Can we have this discussion again?

[stein]

Who knows... maybe it was the record company who did all that stuff and Led Zep didnt even have a say??

 

Also I think that you have to remember the world was a different place back then.. Ive seen an interview with some of the old blues guys who say that they all used to steal off each other cos they played the same curcuit... BUT the difference today is that everything is recorded and the internet lets us effortlessly look up all of the information we want so we can now really break these things down and compare etc etc.. Back then youd have to have been at the show to know about it, and that would be a very small group of people. Who ever knew that this much information would be available to everyone? These days people tend to get away with it less because of that.

I think also, "the times" had as much to do with the culture, or musical surroundings.

 

With the blues guys, they didn't get credit or paid for much anyway. And, it wasn't really looked down upon for playing each other's ideas. Still isn't in "blues".

 

In the time of Zep, recording artist were under pressure to write thier own stuff for the purpose of getting paid for it. The record companies pressured them into writing "origonals" over covers, not because they were new, but for the purpose of money based on songwriting credits.

[CowboyBillyBob1]

The whole Blues tradition is of "borrowing" songs. The music was not recorded. The stories were passed on from one player to another. That is what you were supposed to do. Keep the music alive by passing on the stories. From make shift juke joints and Friday night Fish Fry's is how this music lived on.

How many of Robert Johnsons 29 tunes were actually wholly written by him? He must have gotten some of it from Son House and other much less known players he met in his journeys up and down the river.

 

Now we get to the 40's and even more so the '50's and the migration to Chicago, Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf and even Buddy Guy a little later (among others) recorded this stuff. Willie Dixon wrote a lot of these classic blues tunes. I am sure some parts of them were "borrowed" as well.

 

Now we get to the '60's and Zep got all that material from records imported into England. The only cotton Page ever picked was out of an aspirin bottle, He did not learn them from other guys on the delta.

 

So we now have recorded evidence of where they got some of their material. In this light they should have given credit where credit is due. Something like

"Bring It On home" is not just "borowing" a tune but a blatant rip off of the exact arrangement done by Sonny Boy. They did overstep the boundaries.

 

Still Led Zep is one of my 5 all time favorite bands and unwittingly turned me on to the great blues guys like Muddy and Wolf.

 

Hey Clapton's solo on Strange Brew is a rip off of Albert Kings solo in Crosscut Saw.

 

Solo at 1:10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNsLyQGSqIg

 

Solo at 1:22

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufdx5EwVdro

[Izzy]

It takes talent to know what to rip off.

 

Seriously, though, had they given credit and we'd known the source, we'd love them no less.

It's the versions we love that matter to us.

 

Zep turned cool music into EPIC MUSIC.

The songs may have died away without Zep there to rescue them and bring them to us all.

[D-poland]

So we would be better off without Whole Lotta Love? Heartbreaker? Since I've Been Loving You? In My Time Of Dying, etc?

 

I've got three hours of live Dazed And Confused that I couldn't do without.

 

they put their own spin on it, all of it...

 

The only thing they did wrong is not give credit where it was due.

 

 

to my way of thinkin what zep did was awesome stuff regardless of who wrote it and the way they rendered many tunes did not follow the pattern very closely! so in a way what they did was original, to some extent! when they started out, their stuff was practically unheard of especially in the WAY they played it! back then people weren't all that sue happy and I'll venture a guess that if they had not hit it big we would not be discussing it at all!

[EVOL!]

 

So we now have recorded evidence of where they got some of their material. In this light they should have given credit where credit is due. Something like

"Bring It On home" is not just "borowing" a tune but a blatant rip off of the exact arrangement done by Sonny Boy. They did overstep the boundaries.

 

 

This is the point that hits the nail on the head. There is a HUGE difference between borrowing or writing something that kind of sounds like tune X and the outright theft Zeppelin did. Zeppelin I should have gotten them sued into destitute poverty. It's only now that when you buy the album some of the songwriting credits have been corrected. Anyone know what became of the recent law suit over Dazed and Confused?

[milod]

Okay, I gotta admit I wouldn't know a Zep sound unless I went to Youtube to research it. I was doing other stuff when they were big and had my hands and head full with what I was doing.

 

But...

 

Yeah, the folk tradition especially has been one of borrowing. My perfect example is the old "Little Girl" or "Black Girl" that's been done as blues, rock, country, bluegrass... Another is Muleskinner Blues, and ditto.

