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Discrepency over Black Mountain Side / Blackwaterside claims


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What I said made perfect sense. In every case, they were sued, and they lost by way of agreeing to settling. They had sense enough to admit to their errors, and they paid up.

This is false on 3 points:

1. they weren't "sued" in every case. In some cases, a settlement was reached without a lawsuit being filed. For example, Anne Bredon never sued.

2. since the terms of these settlements were rarely made public, you cannot state with certainty that they "lost" every case, nor can you state with certainty that they "paid up" in every case.

3. reaching a settlement is NOT the same as admitting their errors. Again, you haven't seen the details of the settlements so you cannot state that they admitted anything.

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Point out that even IF it's a traditional song, then you should credit it as Traditional. Not, "James Page". What's more is that in the case of Black Mountainside, it's even more appropriate to put "Traditional, arranged in the style of.... " or "a la", which is what Classical musicans and composers have done for years

Huh? Now you are claiming that rock musicians are supposed to credit their recordings just like classical music?!? Where on earth did you come up with that one?

Can you show me some examples of rock or pop musicians using that exact type of writing credit prior to 1969?

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Huh? Now you are claiming that rock musicians are supposed to credit their recordings just like classical music?!? Where on earth did you come up with that one?

Can you show me some examples of rock or pop musicians using that exact type of writing credit prior to 1969?

That's the point now? Because rock musicians frequently ripped off each other, then it shouldn't be handled in an honest manner? Classical musicians handled it that way, because the art form and the ethics behind it were long established. Not to mention, it was far more difficult to pass off another's work, because the very nature of classical music revolved around development of melodies and music theory, which is not easy to simply copy without someone noticing.

Rock was a new format as of the 50's, and was predicated mostly on white people ripping off the music of African-Americans, just as they had done with Jazz. Soon enough, the rock acts were mostly just teenagers and twenty-something copying each other, which is where managers came in to really make the money. So, no wonder they were able to clumsily get away with so much theft and copying. Nobody was watching, and nobody cared. It took until the 1980's for a lot of these things to come to light, and now the instance of these types of thefts isn't nearly as obvious, and whenever they occur you can be sure that artists will be taken to court over it.

Try doing a straight-copy of someone's song today. Try copying "Hey Jude" and retitling it "Hey Judy" and see how fast you get sued out of existence by the Beatles estate.

Ever hear about the case with The Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony"? That song was a global hit, and the only real breakout hit the Verve ever had. The song used a small sample from Andrew Oldham's orchestrated version of the Rolling Stone's "Last Time". As a result of the uncredited use of the sample, and the resulting lawsuit, the ENTIRE songwriting credit of "Bittersweet Symphony" is now assigned to Jagger and Richards.

Had Page done what he did in the 60's today, he would've suffered the same fate on several Zeppelin tracks. As it was, his contemporaries were already getting sued. Just look at George Harrison's lawsuit over "My Sweet Lord" in 1971. Even John Lennon commented later that Harrison essentially deserved the lawsuit because he wasn't "smart" enough to have changed parts of the song. See, Page was smart enough so that it would take years to find many of his thefts. And even now, he's protected by the fact that people like Jansch or Graham are either already deceased, or wouldn't waste their time. It's amazing that Jake Holmes finally got the nerve to go after Page.

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Uh, no. Those that did the same thing got the same result that Page and Plant got. They got sued, and lost.

And guess what, at the time there were plenty of great artists out there who weren't copying other people's work and claiming it for their own. So, repeating that age-old myth that "everyone was doing it" is pointless. Case in point: Davy Graham. So, it doesn't matter how many people were copying each other, there were still a lot of great players and songwriters choosing an honest path. Lifting from another artist without crediting them is what hacks do when they can't come up with their own ideas. Theft is still theft. Call it borrowing or whatever you want.

Sure, copying Michelangelo's painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and putting it on the ceiling of a local Church claiming it as your own original work doesn't make the effort in painting any less impressive on a technical level. But on an integrity level, claiming someone else's ideas and technical creativity, obviously that's where the problem lies. Page and Plant were extremely high on a technical level, but in many cases displayed very little integrity with crediting the things they "borrowed".

