You’re familiar with the clutch-and-rotate? It’s the last song of the high school dance, and some dweeb asks you, or you ask some dweeb, and you clutch and rotate through the song. More often than not, when I was in high school, that song was Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin.
Yesterday, the guys in Led Zep won the lawsuit against them by a band called Spirit over the opening notes to Stairway. Spirit claimed it ripped off their song, Taurus, and the lawsuit was filed by the estate of the band’s late guitarist. The jury wasn’t allowed to hear the recordings. Instead, a guitarist played both versions from sheet music for them.
Before the contentious trial opened in Los Angeles, Mike and I played both riffs on the air on CJBK and agreed there was a similarity. If you lay them on top of each other they have some sameness but some differences, too. Spirit’s defence was that Zep joined them on a performance bill in 1968 and could have heard their song then, only to rip it off in 1971 for Stairway. Both Jimmy Page and Robert Plant testified they didn’t remember Spirit or Taurus and never owned one of that band’s albums. For a complete account of the trial, check out Rolling Stone Magazine’s take.
Although this is a victory for Zeppelin and rock lovers everywhere – except maybe for those who loved Spirit – it doesn’t mean Plant, Page and the guys in the Rolling Stones and other iconic bands weren’t thieves. They certainly were. They pilfered guitar riffs from little-known blues greats and wove them into their music. This isn’t exactly news. But for now, Page and Plant can call Stairway to Heaven an original, and we high-school dancers can keep trying to figure out what we’re supposed to do when the song speeds up: clutch-and-rotate faster? Or break apart and boogie? It’s a dilemma as old as…me.