Led Zeppelin FAQ_All That's Left to Know About the Greatest Hard Rock Band of All Time

by George Case

  On initial hearing, of course, the parallels between the two movements are plain, and it could well be that Page was thinking of “Taurus” when he began to put “Stairway to Heaven” together on acoustic guitar in 1970. Then again, as with any number of other musical passages, some chord shifts and changes practically write themselves, in that it would be harmonically difficult not to follow one with another to make emotional sense. Willie Nelson’s rendition of the Hoagy Carmichael chestnut “Stardust,” for example, has a similar lead-in from a minor chord that goes down one fret at a time for a similarly wistful effect. If Page was copying California, he did so with the skills of a more proficient musician, redoing an interesting but unremarkable arrangement in a more elaborate way. Page’s onetime collaborator and girlfriend Jackie DeShannon was to recollect showing a part she had written to the guitarist, then (1964) a busy session player. “Jimmy played it back to me, of course ten times better, and it was perfect.” Something analogous may have happened when Page decided he liked the inherent theme of “Taurus” but wanted to make it more ornate.

  Not everyone may buy this, certainly—Randy California has commented with some bitterness on the resemblance of the opening of “Stairway” to that of “Taurus”—but the connection between the two songs seems to derive more from the ubiquity of Led Zeppelin’s classic than from any planned appropriation. In other words, it’s probably a coincidence that one very famous piece of music sounds, for a few seconds of its eight minutes, like a mostly forgotten one. The same goes for “And She’s Lonely” by the 1960s group the Chocolate Watchband, another purported “Stairway” foundation. Meanwhile, guitarist Randy Bachman (the Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive) has opined that the Robert Plant’s vocal melody in “Stairway” was inspired by the blind Irish harpist Turlough O’Carolan’s “Carolan’s Dream,” from the eighteenth century. Others have compared Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” to the final electric minutes of “Stairway to Heaven” (the songs are once more structured on the same descending chords repeated over and over), but Page himself said the same segment reminded him of Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road, Jack.” Who’s to say? Though for some Zeppelin cuts the charges of plagiarism are pretty pointed, those aimed at the most enduring Zeppelin number of all are far less persuasive.

  “When the Levee Breaks” (Bonham-Jones-Page-Plant-Memphis Minnie)

  Though Led Zeppelin’s hugest blues explosion is today listed as a shared creation with the blues singer Memphis Minnie (Lizzie Douglas, 1897–1973), the first pressings of the album on which it appeared left the influential Delta vocalist-guitarist’s name off the credits. In fact, a more accurate acknowledgment might name Minnie’s husband and musical partner at the time of her recording, Kansas Joe McCoy (1905–1950), as a sixth cowriter, since their 1929 song described the recent Mississippi River floods of 1927 and the subsequent migration of impoverished black farm workers to the industrial hub of Chicago. By the band’s fourth record the opposing cases for formal purism against spontaneous evolution were being felt: The version of “When the Levee Breaks” on Led Zeppelin IV owes as much to the 1971 performance of the four young Britons, plus Page and Andy John’s recording techniques, as it does to the forty-year-old original, and the “Memphis Minnie” tacked on to the Bonham-Jones-Page-Plant citation reads a little grudgingly.

  “Custard Pie” (Page-Plant)

  The funky intro to Physical Graffiti is yet another of Robert Plant’s simmering stews of blues, whose lines are dominated by Bukka White’s “Shake ’Em On Down,” plus Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon’s “Drop Down Mama” from 1935, Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Help Me,” and Blind Boy Fuller’s “I Want Some of Your Pie.” Here it’s worth considering again what the self-proclaimed composers were thinking when they put their names to this—did they imagine their quotations were stitched together so randomly as to constitute a new work, did Plant forget where exactly his verses came from and not bother looking them up, or did Page assume rich white superstars had better lawyers than any poor black troubadour could ever enlist against them? “Custard Pie” isn’t as disjointed as, say, “Black Dog” in its lyrical premises, but nor is it descended from one immediate forerunner, like “Dazed and Confused” or “The Lemon Song.” The Page-Plant credit here must be put down to the now-typical Led Zeppelin muddle of carelessness, opportunism, and indifference.