Uh, yes. They did. We've already argued this one into the ground in previous threads, but just as one example, many old blues songs had hardly an original line in them. Nobody sued anybody, that's how the musical tradition worked as a process of mutual influence. This whole idea of copyrighting music is comparatively recent.

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Uh, yes. They did. We've already argued this one into the ground in previous threads, but just as one example, many old blues songs had hardly an original line in them. Nobody sued anybody, that's how the musical tradition worked as a process of mutual influence. This whole idea of copyrighting music is comparatively recent.

It's "recent" as in, since the 1950s. Not "recent" as in the 1980s when Page and Company started getting lawsuit threats, See, the history of copyright law may work in favor of excusing the Delta bluesmen from borrowing from each other as part of the oral tradition of the 1920s. But copyright and publishing was very much alive in the 1960's and 1970's. Which is why Page created Superhype, so that he could make royalty money just like all of the other people who were copyrighting songs were. You don't just get to lump Page into some copyright "dark ages" and claim that it existed from 1920-1980, because that simply isn't the truth.

Like I said before, you couldn't get away with the things Page did in the 60's and 70's today. But the real point is that those laws were already in place in the 60's, so Page SHOULDN'T have been able to get away with the thefts he made. Again, see Harrison's legal troubles in 1971 with "My Sweet Lord".

Too often the "but everyone was doing it" argument gets used as if the period between 1920 and 1970 was just one big free for all, where nobody knew how to publish songs, or how to collect money from royalties.

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Like I said before, you couldn't get away with the things Page did in the 60's and 70's today. But the real point is that those laws were already in place in the 60's, so Page SHOULDN'T have been able to get away with the thefts he made.

Page didn't "get away with" anything. Anyone with a legitimate claim to a copyright could rectify the situation with one phone call. Some people chose to exercise their rights (ARC Music, Willie Dixon, Anne Bredon, etc.), other people chose not to (Jake Holmes). That's the beauty of the copyright concept. It's a fair and equitable system where judges and juries are the ultimate arbiters of originality. There is nowhere for a song thief to hide; if you steal something, then you WILL pay for it.

And then there are people like Bert Jansch and Randy California -- people who never had a legitimate claim of copyright in the first place. Instead of simply admitting that they have no case, they try to save face by making up wild, unsubstantiated claims about "running out of money" or being strong-armed by the Big Bad Zeppelin Machine.

What I find most ironic and hypocritical about the Page bashers is that they seem to think that the rules only apply to Jimmy: "Jimmy should have credited Bert Jansch!" (but Bert didn't owe Isla Cameron a dime...) "Jimmy should have known that Jansch's guitar part was original!" (but it's OK if Bert didn't know that Isla Cameron's melody was original...) "Jimmy shouldn't be allowed to say 'everyone was doing it'!" (but it's okay for Bert Jansch to steal someone's arrangement.....because, you know, everyone was doing it...)

And like I said before, the bottom line is that Jansch credited it as "Traditional". That made it perfectly appropriate, fair, and legal for Jimmy to credit the song to himself.

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Swandown, thanks, but unfortunately the link you posted to Isla Cameron's version doesn't work for me here in this country. I will certainly go find that album. If the melody is the same as the one sung by Anne Briggs though, that's probably due to both of them basing what they did on Bert Lloyd's work - which I wouldn't find surprising at all.

As for the legal issues, my opinion is simply that Jimmy should have said it's traditional because that's where the whole thing comes from, including Jansch's new arrangement. The old prehistory of the song is irrelevant if the only thing you are interested in is Jimmy's guitar, but if you are interested in understanding, say, why Jansch didn't claim a songwriting credit, where the tune comes from that he arranged, and how music develops, then it's absolutely essential. So, yeah, a nod to Jansch would have been in order, but a songwriting credit to him would have been out of the question, as Jansch doesn't even claim it, and for a reason. It's a traditional tune, that's all, and has been changed around in all manner of ways a million times.

