I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck, but tonight I realized that “It Don’t Come Easy” by Ringo Starr and “Let It Rain” by Eric Clapton are essentially the same song.
I also know that “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” is a send up of “More Than a Feeling” by Boston.
And, of course, you have the whole “I Want a New Drug”-“Ghostbusters” thing. Then you have the George Harrison’s problem with the Chiffons.
In rock, it’s a common problem with the omniscient chord structure. And there are a lot of intentional copies, such as Vanilla Ice and Queenl.
I’m just wondering though, what other songs are the same that you’ve noticed?
Part of “Centerfold” by the J Geils Band sounds exactly the same as a Korean song whose name I don’t recall. Namely, the first six notes of the “Da, DA, da da da da” chorus. I don’t know if that’s enough to make it a ripoff.
Is that what you thought when you first heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit?” When I first heard “More Than A Feeling” I thought "Hey, this is ‘Tend My Garden’ by the James Gang!"
The “Shire” tune from Lord of the Rings starts the same way as the hymn “This Is My Father’s World”, which according to Wikipedia is by Franklin L. Sheppard, but is based on a “traditional English melody.”
“Make 'Em Laugh” from the movie Singing in the Rain is by Alan Freed, but is so close to Cole Porter’s “Be a Clown” that Freed was worried about a lawsuit. So he showed up at Porter’s one day “with a checkbook in one hand and a job offer in the other” IIRC, both of which Porter needed at the time.
Yesterday I heard a piece of classical music on the radio. I didn’t catch its title, but it sounded almost exactly like the pop tune “Alone Again, Naturally.”
John Fogerty’s “Run Through the Jungle” and “The Old Man Down the Road”, the latter of which resulted in him being sued for copying himself (he prevailed, details in this article about a subsequent Supreme Court case regarding the award of attorney’s fees).
