Led Zeppelin case: it seems we’ve heard this song before

The authorship of Led Zeppelin’s biggest hit is in dispute. It’s familiar territory.

Undated. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, members of the band 'Led Zeppelin'. PUB: 29/05/2003 PAGE 5 HIT)

It was a humble birth for the song that has been hailed the rock band’s greatest moment.

At the end of 1970, Led Zeppelin were still working on a modest, gently repeating acoustic guitar motif that Jimmy Page had brought to his bandmates months before.

It was going nowhere. It had no lyrics. They weren’t sure it had a future.

Unexpectedly one night, at a crude stone cottage, a former poorhouse called Headley Grange in rural Hampshire in England’s south, words came quickly to singer Robert Plant. He couldn’t write them down fast enough.

The first lines spoke of a self-satisfied woman who was sure all that glitters is gold.

Soon enough, Led Zeppelin had their song, and its title — Stairway to Heaven — and 341 Tolkienesque words of bustling hedgerows, May Queens, and smoke rings in trees.

It has been called the greatest rock ’n’ roll song, it appears on one of the biggest-selling records of all time, it has sold more sheet music than any other rock song, and it forms one of the world’s most valuable copyrights.

Next month a US jury will decide who wrote it.

Right now the eight-minute epic that ascends fluidly from folky baroque to pompous hard rock bears the names Page and Plant, but the descendants of Spirit guitarist Randy California (born Randy Craig Wolfe) claim Stairway to Heaven opens with a passage of music copied from an obscure instrumental California wrote and Spirit recorded in 1968.

For decades fans have debated the likeness between the two, and there are striking similarities. Each has a descending series of finger-picked arpeggios at about the same speed, the phrasing alike, and a clear folk ambience at odds with the material either band had recorded to that point.

Coincidentally, neither was ever a single.

But the trajectories of the two songs could not be in greater contrast: Spirit’s eponymous album bearing the 2min 37sec Taurus reached 31 on the Billboard chart in August 1968 and, until recently, like the band, was largely forgotten; Stairway to Heaven, the most requested radio track of the 1970s, appeared on Led Zeppelin’s legendary, untitled fourth album that has sold 37 million copies and, until Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, was the world’s best-selling record.

Stairway to Heaven is believed to have had more than 4 million radio plays. The albums and DVDs on which it appears, combined with publishing royalties, are estimated to have earned perhaps $500 million.

So, who did write this money-spinning colossus?

Page denies seeing Spirit play on the three occasions they were on the same bill as his band and insists he did not hear Taurus until two years ago.

Earlier this year he embarrassingly conceded that he owned a copy of the Spirit album, but claimed to have no idea how he came to have it. As James Patrick Page, he declared in a statement to a Los Angeles court on March 28 that he did not know why it was on his shelf. “It may well have been left by a guest. I doubt it was there for long, since I never noticed it before.”

Page, one of the most acclaimed instrumentalists of the rock era, insists that the chord progressions like those at the beginning of Stairway to Heaven are fundamental. “I consider descending chromatic lines and arpeggiated chords basic skills learned by any student of the guitar,” he told the court. “Certainly, as a guitarist, I was aware of descending chromatic lines and arpeggios long before 1968.”

Page claims, and there is plenty of evidence to support him, that he always envisaged what became Stairway to Heaven to be a long rock opus “with multiple different parts, that would unfold with increasing complexity and speed culminating in a guitar solo that was preceded by a distinct fanfare, followed by the last verse concluding a climax to the song”.

There is no doubting that is what happens on Stairway to Heaven. Page is proud of his achievement. Plant, on the other hand, is wearied by the song and its burden. That his daft lyrics are so relentlessly mocked perhaps contributes to this.

Randy California was ambivalent about the similarities, telling a reporter in 1991 that “if they wanted to use (Taurus) that’s fine ... I’ll let them have the beginning of Taurus for their song, without a lawsuit.”

A few years later his attitude hardened. He told a reporter at New York’s Listener magazine that “I’d say it was a rip-off”, complaining that Led Zeppelin “made millions of bucks on it and never said thank you; never said, ‘Can we pay you some money for it?’ ”

Weeks later, on January 2, 1997, California dived in to the sea off Molokai, in Hawaii, to rescue his son, Quinn, 12, who was in trouble. He saved Quinn, but California drowned and his body was never recovered. He was 45.