 

There have been a thousand versions of "Blue Moon," and to be blunt, the very progression itself was so common at one point in time that you almost had to sound as if you were copying somebody else if you did anything with the progression - possibly excepting the bridge, but even the bridge was pretty "generic." I've not intentionally "copied" anybody on this one, or those above that I've performed in public," but I'm certain somebody could say, "Hey, yeah, he copied the Horace Hoebelheinrich version almost exactly" because the stuff has been done so much.

 

One of my favorite "swing" pieces is "Deep Purple" that was a #1 for Bea Wain and the Larry Clinton "orchestra." Frankly I preferred Bea's vocal but... Helen Forrest and Artie Shaw ended up with a lot better arrangement and overall sound.

 

Clinton, btw, was quite popular at one point and yet the relatively primitive arrangements tended to be updated into far more... Can't we consider things roughly the same for "rock" as we do for "swing? I'm sure that Forrest was influenced by Wain's earlier vocal, so...

 

<grin> BTW, one can hear the same sorts of criticism as I've seen here when it comes to leading ladies of Wagnerian opera... She copied ***'s version and doesn't have the voice for it, or she should have or...

 

m

[brundaddy]

LZ merely carried on in the footsteps of the British Imitation bands such as the Beatles, Stones, & Yardbirds.

[heymisterk]

LZ merely carried on in the footsteps of the British Imitation bands such as the Beatles, Stones, & Yardbirds.

 

I respectfully must disagree with you: I simply cannot count any songs by The Beatles where they lifted parts of songs or whole songs and claimed they wrote them themselves. Certainly The Beatles were greatly influenced by the blues and rockabilly, but I can't think of one song where they took credit for something they didn't write.

[milod]

Actually according to this article, the Beatles did have at least other accusations of a degree of plagarism.

 

I just did a quick "Google" and found it.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_plagiarism

 

m

[heymisterk]

Actually according to this article, the Beatles did have at least other accusations of a degree of plagarism.

 

I just did a quick "Google" and found it.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_plagiarism

 

m

 

I guess I should amend my statement to "lifted whole songs, or much of a song." Right, I knew of those two. In "Come Together", we are talking about two lines; in "All You Need Is Love" we are talking about a few bars of "In the Mood". I suppose you could argue that Chuck Berry and Glen Miller should get a credit. Still, the essence of both songs belong to John Lennon...not Lennon/McCartney, but that's a whole other topic.

[brundaddy]

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8tZq_6ZC0A

 

First up is Geo. Harrison. Second is the Beatles. 6th is the Small Faces. 7th is The Quarrymen/Beatles.

 

@3:40 the Beatles rip off Chuck Berry.

 

Other Beatles songs were imitations of Little Richard, Motown, etc.

[milod]

For what it's worth, I'm predicting an ever-increasing set of accusations of plagiarism, lawsuits, messing with small venues by "licensing organizations" and such.

 

And I don't think current law handles the situation very well because the Internet and all our television access makes it almost impossible not to have pieces of material sewn together, lyrics reused, etc.

 

Again, there are so many lines from traditional songs from Celtic to blues that are repeated over and over that it's almost impossible not to "copy" some of them since they flow so naturally from the anglophone's lips.

 

m

[CowboyBillyBob1]

What makes a song interesting is if the listener can predict 50% of it. 50% of it is familiar and the other half is something new or different. This keeps the listener comfortable enough so it's not way out there but not so much that they become bored.

 

All artists borrow stuff even if they are noy aware of it. After all it's how they learned how to play to begin with.

 

Some of the stuff that the Beatles were accused of is just someone trying to catch some cash. The Come Together two line lyric is Chuck Berry's but to say that Come Together is a rip off is ridiculous. It was stream of conscious type of thing. There are very few totally original musical material. It is all based on what came before.

 

Now this is different than ripping off a whole tune and arrangement.

 

Izzy: You said "It takes talent to know what to rip off."

You may have been just making a light hearted remark but IMO truer words have never been spoken. Kudos to you.

[FirstMeasure]

If Leiber and Stoller can do it, why not Plant and Page?

 

And the intro to Stairway was ripped off from some Flamenco tune.

[heymisterk]

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8tZq_6ZC0A

 

First up is Geo. Harrison. Second is the Beatles. 6th is the Small Faces. 7th is The Quarrymen/Beatles.

 

@3:40 the Beatles rip off Chuck Berry.

 

Other Beatles songs were imitations of Little Richard, Motown, etc.

 

Imitation? Sure. Plagiarism? Not buying it.

