The American Pie article mentioned Stairway to Heaven and how no one knows the song’s meaning…it’s simple. Stairway to Heaven is about shopping:
There’s a lady who knows all that glitters is gold and she’s buying the stairway to heaven
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board, DebbiefromNY!
In case you did not know, Uncle Cecil did address this issue in a later article. You can read it here:What’s the story behind Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven?”.
The article you were referencing was, of course, What is Don McLean’s song “American Pie” all about?. As a rule, we ask that posters starting threads about a column include a link to the column in their initial post, which can be done easily by cutting and pasting the url link from your browser’s address field into the message. This helps everyone stay on the same page with you. Unfortunately, the comment on this column link doesn’t do it automatically. 
Once again, welcome, look around, and enjoy your visit; we hope you like it enough to stay. 
Welcome to the boards.
Here are the full lyrics (chorus left out to save space):
There are a couple of references to shopping (sign on the wall?), but at more to fantasy, especially Tolkien.
Combined with the direct Tolkien references in other songs (Misty Mountain Hop etc), I think this is much more likely.
Glee, I have edited your post to remove most of the copyrighted lyrics. In the future please do not reproduce the complete lyrics of any copyrighted song, or more than a short snippet. It’s acceptable to provide a link to the lyrics, which are easy enough to find online.
bibliophage
moderator CCC
Sorry! :o
I was concentrating on the fantasy references, and messed up.
It won’t happen again.
From “Ramble On”:
In the darkest depths of Mordor
I knew a girl so fair
But Gollum and the evil one
Crept up and slipped away with her
That’s about as direct as they come, if a bit oblique. 
Here are three threads in which we discussed this song:
“Stairway to Heaven” is about a lot of things. It’s about The Lord of the Rings, Celtic mythology, ritual magic, the Virgin Mary, and superficial women who spend too much time shopping. Maybe it’s also about all the drugs that Robert Plant was doing at the time he made up the words. It’s poetry. Maybe it’s not very good poetry, but like poetry it doesn’t have any single interpretation.