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.

The Literary Drummer

Question: What do you call someone who spends all their time hanging around with musicans? Answer: A drummer.

Not particularly funny jokes like this reinforce the idea that drummers are not proper musos. Trying to think of the most musical drummer in rock, I reckoned it had to be BJ Wilson.

You might know him for playing on Joe Cocker's With A Little Help From My Friends, or you might know him from the various stories about Jimmy Page asking him to join Led Zeppelin prior to his thinking about a bloke called John Bonham.

But you should know him for his epic work with the classic line-up of Procol Harum. Wilson's style has been described as "literary", so closely did the drama of his percussion follow the drama of Keith Reid's lyrics and Gary Brooker's music.

If you need any persuasion, listen to the drum fills on the song A Salty Dog — a piece for which Brooker said there was no drum part, but Wilson proved emphatically there was. This was totally original drumming, played completely for the song, using space and silence just as much as sound. And always surprises.

Scores of other tracks, such as the similarly cinematic Whaling Stories, illustrated Wilson's musicality. But check out his time-stopping barrage in the climaxes of Repent Walpurgis, from the very first Procol album, if you want to hear him in fullest flow.

Wilson died awfully and tragically young. And no one has ever quite matched him — as a rock drummer and musician.

The Juice On Johnson

Robert Johnson... He had to get in here sooner or later... If Sleepy John Estes was scary (see previous post), then Robert Johnson was downright terrifying. He became known to me through the composer's credits on Rambling On My Mind (which Eric Clapton slipped onto the Blues Breakers album) and Four Until Late (which Eric Clapton slipped onto the first Cream album, Fresh Cream).

From there it was a short step to hearing pretty much everything that Johnson had ever recorded in his brief but almost unbelievably brilliant blues career.

There's not much to add to all the thousands of words written about Johnson. It's enough to point out that without him, it's difficult to imagine any of the subsequent evolution of blues/rock. Oh, and can we please remember that it was Johnson, not Zeppelin, who coined the immortal line: "You can squeeze my lemon till the juice runs down my leg."