The action to challenge the authorship of Stairway to Heaven has been brought by Michael Skidmore, a trustee for California. The family’s lawyers are seeking a co-writing credit on the song.

Last Friday, Los Angeles District Court Judge Gary Klausner decided the songs were substantially similar and determined that a jury could decide if one was copied from the other.

Klausner’s ruling stated that “while it is true that a descending chromatic four-chord progression is a common convention that abounds in the music industry, the similarities here transcend this core structure (of the song)”.

“What remains is a subjective assessment of the ‘concept and feel’ of two works.”

It will be the most eagerly watched case of plagiarism since George Harrison was accused of basing his international hit My Sweet Lord on the Chiffons’ He’s So Fine.

And a problem for Led Zeppelin could be that they have form. The band’s first hit single, Whole Lotta Love, was originally credited as having been written by the band. But it was an obvious and quite precise remake of the Small Faces’ You Need Loving, itself a reworking of the Willie Dixon song You Need Love. Dixon sued, it was settled out of court and he now shares a credit.

The band’s first album was littered with songs whose authorship is, or was, in dispute. Babe I’m Gonna Leave You was originally credited as being a traditional song arranged by Page. Anne Bredon, who wrote it, drew that to the band’s attention and her name now appears alongside Page and Plant.

Dazed and Confused was based on a song by American songwriter Jake Holmes called, naturally enough, Dazed and Confused. Originally it was credited as a Page composition. As was — and still is — the instrumental Black Mountain Side, which is a simple reworking of Scottish guitarist Bert Jansch’s interpretation of an Irish folk tune Down By Blackwaterside.

And How Many More Times carries more than hints of Albert King’s The Hunter and Howlin’ Wolf’s How Many More Years.

But, then, rock ’n’ roll’s national anthem, Rock Around the Clock was stolen from Hank Williams’ Move It on Over and it seems no one complained.

Next month’s court case will likely have little effect on the affection in which music fans, and other artists, hold Stairway to Heaven.

It is in the Grammy Hall of Fame. On Classic Rock magazine’s list of the Ten Best Songs Ever, it came in first, the same position it ranked on Guitar World’s 100 Greatest Guitar Solos. It also ranked highly in Q magazine’s 100 Songs That Changed the World, and later its 100 Greatest Songs of All Time. It is one the Recording Industry Association of America’s Songs of the Century, and it is in the top 10 of Triple J’s Hottest 100 of All Time.

It has been covered by artists as varied as Frank Zappa, Heart, Pat Boone and even Rolf Harris.

One US radio station has played it non-stop for 24 hours.

When KBOO, a community radio station in Portland, Oregon, challenged listeners that if they pledged enough money the station would never again play Stairway to Heaven, Plant, who’d performed in the city the previous night and who was listening on a hire car radio, donated $1000.

“It’s not that I don’t like the song,” Plant said later. “It’s just that I’ve heard it before.”

THE PLAGIARIST BLUES

Ever since God created man in his image, man has felt pretty free to copy the ideas of others. In any case, it is a fine line between being inspired by another’s work, sampling it, or stealing it. As a result, juries can be unpredictable when deciding if a song has been plagiarised.

Thicke and Pharrell v Marvin Gaye

Jurors decided Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, pictured, nicked Marvin Gaye’s Got to Give It Up, despite their Grammy-nominated Blurred Lines being in a different key. A judge awarded the murdered singer’s family $US7.3 million. That was later reduced to $5.3m, but an appeal is looming.

Men at Work v Larrikin Music

Men at Work were found to have reproduced “a substantial part of Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree” while recording Down Under, despite flautist Greg Ham referencing just a few notes of the old favourite.

George Harrison v The Chiffons

In 1976, Beatle George Harrison was found to have subconsciously copied the Chiffons’ He’s So Fine when composing My Sweet Lord. At that point former Beatles manager Allen Klein quietly bought the publishing for He’s So Fine, speculating on a multimillion-dollar payday. The court noted the purchase and awarded Klein $587,000 — exactly what he paid. Later, Harrison said he’d been trying to copy the Edwin Hawkins Singers’ Oh Happy Day.