Cold Plagiarism, or Your Grammie's Calling

The parrot was looking around for an opening to reclaim his spot in the cultural jungle, when what does he espy from his new lamppost in Bay Ridge but a New Yorker blog regarding the alleged filching of a certain guitar intro to the usual top contender for Greatest Rock and Roll Song of All Time. That would be... think carefully... Aerosmith's "Love in an Elevator"? Warm... Blue Oyster Cult's "Stairway to the Stars"? Warmer... Traffic, "Heaven is in Your Mind"? It seems to be on the tip of your tongue. Give up? Okay, think of Led Zeppelin's 10 best songs and you will probably, towards the bottom of the list, recall a tune called "Stairway to Heaven".

Now, think of Zep's 10 most plagiarized songs, and you will probably, towards the bottom of the list... (you can finish that one).

So I read this piece by Alex Ross and I can't help feeling that he misses the whole point. What he wants to do is give us a $2 music lesson on why the guitar intro of STH is not actually plagiarized from Spirit's "Taurus", and a list of other songs and classical sources that use the same chromatically descending bass line. Whereas my take on this and every other musical plagiarism case is basically, if it sounds like one is a substitute for the other with a few musically insignificant changes, and there is a history that demonstrates the later composer had access to the earlier composition, then it is plagiarized, and if either of those are not true, then it's not. The second condition is certainly met, in the STH case; the first is certainly not. You would not notice more than the vaguest similarity between the two intros if someone had not filed a suit hoping to win something slightly better than the lottery.

This is clearly a case of bandwagon litigation: Zep's generous borrowings are legendary by now, and they have in some cases been forced to give credit where credit is definitely due. The only thing due to Spirit or Michael Skidmore is a historical glance over the shoulder for being among the numerous users of a common bit of counterpoint. Compare Page's "Black Mountain Side" with Bert Jansch's considerably earlier performance of "Black Waterside" and you can hear what sounds like note for note copying of the arrangement for extended passages. (I heard Jansch play it in Brooklyn a few years before he died and it was cleaner than he was on this YouTube video, which brought out the similarity even more.) Page said somewhere that the tune was "going around the clubs" at the time. Regardless, he copied Jansch's arrangement without giving credit. Jansch never sued, though. Skidmore's attempt to spirit away part of the fortune Page & Plant made on Stairway is just crass golddigging.

Now, I could stop there, but I won't, and here's why. As I was thinking about contributing a few words to this glittering debate I went through my earlier posts to see if I had written anything on plagiarism in rock before - mainly to make sure I didn't grossly contradict myself (though parrots tend to be forgiven for such things). But all I found was this unpublished draft, which I found so funny at points that I figured let me just go ahead and publish it.Timely it's not - seems to have been written in 2009 or not long after - but then again, in light of the present plagiarism shindig, it almost is. Ross also mentions the similar spat between the Marvin Gaye family and Robin Thicke-Pharrell Williams' over "Blurred Lines". I don't get much out of that comparison either. Not like Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy", which a YouTube poster called out as sharing a melody with 4 Non Blondes' "What's Going On?" No lawsuit there yet, as far as I know. There seems to be a pattern here.

Well, if you like this sort of f stuff, read on. Here, more or less unexpurgated except for a few comments [in brackets] is what I wrote on this general subject a few years ago.

[Begin earlier draft] 
Let me start with a trivia question: In what year did Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, Chick Corea, Gary Burton, Metallica, Robert Plant, B.B. King, George Strait, Randy Brecker, The Eagles, Bela Fleck, Al Green, Mickey Hart, They Might Be Giants, Peter Gabriel, John Williams, BeauSoleil, Burning Spear, George Carlin, Bernard Haitink and Peter Bogdanovitch all win Grammy awards? 1979 you say? A little too early for Metallica. 1989? Come on, be brave. Try 2009. Um, deep catalogue, anyone? Or, as the judicious Ben Sisario put it for the Times, "the awards followed a familiar Grammy pattern, in which soft, reverent material beats out more aggressive and youthful music". [Metallica?] Read: the music your Grandma listens to beats the music you listen to. Isn't that why they call them the "Grammies"? [I guess this formula would not apply so well to Kendrick Lamar!]

