There is a pachyderm by the sideboard. Led Zeppelin (I) is often attacked as an act of plagiarism. There is some mud here and the case on both sides gets into a little special pleading and confirmation bias. I'm going to try to present a case that takes a little from both. Let's see what happens.
The facts are that a number of the songs on this record owe more or less direct debts to other songs. In some of these cases the song was attributed to the band when it should have gone to the original author. My copy from the mid seventies accredited two Willie Dixon songs correctly as well as another as traditional but arranged by Jimmy Page. One song, one of the monumental numbers from the band's canon, Dazed and Confused is a flat out appropriation of a song by Jake Holmes and yet the attribution is to Page alone. He'd brought it from his time in the Yardbirds. While the Zeppelin and Yardbirds versions took the song from a whining tale of a trip or love gone wrong and into rock greatness, the lack of attribution is disturbing.
Why the appropriation happened is not mysterious. The newly formed band recorded the album after a few live dates in Scandinavia and the set was made up of jammed versions of blues standards and anything else they could use to fill a set. The wrongdoing here is not the lifting but the claim. Holmes should at least received a co-credit (the changes made by Zeppelin were profound and not foreseeable from a listen to the original and they do involve a lot of new material). There are quotes in songs like How Many More Times but none of them constitues plagiarism any more than Beethoven quoting a folk tune in a symphony.
While it's clear that there was misappropriation the sadder fact in the case is that those who hear about it don't know where to stop and end up tunnelling into their own fundaments. I've seen Good Times Bad Times mentioned for its use of a Rolling Stones title. Care to knock on Justin Timberlake's door and ask him why he named Cry Me a River after a jazz standard he could never hope to equal? Elsewhere, there are many bone-pointings to lyrics taken from other sources but, boy, that's a barrel-bottom-scrape. If you listen to any live Zeppelin you will know that Plant was not an imaginative ad libber with lyrics. His strength was in his voice and its power. And when most of your lyrics are she done me wrong you're not setting them up for originality. If you keep the charges to substantial musical material wrongly claimed, you'll have a better case.
I begin that way as I can now no longer listen to this album without knowing any of this. The Zeppelin-stole-this industry has burgeoned and become as absurd as Ufology or 911 "truthism". Nevertheless, when I hear the great industrial BAM BAM power chord beginning of the opening track I'm flashed back to the mid seventies when I first fell into the great dark well of this music.
The punching chords are joined by a few percussive fills as though its more sober friend is pulling it away from a fight. Plant enters with a mighty vocal about the days of his youth and for the next few minutes of crunching, screaming, bubbling bass and big drums Led Zeppelin are announcing their arrival. The solo is particularly telling. After a big guitar crunch and a pause Page plays one of his million note solos which eventually gets taken over by the chorus and a return to the seductive opening theme as Plant ad libs over that and more lightning fingered Pageism. It's an incredible first statement that incorporates pretty much everything that early Zeppelin was: large scale, uncompromising, flashy and screamingly emotive.
Babe I'm Gonna Leave You follows with a gentle acoustic minor key finger pick with a descending bass and a near whispered melancholy vocal from Plant. This builds to a fuller voice, continuing the sorry confession of abandonment until Plant screams and the odd acoustic rock descent kicks in. It ends on a dramatic F-E-F block before returning to the plaintive textures with added Telecaster and electric bass. Repeat. A beautiful and affecting piece, this is directly taken from first Joan Baez's cover version and then to the original by Anne Bredon. Page repeated Baez's incorrect "traditional" attribution but it's Bredon's song.
The correctly attributed You Shook Me from Willie Dixon follows with an eerie curlew call of muted and distorted slide guitar playing a bluesy wail that could almost be an air raid siren or a lost soul wandering in the night sky. Drums, bass and blues harp kick in and the dark and grinding song begins. This is not like the purest blues of John Mayall or even Cream, it's from the lightless depths of a dangerous mood. Dixon's original has a darkness to it but the blues melody is significantly different enough for the band to have claimed it but for the lyrics. These are not particularly unique thoughts for an old R&B number but Plant's lack of invention when it came to the words had him sing Dixon's words over the top of the huge swampy groove and that was what drove the correct attribution on the record label. A strong organ solo is followed by blistering harmonica turn before the sky opens for Page's giant gliding solo which soars high and bright. One last verse and Plant circles around a wordless ad lib which Page starts matching and this turns into a brief shout out before Plant closes with a final iteration of the theme and Page finishes it off with a bright flourish.