  “The Rover” (Page-Plant)

  Pure speculation, but this Physical Graffiti grinder has a similar descending chord passage to Elvis Presley’s “Burning Love,” slowed down and distorted. Page and Plant were firm Elvis fans, and the entire band even met the King on one occasion. However, “The Rover” was first essayed in 1970 as an acoustic song and remade in its final version by 1974, while “Burning Love” was released in 1972. Probably a curious overlap rather than a studied imitation.

  “In My Time of Dying” (Bonham-Jones-Page-Plant)

  Led Zeppelin’s longest piece clocks in at over eleven minutes, and, with Page’s Danelectro electric guitar tuned to a bluesy open A, it is also one of his most compelling slide demonstrations. Much of the song’s authenticity, of course, is owed to its predecessor, “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed,” recorded by Texan religious preacher and street performer Blind Willie Johnson (c.1890–1947) in 1927. The Zeppelin take was probably inspired by Bob Dylan’s cover (titled “In My Time of Dyin’”) from his 1962 debut album, which later figured in some of the teenage Robert Plant’s 1960s sets. Another candidate could be folk-blues artist Josh White’s rendition from the early 1930s. But the song may even predate Blind Willie Johnson’s version: A 1942 collection, Songs of American Folks, notes “We have never heard this song except from Wallace House, the most versatile guitarist and Folk Singer we know, who in turn got it from [folklorist] Zora Hurston,” where it’s called “Jesus Goin’ to Make Up My Dyin’ Bed.” Any number of African-American spirituals call on Jesus (“Soon I Will Be Done,” “Wade in the Water,” “When I’m Gone”), and the scorching blues-rock of Led Zeppelin’s cut, while clearly descended from Blind Willie Johnson, is a pretty extreme elaboration on a standard thematic premise. “It was just being put together when we recorded it,” Page has said of his “In My Time of Dying.” “It’s jammed at the end and we didn’t even have a proper way to stop the thing…. I liked it because we really sounded like a working group.”

  “Boogie with Stu” (Bonham-Jones-Page-Plant-Ian Stewart-Mrs. Valens)

  The credits of this jaunty cut, a lighthearted vamp taped in 1971 with Rolling Stones keyboardist Ian Stewart (who also played on “Rock and Roll”), may have been Page’s rejoinder to the critics who had been tossing the thievery labels around from day one. “Curiously enough, the one time we tried to do the right thing, it blew up in our faces,” he told Guitar World magazine in 1998. The song, he said, “was obviously a variation

  Blind Willie Johnson’s “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed” was an obvious forerunner of Zeppelin’s “In My Time of Dying.”

  Archive Photos/Getty Images

  on ‘Ooh! My Head’ by the late Ritchie Valens, which itself was actually a variation of Little Richard’s ‘Ooh! My Soul.’ What we tried to do was give Ritchie’s mother credit, because we heard she never received any royalties from any of her son’s hits, and Robert did lean on that lyric a bit. So what happens? They tried to sue us for all of the song! We had to say bugger off.” How conscientious Page really intended to be is difficult to say. “Mrs. Valens” reads like an inside joke more than a genuine recognition (Ritchie Valens, killed in the 1959 plane crash that took Buddy Holly, was born Richard Valenzuela), and it’s questionable how much income actually went to Concepcion “Connie” Valenzuela—or why Little Richard (Richard Penniman) didn’t get anything from either Valens or Led Zeppelin.

  “Nobody’s Fault but Mine” (Page-Plant)

  By the time of 1976’s Presence, Led Zeppelin were one of the biggest rock groups in the world, and Jimmy Page must have known the album would be a ma
ssive seller whose fourth song would soon be noted for its resemblance to Blind Willie Johnson’s “It’s Nobody’s Fault but Mine” from 1928. Page was likely more mindful of John Renbourn’s 1966 acoustic take (credited to Renbourn) than Johnson’s, and Robert Plant added cryptic and despairing lyrics about having a monkey on his back and having to change his ways, relevant to the Zeppelin lifestyle of the day. The Presence version, done as a hard rock number with sinuous phasing effects and a titanic rhythmic underlay, was another electronic update where the advanced stereophonic medium was presumed to displace the Texas gutbucket message.

