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If There’s A Bustle In Your Hedgerow, Don’t Be Alarmed Now – It’s Just Some Chords That Sound Familiar

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The Stairway to Heaven brouhaha has flared up again with new claims made that the opening chords are lifted from Spirit’s 1967 song Taurus .

This controversy has been kicking around for years of course and Led Zep are well-known for appropriating music from other sources. But it will be interesting to see if they are finally bang to rights on this one or if, 47 years after the event, they manage to walk away with an out-of-court settlement.

My money’s on the latter.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/apr/12/stairway-to-heavens-opening-chords-may-have-been-stolen-judge-says?CMP=share_btn_fb

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Comments

  2. From a purely musical POV this is ridiculous. As many people have pointed out, it’s a common chord sequence.

    Plant and Page have form – yep.

    They’re in trouble with a US jury I reckon.

  5. The simple fact is that although Zep apologists, and Plant, use the ‘everybody was at it’ excuse, this is bollox in comparison to Zep’s blatant lifting of other people’s work. They were too huge and powerful too tackle in their heyday. Other classic bands such as The Stones. Yardbirds, Them etc always gave due credit instead of ripping off. It’s the lingering stench of the latter that did it for me with Zep. No honour.

  7. It’ll go to court, get result, appeal will be filed by lovers, another long legal battle to trial, probably other side will win – ad infinitum.

    Will carry on when all parties are dead and just lawyers for their estates are fighting it out. And making more money than any settlement.

  11. In my early to mid teens I adored Zep, and Led Zep 2 in particular. Page & Plant were song writing idols of mine – those astonishing riffs, how did Page come up with them ? That deep soul blues that Plant was able to channel – WOW !

    A couple of years later I discovered the blues proper as was much more in The Stones camp, and started tracking down the greats, and realised what a load of well executed horse shit Zep were.

    • I still adore Zeppelin and their music. What I don’t like is the way they vigorously police the internet for bootlegs and unauthorised LZ product, while taking liberties with the music of others.

      • The vast majority of what I did like by them turned out to not really be by them after all (allegedly) and what was left was not a lot to keep me interested ever again.

      • Wasn’t the policing a Peter Grant thing? Is it still as vigorous now? I ask only because there’s a couple of bootleg shops in Tokyo with pictures / videos of Page grinning to camera with several bootlegs in hand, some of which seem to be of Zep.

        • Instigated by Grant but continued by Page and his “people”.

          Remember a couple of years back when we saw Page for the first time with his newly undyed white hair? That was when he emerged from court after testifying against a Glasgow bootleg dealer.

          That said, I’m sure he turns a blind eye to (and even collects) early Zep boots sold on a less than industrial scale.

          Conversely, you try listing Zep promo items on eBay and other online sites and see how far you get.

      • I don’t quite understand the comment that they vigorously police the Internet fit bootlegs.
        All the torrent sites I visit are overrun with LZ boots. I often wonder how many more do people need.
        They don’t have to look hard to find them, so I think they have given up on the policing.

  14. The Taurus lift isn’t perhaps the most smoking-est gun in the LZ canon of appropriation, but I do rather hope that, for once, they DO get banged to rights. Their position of being able to effectively buy off previous claimants just feels wrong, although I can understand why each individual claimant has opted for the easier option of an out of court settlement and a shared credit. ‘Dazed And Confused’ now has a credit something like ‘J. Page inspired by Jake Holmes’ which is absurd: it’s not a publishing credit, it’s a vague sentence.

    Jim even ripped off himself, in a way. Here’s a song (never officially released) co-written with the rest of the Yardbirds, recorded on their final studio session in 1968. Johnny C will be able to tell you what it became, with minimal changes, a couple of years later.

  15. Does it really matter?

    If a song borrows from another song, who cares so long as the original author gets a cut of the dough and maybe some proper attribution?

    We talked about Bittersweet Symphony a couple of weeks back; it doesn’t dilute my enjoyment of that tune at all to know that much of it was lifted from The Last Time.

    Most art leans on prior art, to a greater or lesser extent. As I get older I increasingly feel it’s better to just enjoy the work for what it is, rather than worrying about how original it is, whether the artist has created something truly original, etc.

    Here’s White Noise by Disclosure.

