News Was Led Zeppelin the most heavily plagiarising classic rock band?
The music industry has always been very sniffy when it comes to plagiarism. Since most artists have a copyright around any song they write, there’s a good chance they will go after anyone they see who has made something too close to what they have already done. There’s more than one way to plagiarise someone, though, and Led Zeppelin has gone through almost every trick in the book.
Then again, this is Led Zeppelin we’re talking about here. The band practically invented the sound of hard rock, and no one before them was doing the outlandish experiments that Jimmy Page was doing or screaming like a banshee like Robert Plant could. Surely they were original, or maybe some people weren’t listening hard enough.
Going through every single Zeppelin album, there are at least a few times when they start to sink too deep into their influences. They may have the ability to play a million notes a minute, but there are also artists like Memphis Minnie and Willie Dixon, who may deserve a bit of compensation for how much they took from them.
Take a song like ‘Whole Lotta Love’, for example. A great lick from Page and a screaming vocal from Plant, which happens to have all of the lyrics from Dixon’s own ‘You Need Love’, down to how he sings the opening line. The band’s entire debut album could be considered just one blues covers album, especially with songs like ‘Dazed and Confused’ taken from Jake Holmes and even trying to add their own take on Joan Baez’s ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’.
Although Zeppelin was certainly aware of covers in their early years, there were also a few cases of creative plagiarism on their second album. They may have played covers like ‘Killing Floor’ live, but when you play it in the studio and retitle it ‘The Lemon Song’, maybe they could pull a fast one on kids who would never know the difference.
Then again, there’s only so many times that Page could pull from his record collection before people started asking questions. When working through albums like Houses of the Holy, they still wore their influences on their sleeves, but they had begun trying to steer clear of abject plagiarism.
That didn’t mean they still didn’t get into hot water. On the fourth outing, the band got called out by the rock band Spirit for ‘Stairway to Heaven’, which they thought sounded suspiciously close to one of their songs. The same could be said for the intro of ‘Rock and Roll’, which sounds close to the drum break in Little Richard’s ‘Keep a Knockin’.
Even though there are more than a few glowing examples of Zeppelin lifting from their favourite artists, can we truly call them one of the biggest thieves in the music industry? Well…yes and no. As much as Zeppelin may have taken wholesale from their favourite acts, their case is the defining line where plagiarism and interpolation begin to blur.
Since the band ultimately paid back the royalties of their songs to some of the co-writers, they seem to fall into a weird zone where Oasis also falls. Although Noel Gallagher may have used countless Beatles songs as a model for where he wanted his own music to go, there’s only so many times you can sit down and write a pop song before picking up on something the Fab Four did first.
The same case applies here to Zeppelin. Jimmy Page may have known exactly what he was doing when he yanked a few tricks from his idols, but their music was not to steal with any malicious intent. It was just another example of a long line of blues musicians working on passing their music to each subsequent generation.
