Holly2003 wrote:
The Real Wizard wrote:
runner_70 wrote:
Zep are the most overrated band in Rock. Famous for stealing the blues standards (which they were sued more than once) and a borefest watching them live.
What Zeppelin did was common in the blues world. They were just the first band to make a ton of money doing it.
Nobody called it "stealing" in the 1960s. The lawyers didn't show up until much later.
Well ... yes and no. Black blues artists had a common cultural well to dip into/inspire them. (And some of it was cash-inspired theft. IIRC Robert Johnson stole Sweet Home Chicago from another black artist, and he certainly was not the first black musician to use the idea of selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads.) Whites didn't have that history. When they played blues and were successful it was often because black artists didn't have that exposure due to poverty or racism. So just like Elvis and rock & roll, there was certainly discussion about white appropriation and exploitation of black culture. In the 1960s when for example the Rolling Stones burst onto the scene playing rhythm and blues it wasn't received entirely positively among black Americans. But at least the Stones almost always credited the black artists they did covers of. For example, black blues artist Robert Wilkins received royalties when the Stones recorded his song ‘Prodigal Son’.In return for acknowledging their debt to black culture they received a kind of seal of approval when Otis Redding did a cover of 'Satisfaction.' In contrast, Led Zep claimed song writing credits on songs that were clearly not theirs. They banked all the cash for that and only changed their tune when lawyers forced them to.
I've had a good think about this and even gone and done some homework. Turns out we've both got a lot to learn here (runner_70 is just going to keep trolling, but you're someone I've always respected here, so I'll bite).
The Rolling Stones aren't exactly the best example to argue against Zeppelin with, as they ripped off blues artists long before Page and Plant did. Love In Vain and Stop Breaking Down particularly are lifts of Robert Johnson songs, and they came out in the same period as Zeppelin's early albums - 1969 and 1972 respectively. At the time nobody noticed or cared, but the Stones eventually lost in court in the year 2000. Neither Zeppelin nor the Stones could've envisioned lawyers several decades down the line listening to 70 year old blues albums and showing up in court on behalf of people who were long dead. Otis Redding covering Satisfaction doesn't undo anything the Stones did. They are just as guilty.
As for the Stones and songwriting credits, look no further than how Jagger and Richards treated Mick Taylor. Taylor wrote songs that Richards didn't even play on, and guess who didn't get a single songwriting credit in his entire tenure in the band?
Ry Cooder jammed with the Stones in 1969, and unbeknownst to him the tape was rolling and Keef stole a bunch of his riffs that later ended up in Stones songs. Cooder referred to them as "bloodsuckers." Again, not your best example for arguing against Zeppelin.
I digress.
People just weren't as educated about the American blues in 1969 as they are now, but now that they are, for some reason all the scrutiny has been hurled towards Zeppelin and not the Stones nor plenty of others who have done the same thing. So why just pick on Zeppelin?
There are many standards that were played and recorded by dozens of blues artists in the 1940s and 50s, but again, nobody cared. Blues artists (including the ones who Zeppelin "stole" from) stole from each other all the time. Zeppelin just got nailed because they made money doing it, full stop.
Willie Dixon, the first artist to sue Zeppelin, is the biggest hypocrite of them all. He was a crook and a thief himself who took advantage of illiterate and poor musicians and got credited for music he didn't write. Dixon didn't seem to care about Whole Lotta Love between 1969-84, nor did Jake Holmes seem all too concerned about Dazed And Confused for over a decade until he wrote Page about it in the 1980s. Why do we think that is? The "we couldn't afford a lawyer" argument posed by Spirit a few years back just doesn't fly. Countless lawyers would work for free on a chance of winning a lawsuit against one of the biggest rock bands of all time. The lawyers just didn't get the call, because the original artists didn't care until they needed the money later on.
Back to ethnomusicology. Let's talk about the slaves working on the plantations who would hear Celtic music and other more European strains, and how they and their friends would incorporate them into their versions of the blues. Nothing is a vaccum. It all comes from somewhere. Noodles from The Offspring lifted the main riff of Come Out And Play from the canned tunes on a bus tour when they were in the middle east. Where is the line drawn? Even in Mozart's time people were declaring "the end of art" because they thought it had all been done.
And not all the artists Zeppelin "ripped off" were black. Jake Holmes, Davy Graham, and Anne Bredon were white. Race isn't the issue here. The Brits just loved the American blues far more than the Americans did, and that's largely because there wasn't rampant racism in Britain in the middle of the 20th century like there was in America. It was an absence of racism that allowed the inspiration to happen to begin with.
Speaking of white musicians stealing music, the Carter family is another good example. A.P. Carter went all over Appalachia collecting old folk songs, bringing them back so they could be reinterpreted, recorded, and sold, but technically it wasn't "cultural appropriation" because he was from the same culture.
So if you guys want to pick on Zeppelin, fine. But let's have some perspective here and not just pick on one band when there's far more to be talking about.
