de=da=duh=D'OH/ bloooooze and thievery

[Paul Mather]

On Thu, 7 Oct 1999, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:

(First of all, welcome back!)

=> Well, the use of the term "ripped off" itself implies fairly modern
=> concepts of intellectual property rights. In many performance contexts,
=> each performance was itself a recomposition. A simple analogy has the
=> performer working from musical "templates", and moreover, if the performer
=> hears new material that he likes he incorporates it into his own repetoire
=> and proceeds to (consciously or unconsciously) alter it to his
=> liking--change the words, change the tune, etc. That applied not just to
=> music, but to things like the written word as well. You had a book you
=> liked, you would happily copy bits of it wholesale into your own new
=> improved version with or without attribution.
=>
=> By our standards, this is ripping things off. By their standards it was
=> just doing business as usual.

Carl, as an academic, you should know that what Zeppelin did was a
textbook case of plagiarism.  No ifs, ands, or buts...

=> No doubt about it. However, it is not always possible to know whose song,
=> really, it was that Zep ripped off. Plenty of trad material--including
=> blues--is currently copyrighted to the first person who happened to record
=> it. The nature of traditional material is that it may or may not represent
=> varying degrees of a performers composition and of pre-existing material.

It's the "varying degrees" bit that is the key here.  If you put out a
song that has the same title, same lyrics, and same music as one done by
someone previously, but put it out under your own name, that's not
"incorporating it to varying degrees" or however you might excuse it.
It's just plain stealing---more so when you do it knowingly.

Even people who have drastically re-worked old songs, e.g., the Allman
Brothers Band's version of Blind Willie McTell's "Statesboro Blues,"
have the honesty to credit the original source, even if the resemblence
to the original is slight.  (Although their version is derived more from
Taj Mahall's cover than McTell's...)

Similarly in academia, even though you may synthesise many other
people's ideas (maybe radically so), you always cite their works,
acknowledging the influence and input to your own...

...unless your name is Led Zeppelin... >;-)

=> To a great extent, Zep were only doing what generations of musicians before
=> them had done. They were doing what most of the "Blues Fathers" had
=> probably done themselves: combining stuff they heard with stuff they made
=> up. However, by doing so they violated copyright laws that had not been in
=> force a century before--and that's the chief difference. Note, I'm not
=> discussing whether what they did was right or not--that's a legal and
=> social issue determined by other factors. I'm only discussing the process.

I would believe that a lot more had Led Zeppelin originated their
material in the nascent field of the blues pioneers.  But since they got
their's second-hand, through *recordings* (and, in some cases, with
members---e.g., Page---*playing* with some of the forerunners involved),
it's difficult for me to believe they had a hard time attributing the
source of "You Shook Me," "I Can't Quit You Baby," etc.  At least in the
case of the early blues pioneers there was a shortage of extant
recordings to document claims.

There is a big (noticeable) difference between using "an Elmore James
riff" or "the Bo Diddley beat" and stealing a Willie Dixon song.  At
least the courts thought so. :-)

The big irony, I find, is that Zeppelin themselves cried into their beer
about people "stealing" their songs, notably that first Kingdom Come
album which stank of Zeppelin.  (Never heard the album, but I did hear
one track once which was a dead ringer for "Kashmir.")  Obviously,
turnabout is *not* fair play. :-)

Cheers,

Paul.

NP: The Bevis Frond, _New River Head_

e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"I don't live today; maybe tomorrow..."
        --- James Marshall Hendrix