Spirit suing Led Zep over Stairway

Here’s the song by Spirit, claled “Taurus”… you decide. 1968 vs Zep’s Stairway 1971. It is about 42 seconds in or so when the chord progression of interest begins, reinforced around 1:40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFHLO_2_THg

The suit was filed in June 2014. It’s being lawyered to death.

Hardly any musicians I know of think there is any basis to the suit, other than decades of butthurt. You’d have to go beyond copyright to some other vacuous area of perception, and nobody wants to do that because Bach would rise from his grave and put everybody out of business.

I was wondering what your thoughts were ENJ, I just listened to Taurus for the first time a couple days ago, and to my amateur ears I thought they sounded damn near Identical and the fact that Zep opened for Spirit around that time on a few shows made me think perhaps Jimmy at at the very least “influenced” by that riff, however, it would seem to me that any statute of limitations would have passed years ago and I was surprised when some Judge gave his blessings to allowing the suit to proceed… I also read some “experts” input on it and he said to us us unschooled listeners the opening bars may sound alike however in many ways they are technically different blah blah blah

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Zep actually did settle up with some woman a couple of years ago about another song. They heard the song on a Joan Baez album where it was stated to be “public domain” or “traditional” but it turned out to have been written by some other folksinger Joanie had heard perform it back in her salad days.

Joanie realized her mistake by the second pressing of the album and corrected the liner notes and arranged for royalties. The woman was not into rock, led a sheltered life, and never knew Zep had also covered the tune until one of her adult daughters brought her the news. She went to a lawyer, he wrote ONE letter to Zep, and they ponied right up.

All of which makes me think Zep is not buying this dead guy’s claim. Not because they’re cheap but because they don’t buy it.

So, um 2014, what was the big rush? It’s not like Stairway was some obscure B-side…

Well, according to what I’ve read the dead guy hassled Page privately for years about it, to no avail, and moped around the home place telling all his kin they coulda been rich if he’d been able to hire a lawyer. After he croaked there wasn’t much except his guitar collection, but I guess it got liquidated and the family gave the dough to some shyster in hopes of getting rich finally.

The chord progression sounds identical to me. If Spirit played Taurus in those shows Zeppelin fronted I don’t think there’s any doubt Page nabbed it. But whatever, it’s only a small portion of Stairway and other than that the songs are completely dissimilar.

Why do you keep referring to him as 'the dead guy"? Randy California was a fairly well known artist and a decent writer/musician. I actually had a few Spirit LP’s back in the day and thought they were pretty good.

Only because I am largely unfamiliar with his music and never even knew his name until recently…and have early stage Alzheimer’s and can’t remember his name for more than 3 or 4 minutes.

The chord progression is in fact mostly the same, but that same chord progression can be found in at least a couple of hundred other pop songs – because after all, there is a finite number of ways to write a melody and a finite number of ways to harmonize a sequence of notes.

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True. Some music industry guy was on the radio the other day talking about the lawsuit and said the same thing about there being a finite number of note and chord combinations. Unless it’s a blatant ripoff like Ghostbusters/I Want a New Drug, copywrite infringement is a tough sell.

It sounds very similar to me. Shockingly so.

Anyways… Jimmy Page is a fukking moron and Led Zeppelin is the most overrated band EVER, so fukk them.

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Speaking of Zep, on the official Zep site, they have a whole page about the concert I was at that got rained out, with article from the local papers and everything, The show was bit longer than I thought it was…I thought it was only about 5 minutes, I guess they played for 20 before wimping out.

(Of course I was a mere toddler at the time)

REC

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That was the one in Tampa, right? They talk about that debacle on the Zeppelin Wikipedia page as well. Anyway, you didn’t miss much. I saw them on The Song Remains the Same tour and they totally sucked. Page was so drunk they had to start the show 2 hours late so they could sober him up. The playing was so bad that
I didn’t even recognize half the songs. Zeppelin always sucked live. Page over dubbed so much in the studio that it just couldn’t transfer to the stage.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-26/led-zeppelin-can-exit-stairway-suit-for-just-1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14tIBa1f70

A few interesting facts about Randy (Wolfe) California.

  1. Jimi Hendrix gave him the name Randy California. He was in Hendrix 1965 NY club band, Jimmy James & the Blue Flames. There was another Randy in the band and Jimi couldn’t keep them straight… so he called one Randy “California” and the other Randy “Jersey”, based of where they were from.

  2. Randy California was slated to be a charter member of the Jimi Hendrix Experience (rhythm, slide & bass), but the band’s new manager Chas Chandler refused to take him with the group to London to record the “Are You Experienced” LP… because he was too young to get a travel visa.

So then who was Randy Texas?

Correction, The “other” Randy, Randy Palmer, was named Randy Texas by Hendrix… not Randy Jersey.

So Randy Andy, 6th in the line of Succession to the British Crown was not considered for a role in the Jimi Hendrix experience?