  With “Custard Pie” and “In My Time of Dying,” “Nobody’s Fault but Mine” reveals the offhand manner in which Led Zeppelin observed their late-period legal niceties. Once more, the issue comes down to whether Page, Peter Grant, and the rest of the musicians really considered themselves above the publishing laws as they applied to dead or elderly African-American blues artists, or whether they merely supposed the sonic sophistication of their performances amounted to original songs, no matter what previous examples they’d drawn on. Their invulnerable commercial stature of the mid-1970s would argue the former, but their frenetic schedules and compromised mental health of the same era weighs in favor of the latter.

  “Tea for One” (Page-Plant)

  Led Zeppelin’s one obvious case of self-plagiarism, “Tea for One” uses the same basic chord progression (C minor, F minor, G minor) as the Page-Plant-Jones opus “Since I’ve Been Loving You” and probably derived from jams around the older song. However, “Tea for One” features a more mature lyric, unlike the blues formulae of “Since I’ve Been Loving You,” and its instrumentation is driven by Page’s tasty guitars without the keyboard flourishes of the prototype.

  “In the Evening” (Jones-Page-Plant)

  Long after its release on 1979’s In Through the Out Door, Robert Plant admitted that the first line of this intro track was taken from the obscure “Tomorrow’s Clown,” by early English rock ’n’ roller Marty Wilde.

  “South Bound Saurez” (Jones-Plant)

  The “sha-la-la-las” toward the end of this catchy groove are almost identical to the backing vocals in Roy Orbison’s “Mean Woman Blues.” Of course, there is no way to copyright such phrases, which are as basic to the language of pop music as “baby,” “ooh wah,” “hoochie-koo,” and “wang dang.”

  “Poor Tom” (Page-Plant)

  First recorded in 1970 but not released until 1982’s Coda, “Poor Tom” uses Page’s quirky guitar tuning and Bonham’s rat-a-tat drumming to illustrate an ancient story of jealousy, murder, and punishment. Both the title and the narrative seem to date back to the seventeenth century, around such British folk lyrics as “Poor Tom hath been imprison’d,” “Poor Tom the Taylor [sic] His Lamentation,” and “Poor Tom’s Progress.” Others point out that the instrumentation suggests Robert Wilkins’s “Prodigal Sun,” an acoustic blues number later played by the Rolling Stones. Near the end of the song Plant also quotes the hippie maxim “Keep on truckin’,” either from the famous R. Crumb poster of 1968 or Blind Boy Fuller’s “Truckin’ My Blues Away,” from 1937.

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  Steal Away

  Other Musicians’ Borrowing from Led Zeppelin

  Many Many Men: Zeppelin Songs Imitated

  Apart from Zeppelin’s broad sonic influence on all of rock—heavy electric riffs, gentle acoustic ballads that turn into headbanging anthems, squealing blues guitar solos, mystical lyrics, and so on—there are a few specific cases where one or more of their own songs can be heard underneath new tracks by later players. This doesn’t even take into account the many hard rock or metal acts that used the Led Zeppelin “look” (four-piece groups with big hair, open shirts, sensitive singers, and brooding guitar heroes) for their own video or live appearances.

  Because Zeppelin was so popular few artists have thought they could do with “Whole Lotta Love” or “The Lemon Song” what Page and Company did with “You Need Love” and “Killing Floor,” but nevertheless the following titles are instances where it is not hard to hear Led Zeppelin’s music used, inadvertently or not, as the basis for nominally original material.

  Kingdom Come: “What Love Can Be”

  Dubbed “Kingdom Clone” by Jimmy Page and many fans, the late-’80s German-American hair metal act used the Plant-like vocal timbres of singer Lenny Wolf to pull off this hit, which sounds a lot like “Since I’ve Been Loving You” as heard in a parallel universe.

