stairway to heaven!! not written by page?..

mikeanniston

New member
ok guys, i know this really doesnt have to do much with this forum, but very interesting none the less.. and i figured one of you zeppelin buffs would possibly know this or have heard of it... ok last night i was having a music discusion about various genres, and someone mentioned about how they had seen a video on you tube that was basically zeppelin on tour with another band, and page was sitting in the bus with a guitarist from whatever band it was, and the other guitarist from the other band was playing what we all know as stairway to heaven, and teaching it to page. a year or so later, stairway to heaven was released by zeppelin. so basically, it is a video of someone that had wrote stairway to heaven and was showing it to page for whatever reason, then page ripped it off and wrote stairway to heaven. has anyone heard of this or know if its true? i cant seem to find the video, but apparently its on youtube somewhere.... if you can find it post the link (if its even out there?) what are your guys thoughts on this? i found it very interesting...
 
The chord progression is an old English standard. Nothing new at all. Clapton wrote a song with the same progression in a different key.
 
Last year somebody at TapeOp forum posted practice tapes of Zep brainstorming Stairway and about a dozen other tunes. I have them somewhere. Pretty cool.
 
yes i know all of that is true but what im saying is theres apparently footage out there of page ripping off someone to write stairway
 
dunno about the "chords" being ripped off by Page, what I heard (read) somewhere was Zep was in the studio, Page had the chords and Plant wrote the words in like 15 minutes....lots of ol' blues songs have this type of go-down progression, even the song Summertime is a close call....btw Stairway to Heaven is my wife and I's wedding song 31 years ago haha:cool:
 
page ??

page gets a lot of crap for [ripping off] rif's some of it may be true ?? but we all learn little rif's here and there and we make them our own and use them in our own music ....
 
check this out

check out turnmeondeadman.net ....... from what they say zep stole quite a bit of musical idea's
 
Listen to some Robert Johnson and you'll hear all Claptons songs, They are not ripped off, they are just chord progressions and licks that haven't been original for years.....
 
check out turnmeondeadman.net ....... from what they say zep stole quite a bit of musical idea's

Feh. Everybody "steals" from everybody else. If you write a song, it comes at least in part from music you have heard. The opening riff for Stairway is the same (or so I'm told) as Randy California's part in an older Spirit song. So what? A great deal of the early Allman Bros. material was reworked delta blues songs. So was a lot of other people's. I don't think there's any such thing as a totally original song.
 
There is nothing new under the sun.

You know, this is a common phrase thrown around with regards to music.

"There's nothing new anymore"

"Everything's already been done."

But I think this is a very simplistic view.

There are things that are surely true about these statements:

For instance, I'm sure every chord in every key has probably been played (at least by some instrument and in some inversion)

However, when you consider the three elements that constitute music alone (melody, harmony, rhythm), it's absolutely ridiculous to say that "nothing is new."

Granted, maybe a fraction of one melody in a verse could be from another song, or maybe a chord progression has been used many times (like the blues, or like a I-V-vi-IV) but to make a blank statement like "nothing is new" is just ignorant in my opinion.

To me, that's like saying there's nothing new in novels or movies. These are all art forms with literally an infinite number of possibilities.

Think about it: In Western music, we have 12 different notes, with literally an infinite number of rhythmic variations and infinite number of possibilities for order of pitches.


Anyway, all this is to say that, although it's clear that many musicians borrow from previous in terms of chord progression, rhythm, or melody, but that's not to say that nothing new is ever created.

When I hear a new song, I usually have one of two very basic reactions in terms of this. Either I think: A) Oh, that's nice (or this sounds stupid, or I love this, or that's really interesting, etc.; or I think B) Hey, this sounds just like XXXXX!

My point is that while there are plenty of shades of gray when it comes to borrowing or stealing or ripping off, I think it's obvious to most people when outright ripping off occurs.

When Led Zeppelin claimed that "The Lemon Song" was written by them, that was a clear case of ripping off. (Or maybe it wasn't their fault and maybe it was the label's fault for assuming they wrote it or whatever ... my point is that would be a clear case of ripping off.) And when Page stole instrumental acoustic pieces almost note-for-note from Bert Jansch and called them his own, that's another clear case.

I for one am interested to see if their's truth to this stairway thing, because, although the chord progression is nothing new (as someone pointed out), the pattern of notes used in the arpeggiation of the chords is specific to that song.

And if this is not the case, then why do we think "Stairway" as soon as we hear the first 5 notes of that song?
 
yes i know all of that is true but what im saying is theres apparently footage out there of page ripping off someone to write stairway


Don't you think if it was true there would've been some kind of lawsuit, especially if there's video of it? My question is, why haven't you gone to youtube to try and find it?
 
There's a somewhat recent Shania Twain song (one of her bigger hits, but I can't recall the name) that has the exact repeating melody line as Aerosmith's "Uncle Salty" from the 70's. It's so obvious that they had to have come to some sort of agreement.
 
Feh. Everybody "steals" from everybody else. If you write a song, it comes at least in part from music you have heard. The opening riff for Stairway is the same (or so I'm told) as Randy California's part in an older Spirit song. So what? A great deal of the early Allman Bros. material was reworked delta blues songs. So was a lot of other people's. I don't think there's any such thing as a totally original song.

Interesting. I have never heard that before, so I just checked into it. It's a song called "Taurus" off Spirit's first (self-titled) album in 1968.