    It’s undoubtedly an enormous, enormous tune and it gets broken out in my house as soon as the weather turns sunny. It also sounds a hell of a lot like this; Show Me Love by Robin S, a record that predates it by 20 years.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps2Jc28tQrw.

    Yet that knowledge doesn’t detract a single iota from my love of White Noise, probably because – much as I enjoy the music of Disclosure – I don’t regard them as geniuses whose music will last forever and whose rep matters at all. It’s just music.

    For a bonus, here’s Hideaway by Kiesza. A massive pop tune that ate 2014. It also sounds a lot like Show Me Love.

    All three tracks are great. There probably is some copying going on in there, conscious or otherwise. I hope that the right people got their share of the cash, but otherwise I’m happy to listen to and enjoy all three, just like I’m always happy to lend an ear to Led Zep, who nicked tons of stuff, but found ways to make it their own.

    OOAA

    • I agree that great music can be made on the back of other music, but the issue here is purely financial. If I created a melody or distinctive musical pattern that someone took without credit and made large amounts of money from, I would without hesitation go after them through law, and I would have not one iota of doubt about doing so on the basis of ‘man, it’s uncool, it’s all part of the process’ or similar such b****cks.

      • That’s exactly what I’m advocating; the original creator should be getting paid. It’s what makes the world go round, after all. I hope that Spirit get their cheque – from what I’ve heard it seems a fairly obvious lift.

        But in terms of my actual enjoyment of the song as a listener? The fact that there’s a furious court case going on in the background doesn’t make a great deal of difference. To be honest, I’ve never loved Stairway anyhow.

  16. … but they didn’t get a cut. Zippity fuck, or any artistic credit/acknowledgement, without legal recourse. That matters . It’s about honour, principal and integrity. Creativity is often symbiotic of course, but that’s a different non issue altogether.

    • I guess that’s what I’m saying; short of being proper, proper bastards, I don’t really care whether the artist has honour, principal and integrity.

      In fact, I’m willing to bet that if we take most of the artists who are worshiped on here, we’ll find something in their backstory that’s a lot more unpleasant than a niggling copyright claim, but which we all choose to overlook nonetheless.

      It’s just music (and, in most cases, just pop music), and the people who made it are just people.

      I should add that I’m a staunch believer in copyright, and that the original creators should have the right of redress, but it seems to me that those conditions are met here.

      • Honour, principal and integrity are probably not areas to explore in too much detail when it comes to 70’s rock stars. Jimmy Page seems to take a lot more flak for nicking riffs than he does for Lori Maddox or decades of aggressive tax avoidance. He must be delighted that plagiarism is the worst charge he has to answer.

        • Even bastards can have artistic moral integrity – I would cite Van as such, always pays his dues, and as for him being a metaphorical bastard, I’m not sure that I’d go that far. A lot of our musical heroes are also decent enough people. We all have an inner bastard, but a lot of us would still, if we were creative types, draw the line at stealing the work, for that is exactly what it is, and therefore often the income/livelihood of other artists, but hey shucks… Maybe I’m just an old fashioned fool who believes in certain standards of decency, rock stars or whoever, personal inner failings aside.

        • Ahem. I wish people would not go along with the state propaganda regarding tax avoidance. Evasion is a crime, avoidance is what you do if you can afford to. It’s even in Hansard somewhere: an MP states that it is a citizen’s duty to ensure he, she or it is not paying too much tax.

          …and breathe.

          • With you on evasion vs avoidance, but suspect that the Hansard thing risks accidentally conflating paying the amount you’re supposed to pay (without turning somersaults to wriggle out of it) and actively overpaying, thereby creating an admin burden for the state.

          • Yes, I think we all know that. Apologies if my phrasing gave the impression that I didn’t. I meant charge as in accusation, not in the legal sense.

            • Lord Clyde stated the taxpayer was not under the smallest obligation, moral or otherwise, to arrange his affairs to allow the Revenue to ‘put its largest shovel into his stores’.
              I’d question whether we all know the difference between avoidance and evasion, given the hysterical coverage in some of the propaganda rags and media outlets recently.

              • Well, indeed. It’s amazing how many times Osborne’s quote about tax evasion being ‘illegal and immoral’ has been brought up in the last week in the context of revelations about avoidance.