So what could be more soft and reverent than Chris Martin and his band of Christmas carollers? Or is that snow angels? Well, as it turns out, the sandman is softer than the snowman. So Raising Sand, the odd, willowy, unclassifiable collection of soporific songs by the former Zep frontman and the country music's femme fiddle Alison Krauss got a whole lotta love from the Recording Academy, at the expense of Coldplay's Viva la Vida, which had to settle for Best Rock Album (which it certainly isn't), Song of the Year (which it probably is) and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group (which is so impossible to define that it could have gone to any n-some under the sun, where n > 1). At least Coldplay, though they've been around for a decade, is only on their 4th album, and at least it is probably their best, though you may infer that I don't think that says very much. Radiohead, who allegedly played their first gig in 1986, and recorded their one solid album (The Bends) in 1995 [yes, I know Kid A has its fans - I'm not one of them], walked off with the Alternative award, their third nomination and second award in that category. If there are any Academy members listening, please note for future reference that this category is supposed to identify tasteful alternative music, not music that is an alternative to taste. Perhaps selling out Madison Square Garden is now a quid pro quo for acceptable "alternative" offerings. OK, The Mars Volta got some yellow metallic object for Hard Rock Performance, as did the Kings of Leon (a safer bet) for Rock Performance by a Duo or Group. At least it wasn't the Killers, whose trite little pop number about humans and "dancer" has "we wants a Grammy" written all over it (you're welcome for the missing "s").

Okay, Grammie is stuck in a ditch, and where does that leave Coldplay? Helping to dig her out? But they have some digging of their own to do. With shovel number one they will have to try to convince the judge that they did not swipe the tune from "Viva la Vida" from Joe Satriani's wordless guitar piece "If I Could Fly". Shovel number two may be just a playground scoop, enough to bury the claim by the Brooklyn band Creaky Boards that Coldplay's hit tune borrowed some ideas from their song "The Songs I Didn't Write"(!). Shovel number three is a mere teaspoon, all they'll need to deal with my suggestion that their song "Clocks" bears more than a passing resemblance to Dylan's well-known "You Ain't Going Nowhere" (on his Greatest Hits Vol.2, at least one Dylan tribute album, The Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and also on The Basement Tapes, though that version is more chanted than sung). Of course there is the obvious nod in U2's direction with some of Coldplay's recent rhythm tracks, and the fact that they frequently sound like a poor man's Moody Blues. Influence, you know...

What is very striking here is that while the RIAA is out filing suits against 12-year-olds for copyright violation, their friends in the Recording Academy are perfectly happy to hand out awards for material whose originality has been challenged - very publicly in the case of the Satriani tune.

Is there a smoking gun here? Is there anything to worry about here? You can state the case for a negative answer very simply. If every case of obvious similarity in popular music resulted in a plagiarism charge and maybe a copyright infringement lawsuit, there wouldn't be many artists left standing. Not every ripoff is as famous as George Harrison's rather blatant adaptation of "She's So Fine" for the Indian mysticism market, or Zep's numerous assaults on the blues and folk repertory, or Dylan's liberal use of standards from below the Mason Dixon line, or Johnny Cash's hommage to Dylan's "Don't Think Twice..." in "Understand Your Man"... There was, for example, 10CC's pretty shameless copying of Jacques Brel's "Sons of..." in "The Film of My Love", an obscure tune at the end of The Original Soundtrack. There's a ton of this stuff going on. And you can extend that to literature, going all the way back to St. Augustine, apparently, or Anthony Trollope if you prefer. This is a way of writing off plagiarism as a moral issue in general, and in pop music in particular. You just look at the volume of it, and say it's common practice, and that's that. Kind of the way, when I was teaching, some students from old Soviet-bloc countries used to tell me about plagiarizing their papers: it's normal, everybody does it, why do you have a problem with it?

The other way of looking at it is this: there's a hell of a lot of room left for creativity in popular music, even if it sometimes doesn't seem that way due to the endlessly repetitive nature of major label releases and the volume of imitations ("Is that the All American Rejects on the radio or is that some new release from Green Day?" "Did he say this song is by the Stone Temple Pilots? Gee, it sounds just like Pearl Jam!" etc.) There is really no good reason even for copying riffs and tunes in a way that doesn't meet the cutoff for copyright infringement; it may not be illegal, but it's unethical and embarrassing. No author has to copy existing texts to say something, and allusion is of questionable value to the masses who don't get it, so why not stick with originality all the way through?

Well, there you have the two poles, what to do, what to do? To me, the first and most important step is simple, honest and more or less painless: credit your sources. "So I was listening to this Satriani album right after I dropped in on a gig by the Creaky Boards and suddenly I started putting together in my head what I heard and it came out as this song. Thanks to Joe and Creaky." Second, if there is any doubt whatsoever about how close you are to what came before, pay the mechanical rights. It costs very little to pay the rights to a couple of songs on an album; it's good for the artist you (may have) borrowed from, and it keeps you honest. Third, make sure you are really adding value to the material you started with, otherwise just call it a cover, or get your own music.

