I don’t buy some of the accusations leveled on that site. For example, it says:
If I wrote Communication Breakdown, I wouldn’t have credited Eddie Cochran, either.
This is at the heart of the issue. Do you consider LZ to be artists who used inputs - even more or less doing a cover - to challenge new boundaries in their medium?
Or were they simple hacks, basically the equivalent of Pat Boone covering Little Richard because the audience was more open to hearing a Pat Boone singing the song?
IMHO - LZ blew whole new doors open - other bands like Cream, the Jeff Beck Group and Black Sabbath were exploring heavier blues-rock, too, but Zep’s work changed how everyone thought about rock and roll - and the blues.
I am open to arguing about the pettiness of LZ not crediting influences sufficiently - okay, smack their wrists, get 'em to pay and move on.
To me this is like hearing that Mickey Mantle drank and played hungover, JFK womanized or Picasso ripped off Braque or Matisse and took on new lovers as muses but treated them horribly and threw them aside - okay, got it - in some of their personal or business dealings, they weren’t great people.
But you can’t argue with the overall performance. If you like LZ and think they their music and influence put them in the pantheon with the likes of the Beatles, The Stones, Hendrix, etc. - then accept that, warts and all.
If you don’t think they are that great, then this type of info just reinforces an existing POV.
But focus on the work. And in their case, it is an amazing body of work.
How about Shakespeare? Most of his story lines aren’t original; does that diminish his genius?
If you thought the best thing about Shakespeare was the stories he came up with, then it probably does- but I don’t think anybody does that, and I’m not aware of Shakespeare taking credit for works that weren’t his (as opposed to using older story ideas, which his contemporaries did too).
Well I don’t think the best thing about LZ are the basic structure of their tunes. It’s the way they arrange it, the sonic textures, and most of all Jimmy Page’s exquisite musicality – in other words, as with Shakespeare, the execution.
Even if they were the greatest cover band ever (and it seems like they were), they were still presented to the public, for pretty much their entire career, as an original band. This might not matter to you, but it made a huge difference at the time. They owed their success to saying that these songs were all theirs, which Shakespeare did not.
Here’s a good link where you can listen to some clips of what Zep stole/copied from.
Or even Mario Roccuzzo.
[hijack]
BTW, does anyone know if this is the same Mario Roccuzzo who’s been a constant presence in the background of TV cop shows for the last 40 years? The timing would fit – he’d have been in California in the late 1950s trying to break into acting, but nothing I’ve seen anywhere indicates that he he had a musical career as well.[/hijack]
That’s way too nice to Shakespeare and not necessarily fair to LZ.
Copyright laws were different, if any even existed, back in Will’s time. It was likely to be 100% obvious to most upper-class Brits that Romeo & Juliet was, in effect, a full re-telling of Pyramus and Thisbe.
Checking Wikipedia - the number of sources for R&J is freakin’ HUGE:
Okay - so do you have a copy of Shakespeare’s draft that specifically cites Brooke’s poem? Was it used with permission? Did everyone seeing the play get educated “hey this is based on Greco-Roman mythology and more specifically from a poem I read”? Hardly.
Look, if you think LZ are lying rip-off artists - more power to you. But you can’t change their place in music history, or the fact that they did something to the songs they played that completely changed how people approached rock music at the time - and even through to today…
Sorry, you misunderstood me.
I meant it’s well-known that Led Zeppelin ripped off a lot of material in THEIR early blues stuff (ie: Babe I’m Gonna Leave You, The Lemon Song, Whole Lotta Love, etc), but was surprised to discover that their later, more rock material (Stairway, etc.) may also borrowed / stolen.
It’s not news that Led Zeppelin ripped off a shitload of stuff, mostly uncredited, and usually only paid the piper when forced to. I’m not happy about this, but they also did a lot of stuff that was quite their own. I like LZ’s sound, and I think they took a lot of the stuff they ripped off to new heights. On the balance, I give them a qualified pass, but I don’t feel good about it. It’s a difficult issue for me, but since I never revered them as godlike artistes anyway, meh.
Um, yeah that was kind of my point. Led Zeppelin would never have been heard on the radio if they were a cover band, no matter how good they were at it. However, everyone knew that Shakespeare was borrowing plots. That’s what
means.
Back in 1933 John Lomax, travelling with his son Alan, came to Angola Prison where they found Huddie Ledbetter, serving a sentence for murder. Lomax & son were folklorists and musicologists, recording music for the Library of congress and they wanted the folkmusic to be as authentic as possible, which is why they searched prisons.
Ledbetter was renamed Leadbelly and had to abqandon hope of being as good a musician as he really was. Ledbetter played seven instruments and liked to make covers of Gene Autrey songs and contemporary jazz numbers, but the Leadbelly Lomax took to New York to display (compare with King Kong) was forbidden to play violin or accordion, Only guitar and the simplest, most “authentic” songs were allowed. Ledbetter wanted fancy suits, but Lomax insisted he perform wearing his old prison uniform. It’s no surpise he flopped at the Apollo theatre - blacks weren’t interested, because this was what white people thought black music should sound like, raw and primitive: "as if I were listening to the tom-toms of savage blacks” to quote Lomax from notes he wrote in 1932.
Listening to actual African music, (which black slaves were not allowed to play in the U.S. but it survived in Latin American countries and the Caribbean (sp?)) it’s quite easy to hear how sophisticated it is, with very complex rythms.