                • It’s probably a subject for another thread, but I wonder to what extent 70’s rock stars’ tax arrangements influenced the thinking of their fans, many of whom may have felt that if Jimmy or Mick or David or Rod or Ringo didn’t have a problem with squirrelling their money away around the world to keep it out of the hands of the taxman, maybe it was okay for them to do it too.

  18. The Beatles and Stones knicked bits of other people’s songs. They have acknowledged as much. In some cases it’s well disguised, in others, less so. There are other acts who have done the same. They were all at it. Bowie’s Starman is based on Somewhere Over The Rainbow, as we know. Neil Young did a song called Borrowed Tune based on Lady Jane by The Stones and sang in the song that he took it from The Rolling Stones. He still took the credit.

    It’s also often not really clear which of these old blues artists wrote the tunes supposedly ripped off by Led Zep because those old blues guys also ‘found’ tunes that they claimed as their own. Still, on a moral level Led Zep could have considered that they had made a lot of money by using that source material, which hadn’t proved so profitable for any of the blues artists in question, so there is that, but to be fair Led Zep did transform those songs quite extensively with their own invented elements.

    • Agreed, but there was also a general code of decency in old blues when it came to sharing and adapting themes/songs – it didn’t include pinching a personally stamped adaptation for one self, hook line and sinker.

    • There are, though, a number of songs – whole, actual, not just blues, songs and instrumentals (not the odd riff or snatch of melody) – that were taken and recredited wholesale. Babe I’m Gonna Leave You, Dazed And Confused, Black Water/Mountain Side, Knowing That I’m Losing You (the Yardbirds cowrite)…

  19. My favourite XTC track – Omnibus – is based on a part of Pink Floyd’s See Emily Play (a keyboard line before verse two). Slowed down, it forms the melody of of the verses in Omnibus. The same melody was also used on Peter Blegvad’s Orpheus project. Omnibus is solely credited to Andy Partridge, so I’m guessing ver Floyd don’t have a problem.

    It might be another of those irregular verbs; I take inspiration from, you pastiche, they shamelessly steal.

  20. ABC News in Australia just did a short item on this LZ story and referred (several times) to the Spirit guitarist Randy California by his little-known given name Randy Wolfe.

    I’m guessing they gave the job of researching the news item to the work experience kid who had a quick look on Wiki.

  26. Am I correct in thinking that George Harrison gave his personal ok when approached by Paul Weller re the obvious with Start ? I hope so. That’s the way to do it. Common decency and manners.

  27. This case has nothing to follow with an artist getting credit and everything to do with money. Whoever represents the state of Mr California be they children or long lost cousins see a shiny penny not righting a musical wrong. Randy had neither the inclination or perhaps funds to address this whole he was alive.

    Listening to the two it’s close but no cigar. If that’s stealing then get Weller for ripping off Taxman. Then the Pistols for ripping off the intro In The City for Vacant. Then Bowie for taking a riff that Jimmy Page played him and using it for The Supermen & Dead Man Walking.

    There is nothing new under the sun. Even Randy Newman knows that.

  28. It’s really hard to have a view on this one. Stairway is tainted by over-familiarity, so it’s hard to hear it as anything other than original, even though musically it is clear that it has similarities to a few other pieces. They need a jury who has never heard it, that’s the only fair way.

    • Do you think a typical jury is qualified to make judgments that hinge on appreciating and distinguishing chromatic or modal scales, augmented fourths or major sevenths? I don’t. Jury trial is supposed to be by our “peers”, so It ought to be 12 musicians who make this call.

      And, anyway, all the defence will have to do is present the centuries-old clip that Gary posted to show the musical figure in dispute was already in the public domain. I’ll be amazed if this suit prospers.

      • I take your point, but on that basis there are a significant number cases that would only ever get heard by specialist juries, or without a jury at all, as come people have suggested should be the case with fraud cases.

        If this case were heard in the UK, would it have a jury ? Most civil cases don’t, or at least didn’t use to. Anyone know ?

      • Not so sure.

        “So, Mr Page, let’s take a look at your back catalog and see how many times you’ve done what my client is alleging you did to him… Mm. Discernible pattern of behavior here I think”

        “Well, um, yeah, so…um…um”

  29. Didn’t Page once complain that Plant was supposed to have done a better job of hiding the rip-offs?
    They’re both as tight as two coats of paint which is why they’ve gleefully pilfered other people’s songs. The music business, however, is just about as corrupt an industry as one can get and is heavily populated by scumbags, thieves, gangsters, extortionists, whoremongers and shysters.