The first two of these are simple. It's the third that creates all the ruckus. When an artist thinks he has added enough value to some existing material, the tendency is to call it his own, reduce the appropriated source to "influence", and forget the niceties. But when is that the case? It can be a very tough judgment to make. For example, I don't think Billy Bragg adds much to Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom" in his song "Ideology"; it's a ripoff, to my ears, same tune with lyrics that repeat the idea if not the exact content of Dylan's song. So, should Bragg have credited Dylan? Probably, but... then there is the possibility (actually just presented as fact in the Wikipedia entry on "Chimes of Freedom") that Dylan got the basis of the song from Dave Van Ronk... who got it from his Mom... who got it from who knows where... To my knowledge, Dylan has never sued anyone for copyright infringement.
[End original post]

And to that I only have to add: how many artists have ripped off Led Zeppelin and not given them credit? That list goes on and on. My point, finally, is that these petty, vague, ultimately very subjective claims of copyright infringement are morally and aesthetically contemptible. I once knew a photographer who sued an artist who had taken one of his photographs, painted the scene, and sold that painting. That is pretty obnoxious, but even photographs of other photographs have been upheld as original works of art. You've got to do better than that to demonstrate mere copying. I am not convinced that most cases of alleged musical plagiarism amount to much.

Remembering 40 Years of Good Times, (during some) Bad Times

Okay, so I said I'd talk about Coldplay. We're getting there - I mean, at least it's a band widely accused of having plagiarized a cut or two. But, disappointment to follow: I'm not going to talk about Led Zep's plagiarism, not even after hearing Bert Jansch play what must be the original version of "Black Mountain Side" a year ago or so. Zep's alleged plagiarism of Willie Dixon and others is old news. So are their other alleged nefarious misdeeds, like beating the crap out of one of Bill Graham's concert managers. In fact I think I've mentioned them before in this blog, so why beat a dead, er, whale? Besides, after watching Jimmy Page pop out of that bus at the Beijing Olympics and perform the next to impossible task of convincing us that we should pay any attention to England after that phantasmagoria of sporting prowess and technical wizardry, I am inclined to let the past be the past.

But not quite. Today, you see, is the 40th anniversary of Led Zeppelin's eponymous debut album. (I know, you thought Eponymous was by R.E.M.; and I thought R.E.M. was something you do in the middle of the night.) After spending the day discussing with my brothers whether this was the greatest post-Beatles album of all time, I could not help but want to add a few thoughts to settle the matter. I'm sure my brothers will agree wholeheartedly that this is the end of it. Not that I dare look at the comments for a year or two.

Actually I don't really want to settle whether this is the greatest post-Beatles album ever. (It's not technically post-Beatles, because Abbey Road and Let It Be had yet to come out, but we all know The Beatles were pretty much history by the end of 1969, the year Zep I was released.) There are, for those of us inclined to discuss such things, a few contenders for the crown - Dark Side of the Moon, being a prime candidate, maybe The Yes Album or Close to the Edge, maybe In the Court of the Crimson King. (If I have to say who the bands are you probably won't appreciate this post much. Please move to the next one, where I promise to mention Coldplay at least once.) Not too many more options, though if you want to push it you could maybe make a case for Born to Run or Never Mind the Bullocks or Nevermind (hey... never noticed that before). No question, though, Zep I is sort of in a class by itself, and all I want to talk about here is why it made the impression it did.

And, let's just say, it did - indisputably, indelibly, left an imprint the size of a cattle brand on the belly of rock music. For me, it was the first album that created a sort of mystical communion with the music: lying behind a bar at my summer camp when I was 14 years old, in a kind of makeshift isolation booth with some pillows on the floor and a set of Koss headphones, I and everyone else on the staff spun it on a reel to reel, vying nightly for a chance to listen. There were other albums - Wheels of Fire, definitely, I think maybe Days of Future Passed was among them, and CCR's Bayou Country (the one with "Proud Mary") but the album that summer was Led Zeppelin. Nothing compared.

And that alone is amazing. This was July-August of 1969. I'm not sure of the exact release dates, but among the other albums that came out that year were In the Court of the Crimson King, Abbey Road, Let It Bleed, On the Thresshold of a Dream, The Band, 2 or 3 of CCR's best albums, Live Dead and Aoxomoxoa, Clouds, Crosby Still and Nash, The Soft Parade, Hot Rats, The Velvet Underground... and that is really just a snapshot. To say nothing of the equally unbelievable output of 1967-8. Yet, coming at the tail end of what my be the three greatest years ever in popular music ("may be" is a concession to objectivity; shine a light in my brain and you're going to see something like "without the slightest shadow of a question, the 3 greatest years that ever were or will be in popular music" - but I have to be more objective since I'm pretending to be a sort of journalist here) Led Zeppelin demanded and got your undivided attention, from the two opening beats of "Good Times, Bad Times" to the last bowed elephant whine in "How Many More Times". Why? What was so special? I suppose this has been answered before, but I don't really care; I'm going to answer it again.

