin is certainly at the top of the Hard Rock and Heavy Metal categories along with the likes of Cream and Iron Butterfly. Their fourth album, launched in (what else) 1971 was one of the highest selling albums of all time with 37 million LPs sold. On it was featured Stairway to Heaven. Rolling Stone rates the song as one of the greatest of all time.
Last night when Kim and I were Ubering back to our hotel from Carolyn’s duplex in Columbia Waterfront, we could see the symbol of 9/11 that we have lived with for twenty years, the beams of light pointing straight up from Ground Zero into the heavens. This is what we consider to be the one and only stairway to heaven. We spoke of how quickly time has passed in those twenty years and how it seemed like yesterday that we were each in lower Manhattan on our own separate missions that day.
Kim had Jury Duty that day and dutifully went down to Court Street by subway. When the subway got to Canal Street, it stopped and the conductor announced that all passengers needed to disembark and go to the surface for transportation due to an “incident” at the World Trade Center. In that moment, people were upset about having their morning commutes disrupted. Kim, being the legalistic person that she is, walked the rest of the way to the courthouse. People in the street were upset, but it was unclear exactly why. When she got to the courthouse the guard bluntly stated that the building was closed, that court was suspended and all jurors were to go home. By then the people flow was heading north, so she joined the crowd. The only southbound traffic was from first responders heading into the teeth of whatever disaster was underway. Kim spent the next few hours walking north to her apartment at 72nd and Columbus. She would stop to rest occasionally where some car would be parked with its radio reporting the collapse of the World Trade Centers. By then she had pieced together what was happening.
I had flown into JFK from LAX late the prior night and I needed to get to a speech I was giving to an IBM audience. I had thought the speech was at the Marriott at the base of the World Trade Center. In those days I had a car and driver held over from my days in the executive ranks at Bankers Trust and Deutsche Bank. Fernando was my driver. He picked me up on time and as we headed to WTC at 7am, I realized I had forgotten my cell phone at home. As I got out at WTC 1, Fernando gave me his phone and agreed he would go back to my place to get my phone. When I got inside the WTC Marriott I was told the IBM gathering had been moved to the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. I cursed my morning foul ups and jumped in a cab at 7:20am to head uptown.
As I was starting my speech to a full house at 9am, I knew and made reference to the first seemingly accidental plane strike on WTC 1 which had occurred at 8:46am, joking about what a mess we would have been in if IBM hadn’t shifted venues. At about 9:10am an IBM staffer stopped my speech and told the audience that a second plane had hit WTC 2 at 9:03am and that this was now being declared a terrorist attack. He also said that Times Square was being considered a secondary target and that all bridges and tunnels in and out of Manhattan were closing and that IBM was advising all its guests needed to do and go wherever they felt they needed to go.
I was still cursing my cell phone faux pas as I got to the bottom of the escalators, wondering how I would ever find Fernando. I had left a message for him on my own phone, which he had, but had no idea if he had gotten it. It was at that moment that I saw one car in the Marriott Marquis drive-through, which was my Lincoln Navigator with Fernando patiently waiting for me. As I got in, Fernando and I swapped phones and he said. “Where to now, boss?” After telling him that he was free to go home to his family if he needed to, he said he preferred to stay with me and the crossings were closed anyway. So I said we needed to head south to find son Thomas, who was in First Grade at Little Red in the West Village. First we stopped to fill up with gas. Then we stopped for water bottles and an armful of subway Sandwiches. The last prep stop was at a Citibank where I took out $2,000 in cash. Our mission was to find Thomas, who was being taken here and there by his mother, who was determined to make it just another day for him.
That was a helluva a day for both Kim and me. Neither of us personally knew anyone who died in the tragedy though there were thousands of stories in the naked city. When we see that annual memorial light-stairway to heaven at Ground Zero, we remember all the price paid to buy that stairway to heaven. It is hard to believe that wasn’t just yesterday. The closer we get to heaven, the brighter that stairway shines in remembrance for us.