Led Zeppelin invented rock but did they invent Stairway To Heaven?

Jimmy Page and Robert Plant deny plagiarising their most famous song, but it isn’t the first time they have been so accused.

It is the song that will follow them to their grave, an epic slice of cosmic nonsense that they might be wishing they had never written - had it not earned them an estimated US$525 million. Not only are the plaintive opening chords to Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven such a cliche for budding axe heroes that playing them has been banned in guitar shops the world over, but the question of who came up with them is the conundrum that won’t leave Jimmy Page and Robert Plant in peace.

On Friday, the US district judge Gary Klausner decreed Stairway to be similar enough to Taurus by Spirit, an American band on the same festival circuit as Led Zep in 1968 and 1969, to let a jury decide whether Plant and Page are liable for copyright infringement. The trial is scheduled for May 10.

Jimmy Page insisted recently that he never heard the song Taurus until 2014.

According to Page and Plant, the descending four-chord progression in question is so overused that it does not deserve copyright protection. According to Klausner , “the similarities here transcend this chord structure . . . What remains is a subjective assessment of the concept and feel of two works.”

Come their day in court, Page and Plant (who are credited with co-writing the song) will have to prove that any borrowing is transformative rather than derivative. The guitarist and singer are likely to be asked about their prior knowledge of Taurus. Did they tour with Spirit, as Skidmore says, or merely have brief encounters with the band at festivals, as Page and Plant, who deny having heard Taurus before 1971, claim?

Page insisted recently that he never heard the song Taurus until 2014 (although Led Zep regularly performed another Spirit song, Fresh Garbage). Yet in 1991 Randy Wolfe, aka Randy California , Taurus’s late songwriter, when asked about the similarity between the songs, said that the members of Led Zeppelin “used to sit in the front of all [Spirit’s] shows and became friends . . . and if they wanted to use Taurus that’s fine”.

Unfortunately, Wolfe’s sharing spirit, so redolent of the hippy era, doesn’t appear to have made it to California in 2016, where copyright laws have not yet adapted to represent the fact that musicians appropriate each other’s ideas constantly. Whether Led Zeppelin appropriated Taurus remains to be decided.

Led Zeppelin achieved things no band before them did. They turned rock into stadium entertainment. They ushered in the golden age of the album as artistic statement, not only by refusing to release singles but also, in the case of their fourth album (on which Stairway appears), by refusing to have something so vulgar as a title on the cover.

And they made some of the best rock music the world has ever heard: epic, emotional, muscular and rooted deeply in folk, blues and classical traditions. They were also not averse, at a time when these things were hard to trace and even harder to prove, to nicking whatever they liked the sound of and claiming it as their own.

On his 1966 album Jack Orion , the Scottish folk guitarist Bert Jansch recorded a version of the traditional Irish ballad Blackwaterside that employed a complex arrangement for finger-picked acoustic guitar. Jansch taught the arrangement to Al Stewart, who showed it to Jimmy Page. In 1969, a remarkably similar instrumental called Black Mountain Side duly appeared on Led Zeppelin , the band’s debut album.

“Jimmy Page avoids me at parties,” Jansch said in 2005, when I asked him how he felt about the situation, “but otherwise I don’t care all that much.” Jansch’s friend Davey Graham, another influential acoustic guitarist, was similarly blase about Page using Graham’s arrangement of the Irish air She Moved Through The Fair as the basis for his White Summer ; if it did bother him he never said.

Then there is the New York songwriter Jake Holmes, whose 1967 song Dazed and Confused bears more than a passing resemblance to a Page and Plant track called, er, Dazed and Confused. “In a way I’m pleased about it because it gives me cachet with my kids to be the guy that inspired Led Zeppelin,” Holmes said in 2006, by which time he had carved a successful career as a jingles writer. In 2012, however, Holmes settled with Page out of court after bringing a copyright-infringement case against him.

Then there are the blues artists who Led Zeppelin took inspiration from. Whole Lotta Love is essentially Muddy Waters’s version of Willie Dixon’s You Need Love with added squealing guitar. The Lemon Song is an amalgam of Howlin’ Wolf’s Killing Floor and Robert Johnson’s Traveling Riverside Blues . Sonny Boy Williamson’s version of Bring It On Home appears on Led Zeppelin II with a Page-Plant credit, although it was later corrected to add Willie Dixon, the song’s writer.

Page, a former session guitarist who spent much of his teenage years appearing on recordings by Donovan, the Kinks and countless other Sixties pop stars, appears to have been a master at appropriation. For the most part he got away with it. However, in a post-internet age in which everything can be traced he’ll have to square up against a man who has form in this field: the Pennsylvania-based lawyer Francis Malofiy.

In 2014 Malofiy sued the R&B singer Usher on behalf of a Philadelphia songwriter called Dan Marino, who claimed he didn’t receive proper credit for Usher’s 2004 song Bad Girl . It did not go well for Malofiy. According to the Hollywood Inquirer , Judge Paul Diamond granted a summary judgment in favour of Usher after describing Malofiy as being “flagrantly unprofessional and offensive”.

Malofiy claims that the Led Zeppelin lawsuit, which he filed in 2014 on behalf of Skidmore, is about “giving credit where credit is due”. It is also, arguably, about shaking down one of the most successful rock bands of all time for allegedly using a small chunk of somebody else’s song as the introduction to one of their own. And there would be no case against Stairway had it not become so enormously, eternally popular, so emblematic of hippy pomposity at its most entertaining and lurid.

Perhaps the best summation of Stairway to Heaven - which has been played backwards in search of devilish incantations, performed before Barack Obama and used to accompany the smoking of a million joints - comes from Plant. “Maybe I was still trying to work out what I was talking about,” he said in 2012 on being asked what the song is about. “Every other f***er is.”

The Times