But what I find interesting isn't so much the legal issue, but rather how musical influences work, how things are reinterpreted and worked upon by people with different background, and thus how music keeps changing - that's really how it is kept alive. What Led Zeppelin did later, when their originality became obvious and indubitable, was based on that earlier period where they are constantly quoting and borrowing things (or stealing them, if you think music is about ownership) left and right, from the British folk legacy, from the American blues legacy - and just plain rock songs, which was more of an obvious common territory.

It had to be that way. Sure, Jimmy Page had a musical vision for the band, but that encompassed a few things, and the balancing of the components and everything, the actual take on the different aspects, etc. would always have depended quite a bit on who he got to join the band. I have often said that the basic underlying formula for Led Zeppelin was the same as for Jethro Tull, in so far as both bands tried to reinterpret and rework three distinct legacies at once - Rock & Roll, the blues and British folk. And yet the bands are completely different. That's not just due to the differences between Jimmy and Ian Anderson, but also because of how the bands actually clicked together and became alive animals. I love the early Tull, but it took changes in personnel for the band to really take off. For Zeppelin it was different, in that the personnel obviously worked, but at the same time, they did have different backgrounds. Just to take one example here: Jonesy was already a very capable musician, but he wasn't much of a blues man really. It wasn't a given how they would approach the blues - they had to experiment together and see how it went.

Led Zeppelin II is practically written and recorded on the road, and you get things on there like the first bit in Bring It On Home, which is very obviously Robert "copying" Sonny Boy Williamson. In a way that's quite honest, because such quoting of snippets from here and there reflects their live shows at the time (and 1968-1970 was a quite hectic period for the band). Their take on the blues was still raw, and they are sometimes tempted to do something like that - Robert just doing a bit on his own, like Jimmy did earlier with Black Mountain Side. They kept working on old things later, but When the Levee Breaks, In My Time of Dying and Nobody's Fault But Mine are examples of a band that has developed its own strong identity. If you are so inclined, you can see them too as examples of theft; it ends up being only silly. Kashmir too doesn't come from nowhere - Jimmy had been doing those earlier things in DADGAD, but now knew the playing styles of his bandmates very closely, and his songwriting presupposes them - even as the others do their bit and surprise him here and there.

Yeah, they should have done the right thing with the credits - of course - but that's law issues, and a lot less interesting than the musical development itself, which really mirrors how music always used to develop before the modern obsession with ownership, copyright and all that. And it mirrors how music really still develops in spite of it all. Anne Briggs put it really well:

[A]ll this [borrowing and influencing], it’s been done throughout history. It’s how music develops. When people sang for pleasure and nobody got any money for it then it was great, no problem. The problems come into it when money starts flying around [...]

Edited by Otto Masson
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As I wrote, it all depends on dates and procedures.

If Jansch published his arrangement at the time the song was recorded, then he has a legitimate claim against Page. If it was done years afterwards, then he can only facepalm.

In any cases, no matter in what year he decided to have his arrangement published, the arrangement is protected as would be an original song (not the recording, which is another kind of right entirely, but the arrangement) against all claims by anyone.

My feeling is that Page's "arrangement" is in a gray area, a period within which Jansch failed to have his arrangement published.

this is a bunch of BS. and, i'm happy to state, if it weren't for jimmy page, no one in the states would even know who bert jansch is. oh, and publishing an "arrangement" will do more for making sure you get paid for your recording than it will for endowing you to any money from someone elses rendition of a traditional tune. that is a very important point.

i would like to add that i personally believe that peter grant was issued an edict from jimmy page at the beginning of zep: do what thou wilt to make sure i don't slog across the world and sell millions of albums and go home penniless (like the yardbirds). this philosophy manifested itself in the publishing as "claim everything and make 'em ask for it back". even robert copped to conversations about songs and credits and the band just let it ride...

