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.
