Led Zeppelin: Classic Or Dud?

Now it's Spirit's turn:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-05-15/led-zeppelins-stairway-to-heaven-vs-dot-spirits-taurus-a-reckoning

More embarrassment for Zeppelin.

Jimmy doesn't come off too well in this NYTimes piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/arts/music/jimmy-page-talks-about-his-old-band-its-legacy-and-himself.html?ref=arts

Q. In part because of Led Zeppelin’s classic riffs, you guys are right up there with George Clinton and James Brown as sources for samples. And, of course, you did something yourself with Puff Daddy involving “Kashmir.” So how do you feel about your music being sampled for hip-hop records?

A. In a creative sense, it’s fantastic. Even if you don’t play an instrument, you’re writing new things. These guys come up with some amazing work, in the electronics and the mixing. I find it really fun to listen to. As far as the business side of it, however, the issue of sampling is thorny. The problem is people not getting paid for performances, Across the board, they are being pirated. Their music gets played, and they don’t get paid. I have a problem with that. I really do.

Q. You’ve also been on the other side of that debate, especially on the first couple of Led Zeppelin records, where you were criticized for using the material of Chicago blues greats, especially Willie Dixon, without acknowledging their authorship.

A. Yeah, but he got credited.

Q. But only after a lot of legal wrangling, so I wanted to ask in retrospect how did that happen, and once it was brought to the attention of your management, why did they resist it?

A. I had a riff, which is a unique riff, O.K., and I had a structure for the song that was a unique structure. That is it. However, within the lyrics of it, there’s “You Need Love,” and there are similarities within the lyrics. Now I’m not pointing a finger at anybody, but I’m just saying that’s what happened, and Willie Dixon got credit. Fair enough.

Fuck you, Dixon's family had to sue and go through eight years of legal bullshit before he got credit. Nothing "fair enough" about that.

Yeah and according to the article posted above, he still didnt get a lot of $$$ even after he got credited. Fuck Page and fuck Zeppelin.

In Page's defense, the MUSIC is not a nick of Willie Dixon, it's that Plant sang Dixon's lyrics over Page's music.

Page's riff was Page's riff. It was there before anything else. I just thought, 'well, what am I going to sing?' That was it, a nick. Now happily paid for. At the time, there was a lot of conversation about what to do. It was decided that it was so far away in time (it was in fact 7 years) and influence that...well, you only get caught when you're successful. That's the game.

- Robert Plant

there's no pt in arguing w Bill about this bro

in page's non-defense, he says he is not pointing a finger at anybody while very clearly pointing the finger at plant. plus, copyright law: page and plant are equally responsible, in the eyes of the law, for the lyrics in their songs.

Whole lotta rough mix is on spotify http://open.spotify.com/track/1sEdXWnELh66aRrTt43Enf

haha every time bill goes into this schtick i feel obligated to bring this up wrt to mr. dixon

Dixon took credit, and received royalties, for composing many songs
that came from other sources. Easy examples are Red Rooster and
Spoonful, taken from Charlie Patton records, and Wang Dang Doodle,
listed from a 1930s record called Bull Dagger's Ball.

If you listen only to Dixon tell it, he wrote every great blues song
to come out of Chicago. If you listen to the people who actually
worked with him 'back in the day', as I have done in my over 30 years
hanging around and chronicling the blues scene here in Chicago, Dixon
was the biggest song thief in the history of blues. Stories abound
of him offering to use his clout to get people a session to record
their original material with Chess (or Cobra/Abco, who he also worked
for briefly in the '50s), with one of two outcomes: the resulting
record was released, but Dixon's name appeared on the record as
composer, or else the session was never released, but the songs later
turned up on Howlin' Wolf, Muddy, or whoever's record, with Dixon's
name listed as composer. This was the standard operating procedure,
and seemed to be accepted as the price one had to pay in order to get
hooked up with the prestigious Chess label. Composer royalties were
not looked at as a big deal then, but when bands like the Stones,
Zep, and others started recording these songs and selling millions of
records in the 1960s, there were a LOT of pissed of blues people in
Chicago who very much resented Dixon's business dealings, and never
forgave him.