[martinh]

I guess I should amend my statement to "lifted whole songs, or much of a song." Right, I knew of those two. In "Come Together", we are talking about two lines; in "All You Need Is Love" we are talking about a few bars of "In the Mood". I suppose you could argue that Chuck Berry and Glen Miller should get a credit. Still, the essence of both songs belong to John Lennon...not Lennon/McCartney, but that's a whole other topic.

 

 

As I understand it, Beatles themselves had nothing to do with the section from "In the Mood" endidng up in the end of "All you need is Love" Producer George Martin wove it in to his arrangement under the impression that it was out of copyright. When EMI found out it wasn't, they tried to make Martin pay royalties to the copyright holder from his own salary! Eventually EMI argeed to pay.

 

 

Now to make my own contraversial statement: A small group of Americans, paricularly music journalists, have never gotten over having their collective musical asses kicked by the Beatles, Stones, Led Zep etc. Several writers for Rolling stone used to suffer particualrly from this xenophobia. it manifests itslelf to this day in this constantly re-ocurring argument that British invasion bands "ripped off" earlier American subjects. Frankly ,the US was ignoring this music, and most Americans could not have have careed less about Robert Johnson or Mudddy Waters, or Chuck Berry at the time. The British bands saved this music from obscurity and awakened Americans to what was going on in their own back yard. Some of them have never forgiven us for it. Thupppph!

[milod]

Martin...

 

I don't think I'd quite agree that we're talking per se xenophobia - at least from most of "us" at the time here.

 

In 1963 I was so far into the folkie thing that words couldn't describe it - yet I was always bothered by the fact of some people were writing "folk" songs that quite obviously were not.

 

Pop music for the "okay, I'm out of high school now," was awfully broad and yes, we did have more than our fair share of the old bluesies, both the acoustic guys and the electric guys.

 

The Beatles broke into what had admittedly become pretty much a rehash of the rehash of what one might have heard in 1957 on the radio. I was shocked when, in the summer of '65, my super-folkie girl friend wanted to go see the Beatle movie.

 

Prior to that, the teen exploitation types of movies were either bikini beach things or variations on darker stuff like "The Wild One" or "Rebel without a Cause."

 

The Beatles at first had a childish joy to music that was far less than reviving bluesies and far more combining Brit music hall and skiffle along with American Rock.

 

Although credited with reviving US blues, The Stones, etc., etc. didn't get even close to the Chicago or Memphis blues sounds I recall - nor those of New York of the time. And I was listening to the original material on the radio from the late 50s, then in folkie venues before the Vietnam War stole the blues side of folkie stuff and turned it into protests and drug promotions.

 

The non-American take, combined with the cuteness of the Beatles, and the somewhat faster dance beat over what was current on American radio, did help.

 

IMHO a lot of the Beatle popularity was generational. The marvelous mix of American pop up to '63 or 4 was fine by my pre-baby boom generation, the rebels in suicidal too-fast cars and switchblades, etc., but it didn't fit with the boomers and their love, sex, drugs and a different rock and roll.

 

Don't get me wrong, I played plenty of the post Beatle stuff for money, but even then it was obvious to me that it was more a generational thing than otherwise.

 

m

[JAC]

Great thread! While you are spinning your wheels on this, take a listen to 21th Century Schizoid Man by King Crimson and, then listen to Kool and the Gang Jungle Boogie! That is how I would compare Taurus to Stairway. They paid out of court to WD, I wonder what that amount turned out to be. They mention something about that in the movie Cadillac Records. Page is a crafty fellow. One of his nick names is Led Wallet. I admire his capitalistic spirit. He is also accused of being an interloper. I wonder if that is because he wanted his material recorded in such a way, when pushy engineers were trying to get him not to do it his way?

[martinh]

Great thread! While you are spinning your wheels on this, take a listen to 21th Century Schizoid Man by King Crimson and, then listen to Kool and the Gang Jungle Boogie! That is how I would compare Taurus to Stairway. They paid out of court to WD, I wonder what that amount turned out to be. They mention something about that in the movie Cadillac Records. Page is a crafty fellow. One of his nick names is Led Wallet. I admire his capitalistic spirit. He is also accused of being an interloper. I wonder if that is because he wanted his material recorded in such a way, when pushy engineers were trying to get him not to do it his way?

 

 

As I understand it, Page paid for the recording of the first Zep album himslef for exactly that reason, He didn't want the record company's producer or a house engineer telling him how it should sound. However, he hired Glynn Johns, who was a very traditional engineer, and the two purportedly had some huge fights over Page wanting to do various innovative tricks on the recording.