In a waspish lecture entitled The Hero as Man of Letters, the Victorian essayist and philosopher Thomas Carlyle sought to debunk the fashionable notion of the solitary Romantic genius. This idea, he suggested in 1840, was a contemporary fantasy: “Never, till about a hundred years ago, was there seen any figure of a Great Soul living apart in that anomalous manner; endeavouring to speak forth the inspiration that was in him by Printed Books.” It didn’t work. Despite Carlyle’s best efforts, the alluring notion of pure, unmediated self-expression in the arts never really went away. As a consequence, from the Romantic era onwards, the moral implications of plagiarism began to become a seriously hot issue. If the best art was a unique emanation from the depth of an individual’s soul, it was an outrage of the highest order to nick it and put it in your own stuff.
Which brings us to Led Zeppelin and Stairway to Heaven, their classic track from 1971. This week, in the latest twist in a long-running saga, a San Francisco appeals court reinstated a verdict that the venerated English rock band did not steal a guitar riff in the song from Spirit, a California band of the same era. Michael Skidmore, a trustee for a late member of Spirit, had won an initial appeal, after claiming that the famous descending chord progression that opens Stairway was lifted from Spirit’s song Taurus, released in 1968.
Musical plagiarism has become a vexed issue in the United States music industry, in an age of sampling and sensitivities over cultural appropriation. Five years ago Marvin Gaye’s children were awarded $7.4m after jurors decided that, in their 2013 hit single Blurred Lines, Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams had copied Gaye’s Got to Give It Up, from 1977. But when it comes to the question of who owns the opening sequence of perhaps the most celebrated rock song of all, it is hard not to conclude that Mr Skidmore has fallen for the old Romantic conceit. Because the truth is that no one does.
The two snatches of music in Stairway and Taurus are undoubtedly very similar. But descending chromatic chords, which can convey a soulful, almost mystical melancholy, were highly popular in the often dreamy guitar music of the late 60s and early 70s. They also feature, as the court heard, in songs such as Chim Chim Cher-ee from the 1964 film Mary Poppins. In previous centuries, JS Bach and Henry Purcell were fans.
Copyright rulings should not be so draconian that they inhibit the creative process. Sometimes a kind of music or thinking is a common cultural resource; its inflections and idioms can subconsciously influence and inspire an age, a moment or a mood. Mr Page testified in 2016 that the disputed chord sequence “had been around for ever”. A seminal study of plagiarism in the Romantic period by Tilar J Mazzeo points out that, at that time, culpable borrowing was defined as that which is “simultaneously unacknowledged, unimproved, unfamiliar, and conscious”. Led Zeppelin lovers can rest easy on that score.