Since Dixon was the most famous voice telling the inside story of the
classic era of Chicago blues, more people heard it and believed his
account as the 'true' account, and unfortunately the lesser-known
guys who felt they were taken advantage of never had their stories
heard. So most people believe the 'Dixon is the man' story these
days, but it's wise to remember that there are two sides to every
story.

the idea of anyone "owning" blues lyrics is pretty lol imho

precisely because of practices like the above, the constant borrowing/repurposing, convoluted histories, endless variations etc.

maybe enough zeppelin freaks have bought willie dixon etc. records to make up for it all

Still, hear the Small Faces 1st album..

In Page's defense, the MUSIC is not a nick of Willie Dixon, it's that Plant sang Dixon's lyrics over Page's music

Oddly enough, Page had already borrowed the music to "Killing Floor" when he was in the Yardbirds.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9yaj2aF1X0M

their other ripoffs like that and the folk one (babe i'm gonna leave you) are way more blatant than the dixon stuff

xpost

lol did they really claim to have written Baby I'm Gonna Leave You?

wait wiki says they split credit with Anne Bredon on that which seems about right

think it originally said trad: arr: page but then bredon sued (or something)

ah it's more nuanced than that:
The band covered Baez's version: both guitarist Jimmy Page and singer Robert Plant were fans of Baez. Baez's album had originally indicated no writing credit, and Led Zeppelin credited the song as "Trad. arr. Page". In the 1980s Bredon was made aware of Led Zeppelin's version of the song and since 1990 the Led Zeppelin version has been credited to Anne Bredon/Jimmy Page & Robert Plant: Bredon received a substantial back-payment of royalties

so it's Joan's fault basically

joan baez, queen of the blues

read the latter half of the Tarfumes bizinsider link upthread for the Bredon stuff, well worth that entire article (except for the part that claims JPJ played "bass recorder" on stairway intro... always thought that was Mellotron?)

In the mid-’80s, another artist stepped forward. To reach the home of the 83-year-old woman who wrote the original Babe I’m Gonna Leave You, you drive up a dirt road on the edge of California’s Sierra National Forest. In a house made from two double-wide mobile homes, Anne Bredon, silver-haired and lanky, spends her days making jewelry, which she sells at craft fairs. To get to town for supplies, she drives a white electric car plastered with bumper stickers like “My Other Car Is a Broom.” She’s not a fan of hard rock.

Bredon wrote Babe around 1960 as a student at the University of California at Berkeley. She shared the chords and words with a fellow student, Janet Smith, who took Babe with her to Oberlin College and popularized it there. In 1962, Joan Baez came through the Ohio campus, heard Babe, and added it to her repertoire, including it in a songbook (credited to Bredon) and on a live album (not credited). In 1969, Led Zeppelin’s first album included a version of the song based on the Baez recording, listed as “Trad. arr. Jimmy Page.” “Jimmy Page must have assumed it was a folk song,” Bredon says. She, in the meantime, had no idea that her song was in the pantheon of classic rock.

In 1981, Bredon’s old college friend, Smith, was strumming the tune at home when her 12-year-old son popped into the room. “Gee, Mom, I didn’t know you did Led Zeppelin songs,” he said, according to Smith. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that Smith happened to look at a copy of the debut Led Zeppelin album in a Tower Records store and realized her friend hadn’t gotten credit. She contacted Bredon with a proposal to hire a lawyer, and the two agreed to split any money they could recover. To resolve the dispute, Led Zeppelin’s publisher made an offer: Because the band had made the song famous, the authorship of the Zeppelin version should be split 50-50, with half going to Bredon and the other half to Page and Plant. Future editions of the song would be credited, “Words and music by Anne Bredon, Jimmy Page, and Robert Plant.”

Xpost Nah, sounds like a recorder.

yeah I don't hear the typical mellotron tape-warble
xp

Definitely mellotron when they played it live, but yeah, recorder in the studio.

Always thought the live versions would've been better if Jones had switched from keyboards to bass midway through. Or if Zep had been a better live band.

...or if everyone remembered laughter.

"When he came across a bootleg of a 1969 Paris show that was broadcast live on radio at a Japanese record store, he scoured the planet for the original tapes." - dude it was broadcast in France in December 2007. I somehow doubt this required Numero Group-level detective work.

scoured the planet = had his assistant make a few phone calls

Booked a flight with an inconvenient layover.

