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.

Stuck Outside The Forum With The Hendrix Blues Again

Was Jimi Hendrix a blues musician? There are some who will think this question in the same league as 'Is the pope a Catholic?' etc...

But for others, it seems, the very idea of Hendrix being thought of as a blues musician is akin to heresy.

A Facebook group called The Real Blues Forum hosts intricate and erudite discussion on the blues, but someone (not me) recently had the temerity to put up some pictures of Hendrix for discussion, because Jimi was seen to be holding actual blues albums in the photos.

When the subsequent discussion (all right, I did play a part in this bit) turned to Jimi being a great blues player, the originator of the strand made it clear that if there was another mention of Jimi's music (rather than the blues albums in the photos), he would remove, i.e. censor, the whole discussion.

A forum is a 'meeting place for open discussion'... but not The Real Blues Forum, it seems.

When I posted a quote from BB King — 'Jimi to me was one of the great explorers of the so-called Delta blues' — toys were thrown out of the pram and the discussion was closed down.

What is so terrible about suggesting that Jimi was part of the great blues tradition? BB hit on something with his reference to the Delta blues... for surely Hendrix was little more than the Robert Johnson of his time.

If Johnson had lived into the electric blues era, there is no telling where he and his playing might have gone. His music might even have been banned from being discussed on The Real Blues Forum.

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."

Men Of Mystery

Dylan, Tooting, doubling up, Like A Flower, Sabatini, Scaravelli... One thing leads to another in BlogWorld... And Vanda Scaravelli's yoga probably leads on to Jiddhu Krishnamurti. It was the great teacher Krishnamurti who introduced Scaravelli to Desikachar ... If you're interested in any of this, follow the links... But be warned, once you start going into the teachings of Krishnamurti, you may find (and even accept) that there is no way back out again.

While Dylan, or his songs, seem to come from the mind and heart of a shaman/poet/jokerman in tune with mystery and that semi-enlightenment that shines through the work of musical and poetic geniuses, Krishnamurti appears to be the full real deal, the mind and heart in full enlightenment and in complete touch with the nameless.

Why mention Dylan and Krishnamurti in the same sentence? I've seen them both on stage and can't think of any other humans of that stature that have moved me as they have. But while Dylan notoriously declared he saw himself as "a song and dance man" (which those who have seen him in recent times will probably appreciate), Krishnamurti always made it clear that "this is not an entertainment".

Krishnamurti, like Dylan, sees the positive in the negative. Only in rejecting everything that is "known" can one come to truth, or, more correctly, can the truth reveal itself. It's not clear whether Dylan has now rejected religion, although a telling line on his 2009 album Together Through Life suggested that the road that had led him from 1973's Knocking On Heaven's Door to 1997's Tryin' To Get To Heaven (Before They Close The Door) had finally brought him to the conclusion that "The door has closed for ever more, if indeed there ever was a door..." Is it just me, or is this one of the most powerfully haunting lines Dylan has ever sung?

Krishnamurti rejects religion, along with nationality, identity, politics, philosophy. You name it, he rejects it. And, like Dylan, he gives you no answers, just asks questions... and suggests you ask questions... for all the answers are inside you... and you are the world (literally, not theoretically). And that statement is a universe away from the dire charity song We Are The World (which, amazingly, managed to drag in Dylan for a fleeting contribution).

Krishnamurti always comes back to the fact that the observer is the observed, the thinker is the thought. The "I' is a false construct of thought, memory and psychological time... and psychological time does not exist, any more than the past or the present exist.

Heavy stuff. But if you want lighter stuff, you'll be content with preachers, gurus, entertainers and those song and dance men who have no connection to the power of mystery.

Krishnamurti died in 1986. He still seems to live in the minds and hearts of thousands of those who heard and saw him and tried to get to grips with his 65 years of teachings. He was 90. Dylan is still only 70 and has a few more gigs to play.

I can't think of anyone else but these two whom I would give almost anything to see... apart from maybe the Buddha... and Robert Johnson... uh oh, more blogs coming on...