It's not entirely surprising that it's being claimed someone who wrote the basis of the music for a Led Zeppelin song was not onboard the Zep.
It's alleged that a significant part of 'Stairway To Heaven' was lifted from a song by Spirit.
There are fine lines between inspiration, paying tribute and stealing. Bob Dylan knowingly entitled an album which seemed to borrow musically and lyrically from a variety of sources 'Love And Theft'.
But he didn't credit Muddy Waters for his own take on 'Rollin' and Tumblin'' – although on a later album he did feel obliged to credit Willie Dixon for the Chicago blues riffing of 'My Wife's Home Town'.
Led Zep have previously been found out for lifting chunks of their classic 'Whole Lotta Love' from elsewhere. And one of their best-known vehicles, 'The Lemon Song', with its single-entendre stuff about squeezing lemons, was obviously taken from Robert Johnson's 'Travelling Riverside Blues'.
But then, where did Johnson get it from?
A line in a Summerley/Derbyshire song by our old band Shark Dentists, called 'Murakami's Blues', included the line 'All the lonely people, where do they all come from?' If it had become a major hit (it hasn't yet), then Paul McCartney might have complained to us... although the words have a different melody to that of 'Eleanor Rigby' and were deliberately used in this tribute to author Haruki Murakami to reference the importance that he has always placed on music and lyrics (as well as cats, sheep, wells and bizarre sex).
I'm not a devotee of Led Zeppelin (although whenever Russ Payne and Unison Bends play our version of 'Since I've Been Loving You', it always seems to go down rather well) nor am I a fan of 'Stairway To Heaven'.
The best version I ever heard of it was when I saw Frank Zappa do an epic and apparently amiable version of it on stage... then topping off the climax with the da-da-da-diddy-da-da-daaaah line from'Teddy Bears' Picnic'...
That seemed to say everything there was to say about 'Stairway'... whoever wrote it.
No comments:
Post a Comment