one last thing. i love your posts and i understand your position but i've enjoyed many debates and conversations on this subject and swandown knows his skinny. if you truly want a clear picture of the situation instead of only holding on to what you believe is right, talk nice to swandown and he may share some of his substantial reseach and sources on this subject. he may sound like a jimmy page fan, too, but don't let that fool you: he is. but he's no apologist...

beat

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<snip>

Yeah, they should have done the right thing with the credits - of course - but that's law issues, and a lot less interesting than the musical development itself, which really mirrors how music always used to develop before the modern obsession with ownership, copyright and all that. And it mirrors how music really still develops in spite of it all. Anne Briggs put it really well:

[A]ll this [borrowing and influencing], it’s been done throughout history. It’s how music develops. When people sang for pleasure and nobody got any money for it then it was great, no problem. The problems come into it when money starts flying around [...]

excellent post. if we want to, we can pop over to some beatle forums and and call lennon and mccartney out on all their "thefts", but it would be a waste of time and a diversion away from the truly more fascinating issue: the need and reward of developing your art based on your influences...

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What keeps being confused here is that people keep denying Page's theft. Stop fussing over who wrote the original vocal melody to the Blackwaterside song. It doesn't matter here.

Nor does any attempt at the excuse of "so and so stole from someone, so it's okay that Page stole from someone else".

Jansch's arrangement of the melody into Blackwaterside was unique to Jansch. And Page copied Jansch's version note for note when he put it on Zep I. End of story. You cannot confuse Jansch's guitar playing with the monotone singing versions of Briggs or Cameron. That's like comparing a Tricylce to a Ferrari. Yes, they both have wheels. Yes, Jansch used the foundation of the Blackwaterside song as his basis. There is no secret there. But he kept the song title the same, and he had played with Briggs live, so it's not as if he was some outsider taking the song. In any case, the song origins are neither here nor there in the context of Page's theft, because all of the ornamental guitar playing was unique to Jansch.

Page lifted it straight out from Jansch's guitar version. You want further proof? Listen to that transition that Page does after every version of White Summer that he performed live in 1977-79. Here that sliding raga riff Page would do just before Kashmir? That riff was Jansch's, found at the very end of Jansch's version of Blackwaterside. Page didn't put that riff on Zep I, but he played it live hundreds of times.

There was no magic "rearrangement" of Jansch's version. All Page did was add some Indian drums and take out the vocals. Complete copy. But remember that Page was obsessed with Jansch's record, just as he was with Davy Graham.

Speaking of which, please take the time to give Davy Graham his dues as well, and see further the connection between Page and his theft of his contemporary guitarists. Page did not compose White Summer. That song is a composite of Davy Graham's "She Move Thru the Fair", Jansch's "Casbah", and Graham's "Mustapha". It was Graham who invented DADGAD tuning. Not Jansch, and not Page.

This argument gets old, because it's always eclipsed by the the needless discussion over Briggs and the Blackwaterside melody origins. The Briggs side has nothing to do with Page's lift of Jansch's version. The melody could've been written by John Lennon for all anyone needs to know. The point is that by the time the melody got to Jansch, Jansch did something with it that had never been done before. He invented a very complex and distinct fingerpicking guitar arrangement to it. Page came along and nicked the arrangement from start to finish and claimed it as his own, just as he did with Davy Graham's work.

jimmy page talked about bert jansch at length many times after the release of the 1st album and always pointed him out as folk guitar god. without page, i'd have never heard of bert. thank you, jimmy. as for bitching about credits on songs that neither of them wrote, it is really about clearances, which fall to lawyers who specialize in such law, which either gets the artist paid, credited, or sued. and in the grand scheme of things, i'd say bert came out alright on this...

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jimmy page talked about bert jansch at length many times after the release of the 1st album and always pointed him out as folk guitar god. without page, i'd have never heard of bert. thank you, jimmy. as for bitching about credits on songs that neither of them wrote, it is really about clearances, which fall to lawyers who specialize in such law, which either gets the artist paid, credited, or sued. and in the grand scheme of things, i'd say bert came out alright on this...

And your point is? Page talked about Davy Graham too, and guess what, he stole from him as well.

