Yes, Led Zeppelin took from other people's records – but then they transformed them

And so the latest Led Zeppelin plagiarism case goes to court. This time it’s Spirit, whose claim that Stairway to Heaven’s acoustic opening takes directly from their song Taurus is to be heard before a jury next month.

It’s not the first time m’learned friends have become involved in the allocation of songwriting credits or royalties for Zeppelin songs – Babe I’m Gonna Leave You, Dazed and Confused, Whole Lotta Love, The Lemon Song and Bring It on Home have all had their credits changed on latter-day Zeppelin releases and reissues. The most egregious of those cases was Dazed and Confused, a song by Jake Holmes that Jimmy Page heard when Holmes opened for the Yardbirds in 1967. It became a staple of the Yardbirds’ set, then when Page formed Zeppelin, he changed the lyrics, took sole songwriting credit, and stuck it on the band’s debut album.

There are plenty more Zeppelin songs where the songwriting credits have never been changed or a financial settlement made, despite their evident debt to other songs – especially old blues numbers, whose authorship might be uncertain, and there was no one to challenge the band’s claim to them. And there are other examples from Zeppelin’s contemporaries: how did Bert Jansch feel when he compared his Blackwaterside to their Black Mountain Side? What did Moby Grape think of the similarities between Zeppelin’s Since I’ve Been Loving You and their own song Never?

I’m not going to stick up for Zeppelin over Dazed and Confused (though the the case of Anne Bredon’s Babe I’m Gonna Leave You is a little less clear cut, given that Zeppelin almost certainly took it from Joan Baez’s version, itself wrongly given a trad. arr. credit, just as Zeppelin’s was). But I am going to stick up for them over the suggestion that their career has been based on fraud and theft.

The lazy assertion would be the old line that talent borrows, but genius steals. Let’s be honest: theft is theft. It’s appropriate that instance of plagiarism are dealt with. But Zeppelin’s sins don’t diminish their greatness. Rock’n’roll was built on a limited number of chords, and a limited number of ways of deploying them. The same words, often barely rearranged, crop up in any number of different songs. Zeppelin’s borrowings were more craven than most, certainly, but if you take time to compare the original recordings and the Zeppelin songs, it doesn’t take very long to realise they are completely different beasts.

If you listen to Josh White’s Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dying Bed, from 1933, you’ll hear a haunted, spooky acoustic blues, and you’ll notice it bears a certain similarity to Led Zeppelin’s In My Time of Dying. If you listen to the latter song, you will hear an astonishing edifice of brutal power and terrifying force. It wouldn’t have existed without the other song, certainly, but it’s not a simple cover version: it’s an extrapolation, a reimagining of where Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dying Bed could have ended up.

Whole Lotta Love may have borrowed from both Willie Dixon and the Small Faces, but the song wasn’t the same as either of its pieces of source material: what Zeppelin took, they transformed. They were derivative only in the sense that they took from existing forms; what they did with those forms created rock’n’roll of a new form, one as at home with folk or blues or proto-metal.

If you listen to Taurus and Stairway to Heaven side by side, you’ll hear that Randy California’s acoustic guitar figure is undeniably similar to the opening section of Stairway. But then take a moment to consider. Is that pattern really the memorable thing about the song? What about the epic solo, or John Bonham’s thunderous entrance, or the staccato riff at the end? Of course that little section is not central to people’s love of Stairway, it’s just one small part of it. But the danger of the accumulation of accusations against Zeppelin is that they become the details people notice in the portrait, preventing them from stepping back and seeing the big picture. And when you look at the big picture, Led Zeppelin were a great, great band.

It would be much more convenient if Robert Plant had never pinched old blues lyrics, or Jimmy Page had never been cavalier about where the inspiration for some of his riffs came from. Really, it would. What they did in the late 60s and early 70s leaves an unpleasant taste. And, in an age where cultural appropriation has, quite justifiably, become something to discuss seriously, it would have been great if their borrowings from the blues had been acknowledged in financial form without those they took from having to go to the courts. But it can’t come as any great surprise to learn that rock stars are not always the most punctilious of people, especially rock stars with a manager as devoted to shoring up their bottom end as Peter Grant was.

But make no mistake: Moby Grape’s failure to become stars wasn’t because Zeppelin stole their thunder. Spirit’s Taurus isn’t less well known than Stairway to Heaven because it was overshadowed. More people know Zeppelin’s version of Dazed and Confused that Jake Holmes’s because it’s more dramatic and exciting.

Whatever happens in the court case next month, Led Zeppelin will not be diminished. The records will still sing to people, whatever a jury decides.