  Kingdom Come: “Get It On”

  Less traceable to a single Zeppelin cut, “Get It On” incorporates the stuttering riffs of “The Ocean” and “Black Dog” and the ascending progression of “Kashmir,” while Wolf’s vocals are highly reminiscent of those on “What Is and What Should Never Be.”

  Lynryd Skynyrd: “Sweet Home Alabama”

  Though the song is an undisputed rock ’n’ roll classic in its own right, the opening three chords and guitar lick of the Dixie anthem are almost identical to the intro of “Your Time Is Gonna Come.” It’s hard to patent something as simple as the D-C-G arrangement, but play the two songs back-to-back and the (likely accidental) similarity is obvious.

  Whitesnake: “Still of the Night”

  By another 1980s metal outfit that took advantage of Led Zeppelin’s ongoing status as a favorite disbanded band, this hard rocker plainly borrows the same call-and-response pattern of “Black Dog”—unaccompanied vocals alternating with a twisty blues-based riff. Both live and on TV, guitarist Adrian Vandenberg was even seen bowing his guitars à la Jimmy Page. Whitesnake’s brazen reproduction of Zeppelin’s music and showmanship bothered Robert Plant, whose pouting and posing stage moves singer David Coverdale had down to perfection, but Page ended up working with Coverdale on a collaborative 1993 album and Japanese tour. “Still of the Night” went full circle when it was played by Page himself in Japan. Another Whitesnake number, “Judgement Day,” could be the unholy union of Zep’s “Kashmir” and “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.”

  Heart: “Barracuda”

  A longtime FM radio essential, this number, with its hard-driving, stop-and-start thud, is very derivative of Zeppelin’s “Achilles Last Stand.” Drummer Denny Carmassi was later recruited into the Coverdale-Page band, flattering the late John Bonham with his very sincere imitation.

  Heart: “Sylvan Song”

  This lovely instrumental of guitars and mandolins from the 1977 Little Queen album could well be guitarist Nancy Wilson’s approximation of Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore,” “Going to California,” or “Bron-yr-Aur,” similar to all three without directly quoting any one.

  Black Sabbath: “Paranoid”

  Like the Heart and Skynyrd cuts, this founding text of heavy metal from 1970 is a sidelong tribute to Zeppelin’s inescapable redefinition of rock ’n’ roll orchestration. The timeless worldwide hit was recorded almost as an afterthought while the quartet were making their second album. Bassist-lyricist Geezer Butler reportedly worried over the opening riff’s resemblance to “Communication Breakdown” (there’s also a hint of “Dazed and Confused” there as well). Both “Paranoid” and “Communication Breakdown” are fast and heavily distorted guitar progressions in the key of E; both are played with the chording hand deadening the strings enough to give them a chunky, almost percussive texture; and both are short: “Paranoid” is timed at 2:50, while “Communication Breakdown” runs 2:26. Though not a deliberate copy of any Zeppelin song, “Paranoid,” like many other well-known rock tracks, would not have been possible without the audio precedents established by Page, Plant, Jones, and Bonham in 1969.

  Eric Clapton: “Let It Grow”

  Clapton himself has admitted to unknowingly ripping off the introduction to “Stairway to Heaven” for inclusion in this number from his album 461 Ocean Boulevard, released in 1974. In his 2007 autobiography the guitarist confesses that this was “a cruel justice,” since, as a devoted blues purist himself, he had often been critical of Led Zeppelin’s
liberal takes on the Delta and Chicago canons. “Let It Grow” is still a nice tune, however, and the listener has to attend carefully for the “Stairway” snippet.

  Billy Squier: “Lonely Is the Night”

  Here and on his other famous songs from 1981–82 including “The Stroke,” “My Kinda Lover,” and “Everybody Wants You,” the American singer-guitarist’s voice and playing had a very Zeppelin-esque feel, emphasized by his high vocal range, stammering guitar lines, and record production that seemed to reproduce the reverberating audio stamp of Presence or In Through the Out Door. As with most of the titles listed here, there is no real plagiarism involved on “Lonely Is the Night,” but rather something between slavish tribute and subconscious mimicry.