The Night Heart Played "Stairway to Heaven" Back to Led Zeppelin, With John Bonham's Son on Drums

Kennedy Center Honors, Washington, 2 December 2012: Ann and Nancy Wilson sing the song they learned in Seattle bars, and the man behind the kit is wearing his dead father’s hat.

First, the correction

The premise that started this piece was “Heart’s drummer is the son of Led Zeppelin’s drummer.” That is wrong today. Heart is on the road in 2026 with Sean Lane on drums (The Rock Revival). The show people remember, the one that keeps getting passed around, is older. It happened at the Kennedy Center Honors on 2 December 2012, went out on CBS on 26 December, and it spawned a whole tour the following year. That night is what this piece is about.

Why Heart, of all bands

Ann and Nancy Wilson saw Led Zeppelin live as teenagers in Seattle around 1970. The band they built afterwards learned its trade playing Zeppelin songs in bars; the early Heart setlist was heavy with those covers (Loudersound). Most coverage of the Kennedy Center night skips that, and it changes how you read the show: the Wilsons were a Zeppelin bar band that got famous, not guests doing the honourees a favour.

The link was already on record before 2012. In 1992 the sisters, working as the Lovemongers, cut “The Battle of Evermore” for the Singles soundtrack (Steve For The Deaf). Twenty years before the bowler hats, Heart was already handing Zeppelin songs back.

The kid on the tiny drum kit

Jason Bonham was born on 15 July 1966. By five he was playing, and you can see him as a small boy on a miniature kit next to his father in The Song Remains the Same (Wikipedia). John Bonham died on 25 September 1980, aged 32, and Led Zeppelin broke up rather than hire a replacement.

Everything that follows rests on that decision. The band never put another drummer in that seat as Led Zeppelin. The only two times they came close to being Led Zeppelin again, the drummer was the son: the Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary show in 1988 and the O2 Arena reunion in December 2007, the one released as Celebration Day (Wikipedia). The same person in three eras: the boy in the film, the young man at Atlantic, the grown drummer at the O2.

What actually happened on the stage

The Kennedy Center honoured Led Zeppelin in 2012. Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and John Paul Jones sat in the box and watched. The finale was Heart doing “Stairway to Heaven.”

Jason Bonham was on drums in a bowler hat, the hat his father made his own. Partway through, a curtain opened and the Joyce Garrett Youth Choir came in, dozens of singers, every one of them also in a bowler hat. The cameras cut to the box and Plant was in tears, on national television (CBS News, NBC News).

The secrecy was real: Nancy Wilson has said she was told to stay hidden in her hotel until it was time to walk out, so the honourees would have no idea who was closing the show (KSHE 95, via Blabbermouth).

What Plant said afterwards

The best line from the night came at the dinner, and it is not the tearful one. Nancy Wilson has told it more than once: Plant came over and said, “I’ve come to hate that song so much, because everyone just murders it. But you guys did great” (KSHE 95, via Blabbermouth, link above).

Page’s review was shorter. Per Nancy, he told her she played the acoustic part “really perfect.” Ann’s version, told to Guitar World, is “You nailed the guitar part!” That is the man who wrote the part telling the woman who learned it off the record in Seattle as a teenager that she got it right.

Plant, looking back later, put the whole night in one question: “How did we move across from being a British blues band to this ridiculous achievement?” (Blabbermouth).

Why the tears, really

Plant has heard “Stairway” murdered for forty years, by his own admission, so a good version alone does not make a man cry on CBS. What was on that stage was the entire chain at once: the band Zeppelin influenced, playing the song back to the people who wrote it, with the son of the one member they never replaced, sitting where his father sat, in his father’s hat. Influence, tribute and bloodline in one frame, a loop closing while the people who opened it watched from the box.

One more thread makes it stranger. After the O2 show in 2007, when Page, Jones and Jason were weighing carrying on without Plant, Ann Wilson put herself forward for the job. Her words: “I just threw my hat in the ring. I went, ‘I’m here!’ and it was crickets” (Planet Rock, via Loudwire). The voice that made Plant cry in 2012 was the same voice that got silence from his bandmates a few years earlier.

The show became a tour

An emotional one-off usually stays a one-off. This one turned into a business. In 2013 Heart ran the Heartbreaker Tour with Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Experience as the opener. Heart played their own set, then Jason came back and the night closed with roughly half an hour of Zeppelin: “Rock and Roll”, “Black Dog”, “When the Levee Breaks”, “The Battle of Evermore” (Ultimate Classic Rock). The song the Lovemongers cut in 1992 was now nightly, with a Bonham on the kit.

The partnership has kept going. Ann Wilson turned up as a guest on Jason’s Bonham & Friends run in 2025 (Concert Archives), and Jason has played with Heart on many nights since 2012.

Why this week

Jason Bonham turned 60 on 15 July 2026 and has been touring his Led Zeppelin Evening through the summer, with the latest leg wrapping 6 September (Yahoo). Heart is out on its own 2026 dates. And 25 September 2026 marks 46 years since John Bonham died. Both halves of this story are active at the same time, which does not happen often.

The thread to pull next

Heart is the clearest case I know of a band learning to be a band on someone else’s songs and then getting to play those songs back to the writers, with the writers in the room. The 2013 Heartbreaker shows are where that loop ran every night, and the setlists moved around.

If you were at one of those 2013 dates: what did Jason and Heart close with that night, and did they do “Stairway” or leave it in Washington? Tell me at @realrocklab on Threads or X.