  30. This case is just bobbins looking for a cash settlement. However devious the Zep boys may have been about purloining ideas, they made them their own by performing them in their own way. I have a hundred albums of Blue Note classics that are awash with other people’s songs, but the original artists NEVER made them sound like THAT.

    • It’s worth noting that the the lawsuit was “brought by Michael Skidmore, a trustee for the late …Randy California”.

      Skidmore (great name) has been barrel-scraping Randy California’s tape vault for decades, conjuring ropey old “albums” out of demos that the guitarist would never have agreed to release during his lifetime. Skidmore was also responsible for the half-arsed, sonically shoddy release of the original Potatoland album. So we have to ask ourselves – do we not – why Skidmore is adopting such a crusading stance here when Randy California himself let it slide. California was aware of the similarity and possible plagiarism, but was not of a litigious, money-grabbing nature. Unlike some people.

  33. As I understand it Barry Manilow and Ian Dury both accused eachother over the respective intros to “Copa Cabana” and “Reasons To Be Cheerful”. It’s said they discussed it long into the night in an Essex pub somewhere along the A13 during Manilows 1979 UK tour. Manilows invite to Dury to cowrite his next album at his Miami beach house never came to fruition although it’s claimed the 2 became close friends,,,,,,,,,

  34. Plagiarism. A victim speaks.
    Many years ago some of my writing was lifted wholesale and used in the sleeve notes of a major series of retrospective CDs on the Island label, credited to someone else. I won’t name the plagiarist here, but the writer of the sleeve notes is a very well-known rock journalist whose name will be familiar to many people here.

    After the theft was pointed out to me, I rang the Island office in Hammersmith, only to be told the CDs originated from their US office and I should take it up with them. At this point I anticipated getting the runaround and while I was pissed off about the situation, I didn’t have the stomach (or the resources) to fight a major label.

    Nevertheless, I decided to give it a go if only to see what would happen and faxed the US office of Island (this was before email, I should point out).

    The next morning I received a phone call from Island’s US office and spoke to the man behind the entire reissue project. I was expecting a difficult conversation but amazingly he put his hands up to the theft right away and basically asked me what I wanted to make it go away.

    To cut a long story short he offered double what I’d been paid for the original work, plus a shitload of free CDs. In addition, he solemnly promised to add my name to the credits on the CD sleeve notes for the next pressing and there was vague talk of more writing work in the future from Island.

    The last two never happened of course, but the cheque duly arrived followed by a huge box of assorted Island/Universal CDs.

    It all panned out so smoothly it left me wondering if I could have got more out of the situation. Perhaps if I’d had legal representation etc etc.

    But hey, I came out ahead in the end and after all they could well have told me to f**k off and there’s not much I could have done about it.

        • You did okay, basically. Island won’t have shifted any great numbers saleswise and the people who did buy them won’t have been tolerant enough in the eye department* to actually make the effort to read the tiny print which is such a feature of the CD. Of course lifting your writing wholesale was deplorable, obviously. Bastards.

          *Like me. I’ve bought one of those Sherlock eyeglasses for precisely this purpose. But does everyone?

          • Thanks Declan. I’m also one of those who reads CD sleeve notes, especially if they are written by someone I know personally (like Peter Doggett) or know via blogs such as this (like our own Colin H).

  35. I’ve obversed this thread from a distance, being musically illiterate. I’ve listened to every clip. There are brief moments of similarity, but only brief. So brief, that I would probably have missed it if it hadn’t been pointed out to me. If I was on the jury, I’d let them off.

    Having said that, big up for those artists who give credit where it is due.

    Well done, Johnny. Which Island release package was it?

  36. I’m sure that all you erudite souls will agree with me that Spirit were a great band. I saw them in Birmingham in about 1974.
    Randy California was one of the best guitarists of his generation.

    • Clear, Family That Plays Together, Farther Along, Future Games (thought you’d raved about this already?), Original Potato Land (crap sound from Alan “Lawsuit” Skidmore), Son Of Spirit, Spirit of ’76, Twelve Dreams, and Kaptain Kopter (a Spirit album in all but name). Beware of later barrel-scraping exercises by Alan “Lawsuit” Skidmore. Lots of truly great bootlegs out there, too. Time Circle is the best comp.

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