So, you wouldn't have heard of Bert Jansch without Page? Well, that's your own lack of music history. Doesn't excuse Page's actions whatsoever. Which is funny, because it's that very fact which people who copy the work of others bet on when they commit thefts. "No one will ever know...." Trouble is, plenty of people had heard of Jansch and Graham before Jimmy ripped them off. Neil Young, Paul Simon, Stephen Stills, to only name a few. In any case, what difference does Jansch's level of fame make? Because Jansch wasn't a superstar like Page, somehow he deserved to have his efforts copied with no credit?

That seems to be the only common thread that people get back to, trying to excuse Page because of some made-up "lacking" on Jansch's part, or the law. That's completely backwards mentality. The same silly argument is used again and again with each lift that Page committed. The "Dazed and Confused" rip of Jake Holmes' work only brings the same type of responses from the same people. "Couldn't have been Jimmy's fault, because Zeppelin was AWESOME! And who IS this Jake Holmes clown anyway?" People just don't want to believe it. It's like tearing apart millions of adult males' fairy tale about the greatest rock band ever.

So, as a defense, cue the experts on 1) Copyright: claiming that technically since Page didn't break a law, somehow the thefts therefore doesn't exist nor should ever be mentioned as thefts, 2) The make-believers who think that somehow Zeppelin was part of some kind of "oral tradition" just like the bluesmen from the 20's (aka Everyone was doing it!), and 3) the people who apparently are so tone-deaf that they still insist that they "don't hear it".

The thefts are clear as day. When Briggs spoke about the goodness of "influencing" each other, she wasn't talking about taking someone's act and making it your own. She was talking about a culture of musical influence, where people play the same style of music. Not copy people's variations on songs and say that you not only wrote them yourself, but that the interpretation is your own as well. She was out to make money like anyone else. There is a big difference between inspiring or influencing someone to start playing music similar to yours (and by "similar", meaning in a style, not the same songs note-for-note), thereby creating a local music scene (we all play folk, we all play blues, we all play rock, etc.), with the act of repeatedly taking someone's interpretations of songs outright and claiming them as your own.

In the midst of the great music he was able to come up with on his own, Page was also a master collage maker using rip-offs of the work of others. That he got away with the ones he did is because people just don't realize that what they think was Page's was in many instances the work of others which he copied and re-arranged to fit his purposes. Some thefts are better than others. But this is allllllll old news. The examples are out there. There are several which have already been posted in this thread, which are IN ADDITION to Page's theft with Black Mountainside.

But with each example it's the same old excuses. It's never the realization from people that you can still be a fan of Page or Zeppelin while still accepting that they committed the thefts that they did.

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Well, I for one already made a pretty clear distinction between the legal aspect as such and the question of musical influence and development, and also said that I am not very interested in the former, whereas the latter is quite fascinating to me. I also did say that in my humble opinion, the band should have said that BMS is traditional - from the legal standpoint that's the main thing. It would have been in order to say something like, "Trad. arr. Jansch/Page", because what Jimmy in fact is playing is Jansch's arrangement - but it isn't. It too is music in it's own right - and not merely a legal issue - where suddenly you are confronted with a two minute instrumental that sounds like a meeting point of different strands of music from Ireland, India and the Arab world, really like world music. It is ingenious. And yet at the same time the originality of the CIA idea should not be exaggerated, because in forming that notion Jimmy had been able to learn from Davy Graham, who in some ways set the precedent (it is also true that Graham started the DADGAD tuning, which has since become pretty much a standard thing to do in Irish music).

