Spirit sues Led Zep

[Dave W]

There's borrowing, and there's outright lifting of whole songs or significant parts of songs. Page has been more blatant about it. Maybe even more so than Dylan.

The attorney for the California estate isn't known for his altruism; that's true. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/10851780/Lawyer-suing-Led-Zeppelin-heavily-criticised-by-judge.html

What a piece of work! He's practically begging to be sanctioned.

[Pilgrim]

Does it strike anyone else that the lawyer's name "Malofiy" is curiously similar to the "Malfoy" family in the Harry Potter series?

[uwe]

Of course, borrowing a riff here and there is a time honored tradition in rock and roll, right, Uwe?

Wait a minnit, did a Kiss Army grunt of all people just make a snide remark about DP's originality?  Purple have never been anything but frank about what and from whom they stole, they even joked about it,



though Maria Quiet uses just the notes of SOTW, not the all determinative bludgeoning rhythmic placement of them. But Blackmore listened to Jazz and also played Jazz guitar (had a Jazz guitarist as a teacher), so who knows. Somehow though, DP's lifting of riffs, never led to litigation (nor did Purple ever sue someone for lifting their riffs). And they were never afraid of crediting other people: the first three albums are full of re-arranged covers from writers as diverse as Lennon-McCartney, Neil Diamond and Donovan. One of the reasons Blackmore left DP was even that they would not put a cover of Quatermass' Black Sheep of the Family on Strombringer, instead it landed on Rainbow's debut.

And this song - though credited to all five of DP, is not written by any one of them at all. Rather they heard a black street musician play it (it was his own composition) and they bought the complete song off him in a fit of enchantment with it. I hope he got a good price, he at least never sued.



The middle section might be something Coverdale and Hughes might have jointly come up with though, it sounds like other stuff they did on Stormbringer.

Zep got sued a lot for their songs, there must be something that irks people badly about the way they do it or perhaps it is just the vast amounts of money they made. One thing you can say about them is that whatever they played, they sure made it sound like their own.

[Granny Gremlin]

Did I mention that I always found that Stairway intro twee and that the whole song is hugely overrated? Give me Kashmir or In my Time of Dying or even The Battle of Evermore anyday. Also, can anybody explain to me what Stairway to Heaven (the lyrics) is actually about?

I'm with you on that, but it did pretty much single-handedly define  and legitimise (in a not just for pussies way) the subgenre of epic rock ballads.  There is no accounting for taste amongst the masses, I'm afraid.

Also, I hope you're being facetious Uwe, cause you gotta know that with Zep, if it ain't about women/sex, it's about drugs (99% of the time; sure there's an exception or two somewhere). 

[uwe]

No, I'm serious! For a non-native speaker, Led Zep is excruciatingly difficult to understand the way Plant stretches and bends the words. And if you have their lyrics before you, you are none the smarter, you tell me what this means:

"There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold
And she's buying a stairway to Heaven
When she gets there, she knows if the stores are all closed
With a word she can get what she came for
Ooh-ooh-hoo, hoo-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh
And she's buying a stairway to Heaven

There's a sign on the wall, but she wants to be sure
'Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings
In a tree by the brook there's a songbird who sings sometimes
All of our thoughts are misgiven

Ooh, it makes me wonder
Ooh, it makes me wonder

There's a feeling I get when I look to the west
And my spirit is crying for leaving
In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees
And the voices of those who stand looking

Ooh, it makes me wonder
Ooh, really makes me wonder

And it's whispered that soon, if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason
And a new day will dawn for those who stand long
And the forests will echo with laughter

Oh-whoa-whoa-whoa-whoa-ho-oh

If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now
It's just a spring clean for the May Queen
Yes, there are two paths you can go by
But in the long run
There's still time to change the road you're on

And it makes me wonder
Oh-oh-ho

Your head is humming and it won't go - in case you don't know
The piper's calling you to join him
Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow
And did you know your stairway lies on the whispering wind, oh

And as we wind on down the road
Our shadows taller than our soul
There walks a lady we all know
Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold
And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last
When all are one and one is all, yeah
To be a rock and not to roll

And she's buying a stairway to Heaven"

"And if you listen very hard, the tune will come to you at last ..." - my ass! Maybe the tune, but not the lyrics! I've only realized just now that the lady in the song wishes to acquire a stairway to heaven, I always thought she was "biding a stairway to heaven". And until today I always wondered what does the "hedgehog", Plant keeps singing about, have to do with it ...  I only now realize that it is "hedgerow".