It's in the same key (Am), and the chord progression is the same for the first 4 chords (Am - E+/G# - Am7/G - F#m7b5), but the Spirit version is only on strings 4, 3, 2 and doesn't include the "melody" notes of the riff on the high E string. After those first four chords, the riffs diverge fairly significantly (in other words, you wouldn't notice any similarity between those few measures if it weren't for the previous similarity).

I'd say it's clear that Page was probably inspired by this tune, and he put his own spin on it for "Stairway." I'm not certainly not the biggest Page fan, and I have no problem agreeing when I hear evidence of him ripping someone off, but I must say I wouldn't call this a case of that. I'd call this more a case of borrowing rather than outright stealing. Just my opinion, of course.

Maybe Randy California was the one in the alleged video, or maybe it was just someone showing Page the riff to "Taurus."

In case anyone's interested, here's the album. Listen to "Taurus."

http://www.amazon.com/Spirit/dp/B00...1656069?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1187189678&sr=1-3
 
The run down on the C chord was used in "Badge" by Clapton maybe 3 years before Led Zeppelin came together. That is one of most used musical phrases in modern music.

C Chord, transition the low C to a B note and then move into the A minor chord. Eagles, Joe Walsh, everybody has used that run. And those that didn't reversed the pattern going from A minor to C.

The difference is, that each one of them put a different melody structure on top of the base pattern.
 
You know, this is a common phrase thrown around with regards to music.

"There's nothing new anymore"

"Everything's already been done."

But I think this is a very simplistic view.

There are things that are surely true about these statements:

For instance, I'm sure every chord in every key has probably been played (at least by some instrument and in some inversion)

However, when you consider the three elements that constitute music alone (melody, harmony, rhythm), it's absolutely ridiculous to say that "nothing is new."

Granted, maybe a fraction of one melody in a verse could be from another song, or maybe a chord progression has been used many times (like the blues, or like a I-V-vi-IV) but to make a blank statement like "nothing is new" is just ignorant in my opinion.

To me, that's like saying there's nothing new in novels or movies. These are all art forms with literally an infinite number of possibilities.

Think about it: In Western music, we have 12 different notes, with literally an infinite number of rhythmic variations and infinite number of possibilities for order of pitches.


Anyway, all this is to say that, although it's clear that many musicians borrow from previous in terms of chord progression, rhythm, or melody, but that's not to say that nothing new is ever created.

When I hear a new song, I usually have one of two very basic reactions in terms of this. Either I think: A) Oh, that's nice (or this sounds stupid, or I love this, or that's really interesting, etc.; or I think B) Hey, this sounds just like XXXXX!

My point is that while there are plenty of shades of gray when it comes to borrowing or stealing or ripping off, I think it's obvious to most people when outright ripping off occurs.

When Led Zeppelin claimed that "The Lemon Song" was written by them, that was a clear case of ripping off. (Or maybe it wasn't their fault and maybe it was the label's fault for assuming they wrote it or whatever ... my point is that would be a clear case of ripping off.) And when Page stole instrumental acoustic pieces almost note-for-note from Bert Jansch and called them his own, that's another clear case.

I for one am interested to see if their's truth to this stairway thing, because, although the chord progression is nothing new (as someone pointed out), the pattern of notes used in the arpeggiation of the chords is specific to that song.

And if this is not the case, then why do we think "Stairway" as soon as we hear the first 5 notes of that song?

I agree with you entirely. That phrase is really too simple to gain what I meant by it 100%. Of course there is new, fresh and original stuff out there. I know that. Otherwise I wouldn't have a massive and steadily increasing CD collection.

Of course, a lot of this stuff is an unthought of amalgamation of stuff that's been done before, just done differently. But if we are talking about a simple chord progression, it's more than like been done before, just differently.

Hell if it wasn't possible to make anything new, I wouldn't bother writing music, because I'd forever just be replaying other people's songs.
 
Now I know why I stayed away from these boards for so long... One interesting post, a few googles later and, BOOM, Uncle Salty is ruined for me.

I hear those opening chords and then it's all I'm going out tonight...

BTW, I remember Cher and Eddie Money having two songs that were almost interchangeable on the charts at the same time: Cher's "Turn Back Time" and Eddie Money's "Walk on Water." They were played back to back on the radio and it was like six minutes of crapola.
Cheers, 'til next year.
 
The run down on the C chord was used in "Badge" by Clapton maybe 3 years before Led Zeppelin came together. That is one of most used musical phrases in modern music.

C Chord, transition the low C to a B note and then move into the A minor chord. Eagles, Joe Walsh, everybody has used that run. And those that didn't reversed the pattern going from A minor to C.

The difference is, that each one of them put a different melody structure on top of the base pattern.

While it's true that the descending bass line in the key of C on the guitar has been used by lots of bands (including the Beatles before Clapton and ... hell, Bach before the Beatles), it's not entirely relevant here. That progression is in C major, and the bass line is straight down the diatonic scale (C-B-A, and often continuing down to G maybe). I'd say the most common form of this progression is C - G/B (G with a B bass) - Am.

Regardless, it's not even really close to "Stairway." That song is in a minor key (Am) in a totally different position on the fretboard (starting in fifth position), and the bass line descends chromatically, creating some much more sophisticated harmonies: Am - Am(maj7) - Am7 - F#m7b5 (or it could be viewed as Am6, or even a rootless D9).

Now this type of descending minor progression isn't all that new either. The Beatles used it in "Cry, Baby Cry" (in E minor though), and Tom Petty went on to use that progression for the verses of "Into the Great Wide Open."

Anyway, just wanted to clear that up.
 
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