Start with this: those two opening beats - what are they? Where on earth did they come from? What can you compare them to? Nothing, really; but here's what comes to mind: Bill Haley bursting out, "One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock rock!"; the first guitar chord in "A Hard Day's Night"; or Mick Jagger insisting, "What a drag it is getting old..." at the beginning of "Mother's Little Helper". If not that, then the first line of Moby Dick ("Call me Ishmael"); or the opening of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ("Let us go then, you and I..."). Or, the best analogy I think: the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The point is, it is absolutely as dramatic a statement as you could make, and they did it with two beats. No other album or song intro quite like it in the history of music.

And what happens next? Well, they build. The two beats (dunk-dunk) develop a tail in the form of John Bonham's tap, tap, tap. Then the taps double (dunk-dunk tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap). Then they add a dotted note, and finally, after a perfectly crafted 2-bar drum intro all hell breaks loose. And here already you can pick up, if you are alert, what will be one of the defining aspects of this album: the drums have become an absolutely equal, in fact essential, part of the music. This is not to diminish the brilliant work that had already been contributed by such percussionists as Ringo, Charlie Watts, Keith Moon, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, Mitch Mitchell, Dennis Wilson, Spencer Dryden, Corky Lang and of course Ginger Baker. Ringo's brilliant work on "Come Together" - a lesson in how to make a "rhythm section" into the essence of a song - came out later the same year, but he had made himself an essential part of other Beatles tunes, starting at least as far back as his dynamic fills in "Boys". Baker and Moon were perhaps the closest to breaking out of the backup role and putting the drums in a place of prominence. But with Bonham and Zep the job was completed, and it was not limited to this song or that, it was a totally defining component of the band's sound. Oddly enough, one of the few songs on which Bonham would ever play a straight backbeat was "Kashmir" - perhaps their most "progressive" tune, where the 4/4 backbeat is intentionally at odds with the 6/4 of the meter hammered out by the guitar and keyboards. Never mind the introduction of 30-minute drum solos, the doubling of the bass drum, or other of Bonham's innovations. By the time he provided that slightly off-center 2-bar lead-in, you could pretty much say that rock had entered a new era.

That was only a part of what happened with Zep I, though. The next big story has to be the voice of Robert Plant. Throughout the album, on nearly every cut, Plant's voice is an instrument. Just as the drums have jumped out from behind the curtain and become an instrument, so has the voice. It is no longer confined to singing. It is not confined, period. It sings, it screams, it wails, it whoops, it slides, it practically fornicates with the rest of the sound. It imitates the guitar, the guitar imitates Plant, they go back and forth - "imitates" is a lousy word here, because this is not "imitation" as in a Bach fugue, but a real blending, melding of voice and instrumental sound, until you cannot tell them apart. There are some nice harmonies here, and the singing itself is comparable in emotional quality only, perhaps, to that of Janis Joplin. (I Got Them Old Kosmic Blues Again, Mama was yet another great 1969 release.) But the story here was not just the singing of the lyrics, but the use of the voice as yet another new instrument.

This alone would be enough to turn a page in rock history. But of course, there was Page and his guitar. For one thing, there could be no question, none whatsoever, that this was the most aggressive guitar playing ever seen. Clapton was great, and those who hold him in higher esteem than Page - for his incomparable tone, his clean and graceful lines, his taste, not to mention the incredible double solos on Wheels of Fire - certainly have an argument, just as there are plenty of people who would rate John McLaughlin higher than Larry Coryell. For me, I like something who takes chances, and gets away with them, brilliantly in most cases, even if he sometimes falls, misses a couple of notes, makes some unpleasant noise. Page took chances no one even thought of taking before, and the result was - well, just listen, if you haven't recently, to the solos in "Good Times, Bad Times", "Dazed and Confused", and "Communication Breakdown", for instance. Paganini, the great 19th c. violinist, was accused of having sold his soul to the devil to be able to play the way he did. Page's solos have bat-out-of-hell quality that has been imitated about a billion times by now, but no mere technician can play rock and roll the way he did. I remember a friend of mine at the time dismissing Page as not very clean, and holding up Alvin Lee of Ten Years After as a better guitarist (Lee's work on the cut "Going Home" is justly famous.) Be that as it may, nothing Alvin Lee, or Zappa, or Jerry Garcia, or even Jorma had done would influence the style of rock guitar playing the way page did. He showed what could be done, in a way that only Jimi Hendrix had done before. If you wish, you could say that Jimmy perfected what Jimi had started. And it all came together, a mature, new, challenging sound, on the band's debut recording!