I'm psyched to hear some justice was served w/r/t Jake Holmes. I didn't realize that settled. Contrary to popular thought I don't generally scour the legal wires for Zep related news.

Lets hope there is justice for Randy California.

I listened to that Spirit song, and it's just kind of a generic descending thing in the middle of the song. Uncanny, though, albeit only for those 5 seconds.

I don't think a chromatic descent is adequate to copyright.

Well, the Stones had to give K.D. Lang and Ben Mink cowriting credit on "Anybody Seen My Baby?" because the chorus had the same descending line as "Constant Craving."

The chromatic descending line is in my funny valentine too.

xpost I've heard Keys to the Highway. It's not that exciting. It's just Page and Plant, from the same night of recording that produced Hats Off to Harper, not a full band recording. The best thing from the unreleased tracks I've heard so far (was at a playback a couple of months ago) was the early version of Since I've Been Loving You, which was much rawer than the album version.

Well, the Stones had to give K.D. Lang and Ben Mink cowriting credit on "Anybody Seen My Baby?" because the chorus had the same descending line as "Constant Craving."

Well, not quite. The story goes, as far as I remember, is that maybe Jagger's daughter noticed the similarity when she heard the song, and the band gave Lang credit pre-emptively. REM did the same thing on that minor song from "Up" that alludes to Leonard Cohen. Whether Lang, or Cohen, would have won a hypothetical suit is another matter. It's pretty hard to win those suits.

Yeah, I do remember it being pre-emptive, and there not being any legal challenges, but I guess my point is that there have been situations like "Taurus"/"Stairway" that were settled where far less of a similarity existed.

Trying one of these cases on the grounds of pure musical theft (as opposed to lyrical theft) is harder. But imagine how much money, say, Van Morrison could possibly earn going after people who ripped the "Gloria" chords!

It's sad reading about where Randy California was before he died--and he was still a working musician at that point, with a major reissue campaign happening!

I was initially suspicious of the Hoskyns book by the pull quote, not just that it was by Klosterman (ugh), but that it reads "endlessly interesting." "Endlessly," really? And "interesting?" Fascinating, maybe, or entertaining, but interesting? And yet, I'm a ways through and yes, it is all oddly interesting. There's very little about the music itself, which almost takes place in the background. But there's a lot of business stuff which reveals just how huge and powerful the band was. Power all around, really. As musicians, in terms of popularity, in terms of sheer muscle, literal and figurative. That the band bullies its way to a 90/10 split with promoters is one thing, but they have a point, that with no need to push singles or albums or ticket sales, they don't need promoters to fill stadiums. Etc. There's also the matter of the band being amazing young even c. 1972 or so, when a case is made that Zep is the biggest band in the world, except no one knows it, because they don't really do interviews or marketing or publicity. But the band is still in circle-the-wagon modes, defensive and vindictive, whenever anyone crosses them or anyone in their secret society. Personality wise, too, they're all pretty different. Plant is a hippie hedonist. JPJ a pragmatist. Page the mastermind. Bonzo a total animal. They all but invented a certain rock and roll lifestyle (though as JPJ notes everyone was like that then), yet emerged remained peerless, surely because they were so cut off from everyone else. So yes, very interesting.

the last couple years of the band go down in bad vibes like the end of goodfellas

I haven't made it that far yet - what happens to Bonzo, does he go back to school? - but the stage is so totally set for the ugliest of ugly ends.

Page has to live the rest of his life like a schnook.

Devil's bargain.

Page has to live the rest of his life like a schnook.

― Montgomery Burns' Jazz (Tarfumes The Escape Goat), Wednesday, May 28, 2014 9:05 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha he basically has!

i'm seeing the 'oral history' and 'trampled underfoot', both by hoskins. they sound pretty similar so i'm guessing one of them is a repackage/rerelease of the other? which one should i get?

Yeah, we established it was the same upthread some.

I'm about 3/4 of the way through. Definitely fascinating. And a guilty LOL at this - "what happens to Bonzo, does he go back to school?"

what happened to john paul jones was fucked

http://www.chud.com/articles/content_images/0NICK2/casino_1818.jpg