To summarize: my position, for what it's worth, is that from a legal standpoint, the main thing was to acknowledge tradition, and that acknowledging Jansch's obvious influence in some form would have been in order. Instead Jimmy chose to acknowledge Jansch in much more general terms as an influence on his acoustic playing - several times, actually. From the legal standpoint that may not be sufficient, but we are not going to resolve the legal question here anyway - thus there is no need to get excited about it, and it's a lot less interesting than the musical aspect of it. As far as the legal questions are concerned I also happen to think that they should have given Jake Holmes a co-credit for Dazed and Confused. But how interesting is that when you can be spending your time considering the fascinating mutation of Holmes's riff into that monster of a song that Led Zeppelin made famous? There are all these meeting points of musicians with different backgrounds, and they produce something new or original, if you like. Listen to Jake Homes's song, closely and enjoy it for the statement it was for him. In the hands of Jimmy Page and the Yardies and then Led Zeppelin it became something completely different - and yet the riff is there in both Holmes and Zeppelin.

This is the real heart of the matter. There is no such thing as 100% originality. Music, and popular music in particular, isn't about legal terms and distinctions; and originality isn't about creating something from nothing. The idea of creating something from nothing is incoherent and ridiculous (the Bible notwithstanding :lol:) Originality is something real, and it happens all the time in this world. Thus it is always already situated, conditioned and dependent on traditions, earlier precedents, material that you can work on and transform. That's why I find it so fascinating. Because it is real, and yet it's absolutely unpredictable. What Led Zeppelin did with their influences is exactly this - in every single instance. While that's not an excuse for the few times when they should have legally credited other musicians and didn't, it really is a separate issue from the musical development as such, which still works quite a bit like the oral traditions of old.

Finally, here's the full context of what I cited earlier from Anne Briggs:

Well, I don’t know anything about the band, I don’t even know who Jimmy Page is. I’ve never been to a Led Zeppelin gig. I once heard a recording of Black Mountain Side, as they call it, and I realized immediately where they’d got it from.

If he says he heard me play it in a folk club, well he might have. But having said that, I learnt it from somebody else who’s never got the credit. The song I learnt from Bert Lloyd, who was a splendid collector of folk songs, now dead. The song I learnt from him was unaccompanied. The riff I learnt from a friend called Stan Ellison. It was Stan who designed the musical accompaniment, the one I recorded, which was nothing like Bert Jansch’s version. Bert heard me sing Black Waterside and did his own accompaniment, as he always does. I learnt an awful lot of songs from Bert Lloyd, and most of the songs I learnt from him Bert Jansch learnt from me!

If Led Zeppelin have a massive amount of money, as you say, they should certainly pay Bert Lloyd’s widow; because it was Bert Lloyd who really put that song together from fragments. And if they wanted to pay anybody else, the money should go to Stan Ellison, not to me.

But all this [borrowing and influencing], it’s been done throughout history. It’s how music develops. When people sang for pleasure and nobody got any money for it then it was great, no problem. The problems come into it when money starts flying around, which is why this bloody old chestnut is still clonking around the universe! (Mojo, December 1994, p. 50).

Edited by Otto Masson
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excellent post. if we want to, we can pop over to some beatle forums and and call lennon and mccartney out on all their "thefts", but it would be a waste of time and a diversion away from the truly more fascinating issue: the need and reward of developing your art based on your influences...

Thanks, and I certainly agree with that. :yesnod:

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And your point is? Page talked about Davy Graham too, and guess what, he stole from him as well.

So, you wouldn't have heard of Bert Jansch without Page? Well, that's your own lack of music history.

this is pretty funny, cookie, and for some reason, violently angry. i hope you don't mind, but i snipped out the bullshit in your post, and it didn't leave alot.

i'll keep it short: slash can appear on the superbowl broadcast and perform jimi hendrix's arrangement of the star spangled banner and would not have to pay jimi's estate a cent (or acknowledge or credit him). and his sister would scream like a bitch almost half as loud as you but it wouldn't mean anything because he didn't write the song. come monday, tons of people would tell 10 year old slash fans that he was playing the hallowed arrangement of jimi hendrix and hopefully a slew of those kids would look it up on you tube and possibly download the woodstock mp3. it's a fact. sorry.

if you say knew about bert jansch before you heard led zeppelin 1 and you were born and live in the united states, i'm calling you a liar. not stephen stills or neil young. you. once again, sorry.

point? doesn't matter. you can tell by your posts that your missing the most important ones and no matter what anybody says, you always will.