Dazed and Confused starts without a gap after You Shook Me. A brooding bass descent is descanted with a psychedelic guitar harmonic. Plant's screamed opening verse is delivered with such force and control it stops time. At its conclusion the entire band plus overdubs replays the theme about ten times bigger than at first (extra guitar and harmonica but boy does it sound huge). The next verse ends with a bamming chord riff a tone above and then a section of Plant trading wordless phrases with Page playing his Telecaster with a violin bow through some big delay and amp tremolo. A sudden kick into double time brings a chromatic vocal and harmonica duet followed by a blistering guitar solo. Back into the bamming chord riff and we return to the big bad brood of the verse. Same as the first but it's a good same. The next bam chords start insisting on a single chord as the band lumbers on to the intense finish with Plant repeating a wordless vocal descant. The last chord lingers, an evil semitone above the key. End of side one.
Jake Holmes's original (youtube it) was lifted by the Yardbirds when Jimmy Page was on lead guitar in their home stretch period. The lyrics in this version are still very close to Holmes's original but the song now has the basic structure of the Zeppelin iteration. The Zeppelin version retains the basic scansion of the vocal and, unmistakably, the bass line. What's added are (for once) completely different lyrics and a treasure trove of new material which is substantially by Page. This is a different case to the flimsy one of Spirit's Taurus and Stairway to Heaven as all that's really similar is the scansion of the first few chords of the opening progression; Spirit most definitely didn't invent that descending figure. But the bass line in Dazed and Confused is the same and distinctive; that is where it came from. Yet Page took sole credit on the album label and only after a long legal case and decades does it now read Jimmy Page inspired by Jake Holmes. That's actually quite accurate but still...
Side two begins with a massive Bachian organ piece which ends in an oddly jaunty four chord arpeggio. The drums kick in with acoustic guitar and Plant comes in with a you-done-me-wrong lyric and the chorus is the title: Your Time is Gonna Come. Page adds a pedal steel which is off pitch but still quite lovely. The song is quite lovely. Then it ends in a fade which is interrupted by Page's acoustic tuned-to-a-chord instrumental Black Mountain Slide which borrows heavily from Bert Jansch's Black Water Slide without the vocals. It's a lift but of an arrangement rather than a composition and taken further into other territory by Page. Not a criminal act but annoying. Moot to me, in any case as I always skip it.
There is no gap from this to the equally skippable Communication Breakdown. It's a fast and crashing rock song with an intense screaming chorus and a blazing guitar solo and I've never heard the appeal in it. I will mention the attempt made by the car wreck voyeur style accusers of plagiarism who tried to claim this was an Eddie Cochran rip off because of the early rocker's song Nervous Breakdown. As fun as Eddie's song is (and it is) the sole link is the word Breakdown in the title. That's it. If you are serious about accusing anyone of ripping off other people's material you really should stick to the facts.
I Can't Quit You Baby is an avowed cover version of Willie Dixon's original. It's expert and not interesting to this blues-indifferent listener.
Finally comes How Many More Times which is what I'd skip to when I flipped sides. A big bass shuffle ends in a Bonzo roll and kicks into a delicious unison riff from Page's overdriven Tele. Pow-wer! Plant comes in with another done-me-wrong rants as the business surges below his scream. This breaks down to an even more sinister violin bowed guitar figure than the one in Dazed and Plant screams out a nightmarish resentment of his character's fall into fatherhood as though it's a terminal disease. This picks up with a lift from Albert King's The Hunter (uncredited but it isn't that long a quote) and then back in with a nod to Page's involvement in Jeff Beck's Beck's Bolero. And then it's BAM back into the verse at full speed with a more gradual but also more traditional blues rock finish. This track is a hell of a lot of fun.
At the beginning of 1977 when I first heard this the sound and mystique of it were thrilling. I associate it with the grey skies of early Autumn in the tropics which was the weather on the weekend I bought it and heard it god knows how many times. While I only knew about the lifting later I had already heard the dipping into improv and quoting in the live version of Whole Lotta Love and let that context forgive the band. Mostly, it felt like finally reading that book you heard about so long and having it come to the same life it had for all those other people.
Never my favourite Zep album but one with some of the seminal moments of inspiration that led the band to its best even if beginning from the nadir of plagiarism. But that is less about the music than the claim. Still wrong but also still misrepresented even now when the talented but uninspired bands of the last two decades lift whole phrases, guitar sounds or substantial chunks of other songs and get praised for it. Zeppelin made it to the world's top spot within a year of their formation and were seen as plunderers of the underdog. It's not surprising then to find forgiveness afforded the like of the Black Lips for Drive By Buddy (19th Nervous Breakdown) or the Flaming Lips' Fight Test (Cat Stevens' Father to Son). Such is life.
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