"Hey, I'm the bustling hedgehog from Uwe's Stairway to Heaven, whaddaya mean they're not singing about me?!!! I'm your spiky subliminal message!!!"


I always found the lyrics in Alice Cooper's, Ian Gillan's, Greg Lake's, Mick Jagger's, Ozzy Osbourne's vocal delivery - you can really name almost anyone here - much easier to understand than Plant. Truth be told, that was always one of the aspects that bugged me about Led Zep.

[Granny Gremlin]

OK fine.  Plant was reading a little too much Tolkein.  That first verse is pretty obviously about (trying to) scoring drugs though... and the last one is about being on them. 

I never thought about the middle too much, but if I'm on the spot here, I'm gonna go with drought (drugs not water), new batch hitting the streets, and the cognitive dissonance as to whether to indulge or not.  With the final line hammering it home what the choice ended up being. ... keep in mind I'm not a native speaker either.

Yes, when it came to lyrics, Zep was quite a bit more flowery than most Classic Rock bands  (which I tend to find a little too on-the-nose for my tastes these days; especially Alice, as much as tween me was into them - never any mystery there).  It's a fine line between being poetic and cryptic.

[Captcolour]

Rereading the lyrics you posted, if you look at it from a religious perspective, the lady and the gold represent false gods and idols made of gold used to buy your way into heaven.  Enter the piper (Jesus or perhaps insert your favorite religion), as a different pathway to entering heaven.  The "tune will come to you at last" is hearing the piper's tune in choosing that over what the lady with the gold has to offer.

Or maybe not.

[OldManC]

Wait a minnit, did a Kiss Army grunt of all people just make a snide remark about DP's originality?  Purple have never been anything but frank about what and from whom they stole, they even joked about it,

...

Zep got sued a lot for their songs, there must be something that irks people badly about the way they do it or perhaps it is just the vast amounts of money they made. One thing you can say about them is that whatever they played, they sure made it sound like their own.

I knew my little joke would get a response, but not such a healthy one! 

A tip of the hat can span generations.




As for Zep's stealing and why they get singled out... Bands lifting parts and borrowing riffs is a time honored tradition. I think it was Steven Tyler that said something to the effect of: amateurs borrow/pros steal, but even there he was talking about making new songs out of what was stolen. I can't speak for anyone else, but what bothers me is that Page and company took songs that others wrote and recorded and stole whole verses and more, or took other bands' arrangements and claimed them as their own, or took whole songs outright, and in each instance, credited either Page alone or Page and other band members on the records and in publishing, where the real money is. That's not tipping the hat, it's bashing someone over the head with a club and stealing his wallet. I fully recognize that Zep made most of those songs their own (and improved on many as well) and many of us would never have heard those songs if not for them, but none of that excuses them for claiming those compositions as their own and depriving the rightful creators of whatever remuneration they deserved as composers of those songs.

[uwe]

Tolkien ... groan ...    His books must be among the most overrated pieces of literature ever. I find them dreary and their message could be condensed to one page.

And what I wrote here

"I always found the lyrics in Alice Cooper's, Ian Gillan's, Greg Lake's, Mick Jagger's, Ozzy Osbourne's vocal delivery - you can really name almost anyone here - much easier to understand than Plant. Truth be told, that was always one of the aspects that bugged me about Led Zep."

was perhaps a bit misleading: What I meant to say was that I have a hard time understanding Plant's lyrics phonetically, much harder than with other singers. That I find them hippie-inane once I have understood them phonetically is another matter. Tolkien alright ... escapist nonsense without even any humor to it.

But at least now I have two interpretations: Bruce says it's about God, Jake says it's about buying drugs. And Karl Marx who said that all religion is opium for the masses makes sense of it all then.  That said, no one has explained the hedgehog yet!

[gweimer]

The secret to effective vocal delivery is well-placed, and drawn out vowels.  You just fill in the rest after that.   

[patman]

I always thought Tolkien was a creepy allegory about Nazi Germany...

[uwe]

Or about the Soviet Union ... different theories abound. If the hobbit saga is supposed to be a veiled criticism of totalitarian regimes then frankly I prefer Orwell's 1984 or Animal Farm as a piece of literature. Or Huxley's Brave New World. In contrast, Lord of the Rings is so apolitical it would have even escaped Nazi censorship. To give Tolkien credit where credit is due: When a German publishing house wanted to translate The Hobbit into German in 1938, he commendably refused the whole deal when they demanded a "Certificate of Aryan Pedigree". 