Page did more than just play fast solos, of course. He practically took the place of two guitarists, turning complex rhthms into leads and leads into the main backbones of songs. He moved beyond the reverb-and-wah-wah effects of the psychedelic era and challenged the echoplex to become part of the aural landscape. In spite of being the godfather of heavy metal, he brought in acoustic guitars with uncompromising fingerstyle technique that retained more than a bit of the feel of British folk music. Easy enough when you are helping yourself to a tune that Jansch had arranged, but "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" was to the best of my knowledge a Page original; and there would be plenty more folk material, from "Gallows Pole" to "Nobody's Fault But Mine". Here he was doing anything particularly new - Jorma's acoustic work, Harrison's sitar, and much else preceded him, but there had been a tendency to get away from it in acid rock. The concentration on both acoustic and Chicago-style urban blues brought a sense of roots-rock authenticity to Zep I that few recent groups could claim. Cream, for sure, The Beatles in their early days, Jefferson Airplane to some extent, maybe Canned Heat - but it was hard to miss the in-your-face attention to serious roots music on this album, even as it moved rock onto a whole new platform. At the same time, the technique of bowing the guitar, especially in "Dazed and Confused" and "How Many More Times", lent an almost surreal quality to the music, beyond psychedelic, not yet space-rock, but something totally futuristic and different and fascinating. "How the hell is he doing that?", was the natural reaction, and on finding out the answer - "I didn't know you could do that!" Well - there you go.

I have not even said a word yet about how Page played the blues. Perhaps because I don't have the words for it. Maybe that is best. There have been great blues players since - Stevie Ray Vaughan, George Thoroughgood, many others - but with all due respect, there are few recordings in the history of rock that even equal, much less surpass, the two (properly attributed) Willie Dixon cuts on Zep I, "You Shook Me" and "I Can't Quit You Babe". You can laugh at Page's imitation of Chuck Berry's patented shuffle on stage, but I've heard, I think, every major urban blues guitarist before Page, and I mean from Tampa Red and Lowell Fulson to B.B. King and Muddy Waters, and nobody played the blues quite like that. Of course, they couldn't: because he didn't just play the blues, he used the most cutting edge electronic effects to their full potential, and achieved a new kind of blues vocabulary in doing so. Again, only Hendrix compares as an innovator. And if you have any questions about his taste, I urge you to jump a couple of disks forward to Zep III, put those headphones on, and settle in with "Since I've Been Loving You", one of the most tasteful blues recordings ever made, to my ears.

Have I missed anything? Yes, indeed; a quarter of the band, in fact. No, make that two-fifths, since he was not only the bass player but the keyboard man. John Paul Jones - what can you say? There are so many places where his playing is so crucial to the music, I could almost repeat everything I said about Bonham but substitute "bass" for "drums". Caution suggests that I should not, though: as great as he was, and as important as he was, there were too many others who pioneered that trail, not least of them Paul McCartney. I tend to think that if there is anything McCartney hadn't done with a bass by 1969, then Jack Bruce or Phil Lesh or Jack Casady had. But whatever: from the little fills in "Good Times, Bad Times" to the opening of "Dazed and Confused" to that enormous avalanche of sound that plummets into "Oh Rosie, Oh girl..." in "How Many More Times", Jones was there, a helluva lot more than just a solid bottom. Maybe he wouldn't prove his full mettle until "The Lemon Song" on the next album, but he was already in top form on the first one.

So, how much can you say about a single album? A lot, I guess, since I recently saw a series of monographs on various rock classics for sale in B&N, I think. Come to the PL, folks, we're better and cheaper. But it's time to wrap up, and say goodnight to what is certainly one of the monuments of rock history. There have been some other great debut albums - King Crimson and Blue Oyster Cult, for example. For the most part, though, when you think about it, it has taken even the greatest groups a couple of disks to work up to their full potential. That Led Zep achieved this earth-shaking triumph with their first recording is truly in the realm of the incredible, an Opus 1 equal to the best that anyone else has to offer. To do that and not be a flash in the pan, but go on to record another seven albums packed with brilliant material, that is a feat equalled only by The Beatles, to my mind - and Led Zep's first recording was a greater achievement than anything the Beatles did until at least A Hard Day's Night, if not Revolver. And with that I bid you goodnight.