They similarly ripped off Blind Willie Johnson, J.B. Lenoir, Albert King, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Leadbelly, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Traffic …
Thanks the gods for Led Zeppelin! Music that doesn’t suck! Music that Rocks! I love Page’s long solos, even if they do get sloppy sometimes and ramble. He wasn’t afraid of going out on a limb to improvise in front of tens of thousands of people. Let’s see you do that. Actually being creative on the spot, as opposed to playing the same song, note perfect, night after night because you have practiced it over and over until it’s dead. Sure they may have “stolen” some blues songs but they had plenty more awesome originals. Kashmir? No Quarter? Amazing. Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones have more talent and soul in their little fingers than all of the popular bands of the last 10 years put together, in my opinion. Besides, my understanding is that reinterpreting blues songs is an old tradition. They got sued for doing it because they were/are huge. And Rush silly? Yeah, whatever.
Anyway, to the OP: I don’t know what the lyrics mean. I have heard many interpretations but none of them completely made sense. It is possible that they just used phrases that worked well with the song and in a theme, like they did with Stairway.
Could you expand on this please? I am particularly interested in the Albert King connection.
That would be the “The Hunter” section in “How Many More Times.” Although I always vaguely remember that as being acknowledged on the cover. OTOH, I also vaguely remember hearing an Ike & Tina Turner version of “The Hunter” on the radio around 1970 or '71 and going “Hey, wait a minute…”
What did they swipe from Traffic?
And who was it that came up with the riff first, Chicago Transit Authority for “25 Or 6 To 4” or Zeppelin for “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”?
Er…heh…ok cool.
Always nice to have someone note a mistake on an internet message board. I entirely agree with your point about Led Zeppelin though. Several years ago a music magazine (can’t rememebr the name but it was an English magazine) released a CD with the magazine called the “roots of Led Zeppelin”. By god if it wasn’t the exact same music!
That would be Mojo. I actually have that CD at home (my ex-wife subscribes and doesn’t care for the CDs, which she sends to me). I should dig it out.
White guilt my ass. Listen to Howlin’ Wolf’s version of “How Many More Times” - not “How Many More Years,” which is a very similar song (Wolf ripped himself off, I guess), but “How Many More Times” - and then the LZ one. They’re the same damn song. Musicians do rip each other off all the time, but not too many got as rich doing it as Zeppelin did.
Saying that Elvis or Zeppelin “stole” and “ripped off” and buhu didn’t give credit to old blues men and women, etc, is nothing but stating: I know nothing about music history and how it develops over time. Tell me one song which isn’t “stolen”, and I tell you you didn’t hear this or that tune, right? Stop being ridiculous. Elvis and Zeppelin, Beatles or Marley, or the other great artists of the 20th century were truly original - in the only sense the word is meaningful in this context - and took important musical steps we still hear echo in modern music. - But no, they didn’t create anything out of nothing; and yes, they loved music and took whatever they wanted from its history and made it their own, for us to “steal” from they if we wish. You see, That’s the Way It Is: The Song Remains the Same.
Saying you wrote a song somebody else wrote isn’t an important musical step, it’s just theft. Led Zeppelin’s sound did change rock music, but “How Many More Times” isn’t a sound. It’s a song someone else wrote that Led Zeppelin claimed they wrote.
The level of denial coming from fanboys defending Zep’s blatant, excessive, and well-established plagiarism is astounding. We’re not talking about adapting existing songs via the folk process, like the old rural bluesmen themselves did. Led Zeppelin weren’t part of that culture. They outright stole published, commercially recorded songs by top American bluesmen.
When the Doors recorded Willie Dixon and Bo Diddley songs, they credited them as such. When Cream recorded Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf songs, they credited them as such. When the Rolling Stones recorded Muddy Waters and Slim Harpo songs, they credited them as such. And make no mistake, those bands all put their own unique stamps on those songs. But Led Zeppelin seemed to feel that there was no need to acknowledge the person who provided them with the words, the tune, and the guitar lick to “Whole Lotta Love.”
With regard to Presley, he was quite open about his influences both white and black. In fact, in an interview in 1955 he was crediting black and white artists who influenced him. That said, he was unique and there really wasn’t anyone who sounded like him.
That said, some Zeppelin songs are directly ripped off (and I purposefully use that word) from earlier bluesmen. That’s not influence but theft imho.
At some point LZ fans (of which I am one) are going to need to accept that Led Zeppelin thieved their two best known songs (“Stairway to Heaven” and “Dazed and Confused”) outright, from other songs that had only been written a year or two previously.
The song **Dazed and Confused ** was written by Jake Holmes in 1968. The song, with its distinctive descending chord progression, appeared on Holmes’s incredible album The Above-Ground Sound of Jake Holmes (which is a must-hear, by the way). Page and Plant took that song, changed the words around, kept the descending progression, and changed the writing credits from Holmes to Page/Plant. This (and not sloppy playing, as is often cited) is why Page has never agreed to allow the rerelease of the Live Yardbirds album, and Holmes basically let them get away with it. To learn more, read the article from the excellent Shinding Magazine here (WARNING: PDF).
As for Stairway to Heaven, well, the entire acoustic guitar structure of the body of that song was taken wholesale from the song Taurus by the group Spirit. LZ used to open for Spirit, ad Page apparently took a great liking to the song when he heard Spirit play it live. Again, he decided not to credit the author of the song. But hey, listen to the song here. Again, it’s another amazing album.
Bits and pieces of “Your Time Is Gonna Come” are taken straight from “Mr. Fantasy.” I don’t just mean they’re similar—I can show you on a guitar how they are identical. Usually I don’t get worked up when such similarities arise—these things happen innocently too—but given the Zepsters’ track-record, they don’t get the benefit of the doubt.
And here’s a better link to the whole song Taurus (Real Audio, from a WFMU radio bradcast)…
Um, well, this dumbfuck has played the guitar for over thirty years, plays the banjo, mandolin, and ukulele as well, was a professional musician for twelve years between college and grad school, and is a very accomplished country blues player (ragtime/Piedmont/Delta blues). I’ve been paid to play rock, blues, folk, country, soul, pop, and bluegrass. I know the blues/folk tradition quite well, thanks, and I know perfectly well that the tradition is musically incestuous. Hell, I was even a big Zeppelin fan as a teenager, and could play their stuff note-for-note then. There’s a difference between someone saying, “I stole this from Charlie Patton, because it’s a great turnaround,” and stealing someone’s tunes and saying you wrote them (and collecting all the dough). The former is flattery; the latter is being-a-motherfucker. Do I sound smug? I don’t give a flying fuck. Change your tone, and don’t lecture me.
Well, you know, it’s rock’n’roll. If it makes you upset, nobody’s crying on your behalf.
Nor on yours. Conversation over.