WOW! Robert Plant Hints at Led Zeppelin Reunion Next Year

[brett_jv]

48. Oh this list is such a steaming pile of bullshit ...

Last edited Tue Feb 19, 2013, 08:43 PM - Edit history (1)

Aside from maybe Bring it On Home, every one that says the Zeppelin song is an outright 'uncredited cover' or 'uncredited version' is complete horse-puckey in my book.

They paid homage, they ripped little vocal bits or guitar licks (admittedly, sometimes they were prominent ones) from other, older songs, but they never 'covered' a song w/o credit. The only 'cover' they did (iirc) is Robert Johnson's 'Travelin' Riverside Blues', and they gave him credit for it ... but the only thing that they really took from it was the words ... everything else, even the melody, is totally different.

There's nothing wrong a song being 'apparently derived from' another song.

There is no 'main guitar line' in Stairway to Heaven ... there's like 8 of them. Having ONE of them be reminiscent of some other song, or even ripped wholesale, is not a big deal nor uncommon.

And how in the **** could Custard Pie AND Hats off to Harper BOTH be uncredited versions of the SAME friggin song? There's probably no two songs in their catalog that are MORE DIFFERENT than those two songs. They don't have the same words, chords, sound ... NOTHING is the same except they say the words 'Shake 'em on down' in an incidental fashion once or twice in their lyrics. What a joke to say these two are 'covers' of 'Shake Em On Down' because of that.

With the relatively few exceptions, wherein legal action was succesfully taken against them regarding songs from their first two albums from old bluesmen ... NONE of these claims in this list would even come close to standing up in court.

Their first two albums paid clear homages to their influences, but they took 'ideas' or 'snippets' of songs and made completely different works of art out of them. I don't even entirely agree with the lawsuits that WERE won against them (although the Killing Floor/Lemon Song was case was probably the most 'worthy')... because in every case what they did was take SNIPPETS of older songs, reworked them, and placed them as relatively minor passages in songs that were, as a whole, entirely different. What they were really trying to do was bring exposure to the music they loved ... there's a reason Lemon Song says 'Down on This Killing Floor' right in the song lyrics ... they were saying "Hey, this old song inspired the one one you're listening to ... go check out Howlin Wolf!" I think he was an ass to sue them over that, personally. What Zep did made Wolf nothing but bucks. And Lemon Song was never a single or anything, it never sold a single copy on it's own.

Moby Grape 'Never' does share a very similar opening (four-line) verse with "Since I Been Loving You" and both contain the lines 'the best of fools' and 'cause I love you' and 'can't you hear me'... and it sounds NOTHING like it otherwise. Here's links to the lyrics of both:

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/ledzeppelin/sinceivebeenlovingyou.html
http://www.60s-classic-rock.com/mo/moby-grape-never-lyrics.html

To say these are the 'same lyrics' is a complete joke.

I will say though that for Zep to take full songwriting credit for 'In my Time of Dying' is a bit of a stretch ... but the song is SOOO different from any earlier version of 'Jesus Make Up my Dying Bed' or 'In My Time of Dying' it's not entirely unjustified ... a 'nod' the 'traditional' nature of it would've been fair, and in keeping with what they USUALLY did, but nobody 'owned' the 'original', and the 'original' versions are SO friggin different that there's is really a new piece, 'inspired by' a traditional tune.

Whoever made this list has a friggin agenda (I'm sure it wasn't you personally), and it's so far from accurate taken as a whole it's ridiculous.

If they come back, I'm so friggin THERE. I'd sell a Kidney to see Zep live. The Celebration Day movie was awesome. In particular Jason Bonham and JPJ as the rhythm section ... they absolutely tore the roof off the place, but Page was still improvising leads on the spot at nearly 70 y.o. and doing a more than passable job at it, and Plant's voice has mellowed nicely with age, even if he can't pull off the banshee wails he could in his 20's.

Looking at their collective body of work, Zeppelin are the greatest (and one of the most original) rock bands of all time (sorry Stones and Who ... you guys are 1 and 2 ... and the Beatles are alone in a category all their own). And the relatively few successful charges of plagiarism against a few songs on one of their albums does not tarnish that legacy in the slightest.