Whole Lotta Love And Theft

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.

Experienced Again

In an age when so many museums and exhibitions seem to feel the need to dumb down and/or succumb to commercial pressures, it was a much more than pleasant surprise to visit the new Hendrix museum in central London.

Based in Jimi's old flat in Brook Street, it has the right balance of information, music and relevant artefacts.

The high points are his old acoustic on which he worked on most of his classics, including his iconoclastic version of Bob Dylan's 'All Along The Watchtower'; audio clips of him in the studio; and the reconstruction of his tastefully exotic bedroom.

Most of the furnishings are brilliantly sourced substitutes, but the mirror over the fireplace is the one that was there originally. And there is something decidedly spooky about looking into a mirror that you know Hendrix also looked into.

Then there is his record collection, perhaps the best mirror of all of the man. Everything he had is catalogued here, and in some cases there are the original album sleeves too. Above all, Hendrix was a blues man – the evidence here is in countless records by Lightning Hopkins, plus Howlin' Wolf, Robert Johnson, and the classic Albert King record 'Live Wire/Blues Power'. He also had, not surprisingly, pretty much everything by Dylan.

I bought my copy of 'Are You Experienced' in Paris in 1967 and so managed to get the psychedelic Barclay sleeve (below), rather than the extremely straight UK version. It was nice to find that Hendrix, too, had the French version in his collection rather than the English one, and that his was here on display.

It was also touching to find that when Jimi discovered that Handel had lived in the same building, he went down to the local record store and got a couple of the man's albums to check him out. The sleeves of those are here too – as is the Handel museum, next door.

Book to see them both - you will not be disappointed.

Between Rock And A Small Place

Talking of Bob Dylan… and there are often not many more interesting things to do… I've been reading 'Small Town Talk' the irresistible account by Barney Hoskins of Woodstock (the town, not the festival) in the era of Dylan and The Band.

The book has, inevitably, a lot of drugs and a reasonable amount of sex… but not so much rock 'n' roll. Hoskins emphasises the point that Dylan, The Band, The Basement Tapes and the music that flowed on from them had little to do with the loud excesses of rock and the prevailing spirit of the time.

They were hip, not hippie, and they were artists, not rock stars. The same applied to Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and John Martyn, who also had their Woodstock moments and inspirations.

Every one of these great creative artists gets a flaws-and-all portrait from Hoskins, as does the awesome/awful svengali Albert Grossman, and also the town of Woodstock itself – which went the way of all Edens and ended up as a tourist attraction.