If you click on the above link, midway through the piece is a chart of the various infringement and potential infringement suits courted by Page and Plant, back in the day. I can certainly understand ageing bluesmen getting peevish and recruiting lawyers to correct the younger band's* cavalier attitude toward attribution and wholesale appropriation. But this is something else. We're talking about a chord progression.
It's curious to consider the ramifications should the Trust win the suit. What's to stop, say, Chuck Berry's people from suing AC/DC for 95% of the songs they've committed to record -- the ones reliant on the "Johnny B. Goode" half-boogie structure? Why not also demand recompense for Angus Young's gimped-up appropriation of Berry's famous duckwalk?
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| Or some other signature move? California, in action. |
Or, more likely, their label's lawyers'.
2 comments:
Interesting... I knew nothing about this, but that is a long list.
Thanks to your link, I've just spent a lot of time on youtube comparing versions. I didn't listen to every single song, but I listened to a few of them. I've got to say, on every one I heard, I thought the Led Zeppelin version was much supperior
Yeah, those guys had the insight, alright. I could imagine it might make a guy like California, who's no slouch himself, hear a progression he performs at every concert deftly improved like that, then become the most popular song in the world.
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