Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway” Trial: What Does “Stealing” Actually Mean?

I’m sure at least some of you followed the recent ridiculous courtroom drama in which some crappy ’60s pop combo butted heads with the greatest band of all time. The allegations itself were silly, but certainly tricky: we’re talking about “music theorists” and “professors” trying to explain to a jury of non-musicians the “technical application” of “scales,” which have MORE to do with the sacred, mysterious tendencies of musical language itself. I’m not even going to roast Rhombus this time around for his article back in April… do I really have to stand up for Led Zeppelin?

The media reaction to this trial was, in effect, a bunch of non-musicians trying to evaluate formal properties of music as though they existed in a vacuum. That’s where we’re at: everyone wants to be an expert, and most art is just content we’re gonna consume on our phones before moving on to the next thing. “Stairway to Heaven” is a piece of old content — let’s mine it for whatever $ we can find!

But for me, I’m curious about what this trial says about where we are at with popular culture, and how it relates to the culture Led Zeppelin grew up in. The modern consensus, from this trial and others, dictates that the past is something that can only be looted. People love a simple, sentimental narrative, but, truthfully, this story is a lot more complicated than it might seem on the surface.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_2sPkfPKwc

Last year, Mad Max: Fury Road was one of few American movies that achieved critical, commercial, and fan success. And it’s good, really good. In a lot of ways, it perfected The Road Warrior‘s aesthetics. But it’s not that good, it just looks good relative to what else is out there. Where The Road Warrior is rough and dirty compared to Fury Road‘s neatness (thematically AND formally), it was also strikingly original — a movie made by a bunch of crazy, inspired people who took serious risks. Fury Road is completely insane in some ways, while in others it’s super, super conservative.

Around the same time as Fury Road‘s release, Pharrell and Robin Thicke lost a very public trial to the Marvin Gaye estate over “Blurred Lines” copyright infringement, in a case pretty similar to last week’s “Stairway” trial. Like with Fury Road, “Blurred Lines” was basically a polished, cleaned-up version of the original Gaye track, “Got to Give it Up.” Also, most importantly, “Blurred Lines” really only has a a couple musical ideas (like the Gaye song), while the “Stairway to Heaven” case concerned one musical idea in a song with many.

One of these works was ruled stolen from a different artist, but these are interesting comparison points in terms of what we call “good” art that — whether the audience is conscious of it — is largely indebted to the past. There are right and wrong ways to “steal,” as it were, from a piece of art that already exists. Nowadays, we are preoccupied more with the idea of copying the past, a distinction that few people in the media who talk about these things actually pay attention to — namely because they’re not musicians.

And because the “Stairway” trial went in a different direction from “Blurred Lines,” the precedent is still unclear. How do we quantify infringement — on a formal level (the A minor scale, an actual frame of one movie cut into another), or on a more mysterious, spiritual one (the “vibe” of “Stairway,” the thematic “feeling” of Road Warrior)?

This matters, because the music culture that Led Zeppelin grew up in was all about “stealing.” American jazz and blues, Jimmy Page’s chief influences, were original art forms based around hearing what someone else did, learning how to do it (“stealing”), and then applying it. There wasn’t an ingrained, bureaucratic school system for studying this kind of music — it was learned, as Charlie Parker, Lester Young, and Barry Harris have all espoused, “in the streets,” as corny as that sounds these days.

Zeppelin were born in the ’40s, twenty-odd years before youth culture became a marketable, profitable pillar of business. Page didn’t learn to play the guitar by watching YouTube lessons, gorging on mp3s, or watching dozens of bands play live every month: he learned by listening to the radio, and trying to excavate the depths of every miniscule piece of musical information he could find. By contrast, ’90s babies grew up in a culture of hyper-sensitive awareness of media culture, and that’s reflected not just in art criticism but in the making of art itself.

Everyone wishes they were a teen in the ’80s, but c’mon – look how fun the ’60s was!

This is different, of course, from lawyers trying to build a case — which is a pretty good one, if you look at the original 2014 complaint filed on behalf of Spirit’s guitarist’s estate. The evidence all points to Page having lifted the lick.

In other words, yes, Led Zeppelin may have “stolen” music on a formal level for a few of their least interesting songs, and some of these heists were more brazen than others. But “stealing” meant something different to this group of musicians who all grew up worshipping American blues giants — who also all “stole” from their contemporaries and predecessors.

To fault Zeppelin for these offenses, while overlooking their tremendous artistic achievements in literally every respect for a rock band, gets into litigating around the spiritual side of things. As evidenced by the tremendously overrated response to Fury Road, our information-based geek culture is either incapable of, or just doesn’t care, about dealing with that side of the equation.

But, funnily enough, our lawyers are.