Granted, Lord of the Rings is also a - rather labored - moralistic tale about how ultimate power (the ring) leads even the best (the child-like, innocent hobbits) to ultimate corruption (Frodo's battle against the evil influence of the ring which only he could win, albeit at the expense of his life), but did Tolkien really need 1.000 pages and more to get that across? 

And  during all those pages Tolkien never manages to depict what makes "the forces of evil/Sauron" tick - lame. I like my villains explained.

[Pilgrim]

Au contraire, Tolkien is grand epic literature in the mold of Beowulf and the Odyssey.  The point is not in the allegory or hidden messages, it's the use of the language, (Tolkien's life focus) the wonderful mental pictures it paints, and the clever development of Middle-Earth as a world with a rich history, peopled by a variety of races with their own histories and relationships.  The popularity of Tolkien's epic tale is ample testimony to its appeal to millions who appreciate its tone, texture and images.  I'll grant there are a few places in the books which are somewhat heavy sledding, but that's generally true of most worthwhile books. 

Evil such as Sauron never needs to be explained.  It exists, it's very much in action today, and we see it in religious fanatics and small country dictators all the time.  We see its impacts and results constantly, whether the immediate trigger is greed, lust, envy, mental illness or sheer amoral lack of care about any other person or any other thing.  I don't really care why it exists, but I know that it does and is often inexplicable.

Full disclosure: at one time, I could write both Elvish and Dwarvish, having spent some hours poring through the appendices of the third book and working out serviceable alphabets for both.  I'm not a Tolkien fanatic, but I have immense respect for his literary achievements.

Ayn Rand couldn't polish Tolkien's boots! 

[uwe]

Hey, I wanted to slip an Ayn Rand comment in, but decided against it, and then what do you do?  I think even I prefer Ayn as a writer (not as a philosopher!) even though she is kind of wordy too.

I'll grant you that Tokien's linguistic penchant is all over that book and that he carefully crafted Middle Earth as a multi-national and  -racial something. And there would be no Game of Thrones without it, it has certainly left its mark. Game of Thrones has better sex scenes though, Lord of the Rings is rather asexual, don't you think? Neither the Orcs nor the Uruk-Hais ever had any fun with Orc or Uruk-Hai chicks (no wonder they were kind of grumpy!), no competiton for Daenerys Targaryen I'd say, who did not only look cute but also gave birth to three little dragons. 

Evil never needs to be explained? But that lacks literary ambition! Didn't Shakespeare explain his (real and perceived) villains rather well? Whether it was Macbeth or Shylock, he tried to make you understand where they are coming from and even his worst villains weren't all-bad, they were still human with feelings and all. With Tolkien, evil is some inhuman force of nature, he didn't even dare give Sauron a real physical body. That is too quasi-religious for me. I don't believe in the existence of evil - however you define it - as a spiritual concept that somehow hovers over mankind.


PS: "Full disclosure: at one time, I could write both Elvish and Dwarvish, having spent some hours poring through the appendices of the third book and working out serviceable alphabets for both."  You, Sir, are a very brave man!

[Pilgrim]

Evil never needs to be explained? But that lacks literary ambition! Didn't Shakespeare explain his (real and perceived) villains rather well? Whether it was Macbeth or Shylock, he tried to make you understand where they are coming from and even his worst villains weren't all-bad, they were still human with feelings and all. With Tolkien, evil is some inhuman force of nature, he didn't even dare give Sauron a real physical body. That is too quasi-religious for me. I don't believe in the existence of evil - however you define it - as a spiritual concept that somehow hovers over mankind.

Perhaps it lacks literary ambition, but considering the epic scope of Tolkien's work including languages, races and history, one can hardly claim that his work lacked either ambition or scope.  He just didn't invest additional energy in trying to explain Evil that didn't require explanation.

I always assumed that Sauron's motivation was a simple lust for total, complete power.  He certainly wouldn't be alone, either in Tolkien's work or in today's real world.

PS: "Full disclosure: at one time, I could write both Elvish and Dwarvish, having spent some hours poring through the appendices of the third book and working out serviceable alphabets for both."  You, Sir, are a very brave man!

De nada.  In fact, as a thanks for your stewardship (and rabble-rousing) on this estimable forum, I offer this Elvish sentiment: Elen sila lumenn' omentielvo "A star shines on the hour of our meeting".