So the most authentic form of American music - the blues - was created by whites for whites, It never was authentic in the first place. Led Zeppelin ripping off what essentially was fake can’t really get me upset.
From Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music by Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor.
Wow, BIG DEAL.
Please, Led Zepplin made each of these songs a whole lotta better, if you know what I mean.
Sure, some of the aspects of these songs, wether it be vocals and/or parts of riffs may be copied, I still think Zeppelin is awsome.
If it bothers you that they copied parts of songs, just don’t listen to them anymore.
Heck, in there defence, I’ll say that many of these blues bands would’nt have become very popular regardless of what Zeppelin did. Heck, it may even helped many of these bands gain more fame.
I think most people agree as long as they had given them all partial songwriting credits, everything would’ve been peachy. IIRC the only one of them ever giving a credit (and as a result $$$) was one Mrs. Valens.
I can’t agree with this at all. Of course radio would have played them. Nobody at the time cared very much that songs were based on old blues tunes. There had been hundreds of them and most groups were slow to give the originators any credit. That was a later development. Zeppelin’s place in rock history would not have changed the tiniest bit, as you’ll see.
And the question of what was “original” was far more open in those days. There were no good databases of music. You had to hunt through ASCAP and BMI to find publishers’ credits.
“Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” is a perfect example. It wasn’t credited because they heard it on a Joan Baez album listed as a “traditional” song, liked it and adapted it. Even pulykamell’s excellent list has it credited to her.
But she didn’t write it, nor is it a traditional folk song. Anne Bredon wrote it. It was part of the consensus playlist in New York City’s rising folk scene in the early 60s. Other people had recorded it before Baez did, but folk albums of that era were obscure even in the 60s.
If a songwriter was so obscure that Baez didn’t know the original in 1962, adapting blues songs whose originators were obscure or unknown then and still contentious today after decades of research was not seen as any sin by 1969. It was an issue only to a few reviewers and purists.
So the “rip-offs” were known from the very instant the album was released. It didn’t matter to radio, to concert-goers, or album-buyers. There’s no need to rewrite history. The accusations were always there.
We feel different today about lots of stuff that was taken for granted, ignored, insulted, or untalked about in the 60s. The real question is whether any steps have been made to change those attitudes.
In the case of Zeppelin, the answer is mostly yes. Anne Bredon has been given a co-writer credit on “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” since 1990. Co-writer is fair, because while I’ve never heard her version, I’ve heard some of the early folk recordings of it and the song is hardly recognizable except for the words.
This practice did get Zeppelin sued over the years. But they’re hardly alone. Countless lawsuits have been brought, with the settlements almost always going in favor of the originators. It’s not a pretty part of music history. But nothing about the business side of rock was ever pretty at any time, including today. You’d have to dismiss most of music history if your standards are that purist.
My vinyl of LZ I has credits for Dixon.
“Um”?! You “ummed” me?! 
**Exapno **did a fine job - your assertion that LZ would never have been heard on the radio if they were a cover band is baseless.
Yeah, those Mississippi sharecroppers – if de white man had just let them alone they’d all have been performing violin concertos at Carnegie Hall. :rolleyes:
I’m sure the Lomaxes and any number of other “folklorists” and “musicologists” and what not tailored their selection of performers and songs to fit their preconceived notions of what was “authentic” and what wasn’t, and it doesn’t take a lot of looking around to discover that boundaries between white and black music, country & western and blues and swing and jazz and everything else, were a lot more fluid than the pseudo-intellectual blues purists of the '60s and '70s would have you believe. But it also doesn’t take a lot of looking around to see that there were a whole lot of black performers making records on “race music” labels like Paramount, et al., and selling lots of them to other black folks, throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Many were readily identifiable as “blues”, though with a wide stylistic range, various instrument combinations, etc. To suggest that the “blues”, historically, was created by whites for whites is ludicrous on its face. Certainly the ownership and staff of most of the labels, distributors, and publishing houses was white, but neither the performers nor the audience were.
Of course, neither the audience nor the performers worried much about whether performers actually wrote their own songs, or whether they gave credit to whoever did. They weren’t collectors, or obsessive fan-boy types – they were people making some part of their living by playing music for other people, or people who wanted to dance and drink and gamble and have fun listening to music they liked. The same was true for the popular music that the white folks were playing and listening to as well – it’s just that there was more money to be made, and the writers and performers were in many cases more familiar with the idea that the “composer” was entitled to some compensation when others recorded or performed their songs, so they watched the till more carefully. I doubt that Page, Plant, Bonham, and Jones spent a whole lot of time thinking about creative credit or any of that, any more than Robert Johnson or Sonny Boy Williamson (either of them) or Son House or Elmore James did – LZ always seemed to me to have had other issues top of mind.
Roleyes all you want. I provided a cite, you provide opinion.
Black people played what they were allowed to play and during the 20th century, most of them played jazz and music derived from jazz. Satchmo made his first records in the 20’s, Robert Johnson in '36, when Leadbelly was acting “the noble savage” for Lomax in '33, Biillie Holiday made her first recording. Scott Joplin, arguably the father of ragtime started making money and
Two marches and a waltz? Yeah, dem sharecroppers on the delta sho could play dem songs to make a grown man weep. Negro spirituals, gospel and blues all the way.
BTW, which African instrument survived and is still thriving in America today, though not connected in any way to black, a.k.a urban music? banjo