Led Zeppelin Loses First Round in ‘Stairway to Heaven’ Lawsuit

The British rockers must confront allegations that it ripped off the rock group Spirit

For decades, Led Zeppelin has faced claims that they plagiarized their iconic 1971 hit “Stairway to Heaven” from the rock band Spirit. Now it looks like Zeppelin is headed for a difficult legal battle.

Back in May, family members of Spirit frontman Randy Craig Wolfe (a.k.a Randy California) filed the suit against Zeppelin, seeking monetary damages and a writing credit for the now-deceased Wolfe, NBC Philadelphia reports. Wolfe’s family claims that Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page ripped off the chords for “Stairway to Heaven” from Spirit’s 1968 tune “Taurus.” (The two bands at one point toured together and had thus become familiar with each other’s music.)

Now, Zeppelin and their music companies have requested that the case be dismissed, as the “individual defendants are British citizens residing in England, own no property in Pennsylvania and have no contacts with Pennsylvania, let alone ties sufficient to render them essentially at home here,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.

The judge, however, said no to that request — so the band will now be forced to move forward with the suit.

In the meantime, if you’ve never heard the song that Zeppelin allegedly ripped off, listen to it here, followed by “Stairway to Heaven” for comparison’s sake:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd8AVbwB_6E#t=14

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcL---4xQYA

As a Zeppelin fan I'd suggest Page copied the idea of using the acoustic guitar in that fashion for the intro. Then changed the notes to make it different.

I just listen to the Spirit version and think it has similarity to Stairway, but then it just sounds like a drunk version of Stairway as it is too different. I wouldn't confuse the two versions, but I could understand a person who wasn't a Zeppelin fan getting mixed up.

Similar but sufficiently different.

I'm not sure how the laws pertain to similar but different.

As much as I despise Led Zeppelin's arrogance and occasional plagiarism, I think this is a pretty weak legal case. Randy California's heirs are trying to free ride on the Pharrell Williams decision that Tal Bachman warned us about. If they can force a settlement before the other case gets overturned, they will have hit a jackpot of sorts.

By the way, I have great respect for Randy California and for Spirit. They made some good music that we don't hear nearly enough these days. And Randy died while saving his son from drowning, so there's that. Greater love hath no man.

Wasn't there a gentleman's agreement between spirit and Led?

Zeppelin's manager was a notorious bully, so I suspect any agreement was entirely one-sided.

I'm alarmed,there is definitely a bustle in my hedgerow



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/23/2015 03:43PM by ladell.

I'd say that Jay Ferguson was the frontman rather than Wolfe/California. He was very talented and had a fine voice. I've always wondered why his solo albums never got much attention.

Ok shummy, you know I’d weigh in.

Isn’t the argument more bolstered by the fact that before Stairway to Heaven was written, Spirit had been involved as some sort of opening act for Zeppelin, and Page had heard Spirit playing that song? That’s (to me) the biggest bolster to the argument that it was plagiarized. But beyond that subtle important point, I don’t really see the two riffs even being all that similar. Here are a few points I’ll make about it.

For starters, it’s not even the same riff. Although the harmonic movement (the chord progression) is very similar, Spirits arpeggio moves down melodically on the accent points, while Page’s riff moves up melodically. Even the harmonic movements depart from each other at the end of the riff, and the Spirit riff only repeats the same texture, whereas Page’s develops additional variations on the theme. When you view how the riffs aren’t even exactly that same, and add that to how Stairway to Heaven departs from that intro theme, and develops into an entirely different song for the remaining eight minutes, it becomes a bit of a stretch to say ‘Spirit’ wrote Stairway to Heaven. That’s plainly ludicrous. Spirit’s song shows nothing more than a ‘similarity’ (mostly through the very common technique of arpeggiating the chord tones), and this similarity covers only about four measures of a song that then develops far beyond just those few four measures into a much larger piece.

Knowing that Page heard Spirit play that riff, at best I would say Spirit ‘inspired’ Page to use that arpeggiating concept, which had already been exhausted by Bach centuries before anyway, long before Spirit copied it from him.

That leads us to a few other points about music. All musical devices have already been done before by someone. Even though they didn’t back them with a rock rhythm section, classical composers have already combined harmonic movements and formed melodies to the point where they have already exhausted almost every sound possible. Jazz musicians have already put together every harmonic substitution chord possible over standard ‘pleasurable’ chord progressions. You can’t write any music that hasn’t already been done before; it’s impossible.

Further to this point; the arpeggiating guitar riff over a similar harmonic movement is just a technique; it's an inspired ‘sound’. It’s not a ‘song.’ That would be like Jerry Lee Lewis’s drummer suing everyone over the past forty years who played rock ‘n roll drums because they are using a 2 and 4 snare, a one and three kick drum, and eighth notes on the hi-hats, with a crash on one every eight measures. That’s not a song; that’s a musical technique. And you better play the drums that way, or you won’t be playing anything very tangible at all in today's 'rock' style.

Lastly, it is important that we allow musicians to be inspired by one another, and to continue to express themselves through common, identifiable sounds, without them being sued for doing so. Every pop song today uses pretty much the same chords in the same order, or our ears reject it. If someone wants to write reggae sounding music, be thankful Bob Marley didn’t say reggae was his ‘sound’, and nobody else could ever emulate it. That’s what musicians and songwriters do, emulate each other when we are inspired by ‘sounds’ we hear (these ‘sounds’ being organizations of various common techniques and musical devices.)

To me, you can’t plagiarize a sound or a technique; you can only plagiarize a complete song. This would be like when someone with the means steals a song (lyrics, melody and chord progression and all) from some newbie at a folk festival or club, and then steals that song by beating them to recording and releasing what is obviously the other person’s entire creation. That isn’t what happened here. What happened here was Page was inspired by Spirit to arpeggiate an acoustic guitar over a slightly similar (but still not exactly the same) series of chords, and all this only formed a tiny portion of Zeppelin’s song anyway. So, I hope the judge rules properly here. If he doesn’t, he risks setting a dangerous precedent against anyone writing music in the future, since it’s all already been done before anyway by somebody, and similar sounds and techniques are always being repeated. That’s how music is made; through emulation. Plagiarism is only when you steal someone else’s entire song and say it is your own; that’s plagiarism. Playing a similar riff, or groove, or arpeggio, or drum feel, is not. Let’s hope the judge gets that.

What Page should do, if he was inspired by Spirit to use a similar sound, is buy him a drink, or give him the nod for inspiring him, or have him over for a jam and pay for the booze and food. But Spirit didn’t write Stairway to Heaven, not by a long shot.

That’s my analysis.