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"It was Stan [Ellison] who designed the musical accompaniment, the one I recorded, which was nothing like Bert Jansch’s version."

......

"And if [Led Zeppelin] wanted to pay anybody else, the money should go to Stan Ellison, not to me."

This is what I meant about Briggs' contradictory claims. First, she says that Ellison's guitar part is different from Jansch's version. But then she says that Ellison deserves royalties for Jansch's version of the song. That makes no sense. (Is she stating that Ellison deserves royalties for a melody that he had absolutely nothing to do with? Why?)

It's also interesting how she says "Bert Lloyd put the song together from fragments". But that can only be true if Lloyd taught the song to Isla Cameron! And while Lloyd and Cameron certainly worked together in the '50s, there's no evidence that proves he taught the song to her. We may never know the answer to that mystery.

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this is pretty funny, cookie, and for some reason, violently angry. i hope you don't mind, but i snipped out the bullshit in your post, and it didn't leave alot.

i'll keep it short: slash can appear on the superbowl broadcast and perform jimi hendrix's arrangement of the star spangled banner and would not have to pay jimi's estate a cent (or acknowledge or credit him). and his sister would scream like a bitch almost half as loud as you but it wouldn't mean anything because he didn't write the song. come monday, tons of people would tell 10 year old slash fans that he was playing the hallowed arrangement of jimi hendrix and hopefully a slew of those kids would look it up on you tube and possibly download the woodstock mp3. it's a fact. sorry.

if you say knew about bert jansch before you heard led zeppelin 1 and you were born and live in the united states, i'm calling you a liar. not stephen stills or neil young. you. once again, sorry.

point? doesn't matter. you can tell by your posts that your missing the most important ones and no matter what anybody says, you always will.

What does it matter when I heard Jansch? That makes Page any less a thief? There were probably several people who checked the examples I posted and found out the same truth about Page. What, they waited too long to find out, so somehow Page is no longer guilty? Put it in a time capsule for all I care. What Page did in the 60's and 70's doesn't hold any less relevance if you talk about it today or if you talk about it in 100 years.

Besides, despite your ridiculous attempt at "smack talk" your post just completely proved my point, genius.

You're right, if someone saw a clip of Slash playing Hendrix's rendition of the Star Spangled Banner at the Superbowl, plenty of people would tell their kids "Hey son, that version he played was Hendrix's version". Because people know better these days. Funny, that's the exact point that all of you fanboys seem to miss when talking about Page's theft of Jansch and Graham.

But let's take it a step further detective, to make it completely equal to what Page did, Slash would not only have to play the Star Spangled Banner like Hendrix, but he would STILL have to have the balls to then try to sell that rendition on an album and credit it to "Slash". Not only that, but he would have to give interviews over decades saying that the version was his own interpretation and was his idea. Only then would it be equal to what Page did on Zep I. And what do you think people would say? They'd say that he was copying Hendrix.

Thanks for proving my point.

Check my posts friend. Where did I mention that Page owed Jansch's estate a cent? I never did. I could care less what financial restitution (if any) Page provides. The bigger restitution is the acknowledgement. If for no other reason than to shut you fanboys up from constantly apologizing for Page's thefts.

These threads are always the same. A bunch of people who drown themselves in the supposed legal standings of the parties. I could care less about whether Page gets sued or not, because it doesn't make him any less of a thief. OJ got acquitted. Didn't make him any less of a murderer.

So, keep spinning yourself silly. The question has never been what/how much/if Page owes Jansch money. The question has always been whether or not Page took from others or not, just as this thread brought up in the very first post. Answer: he did. Lots of times, and lots of music. Yet, every response here is the same spectrum of poorly thought out attempts at justifying Page's theft.

Read my posts again and spend some time with the examples I mentioned. You might actually learn something kid.

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This is what I meant about Briggs' contradictory claims. First, she says that Ellison's guitar part is different from Jansch's version. But then she says that Ellison deserves royalties for Jansch's version of the song. That makes no sense. (Is she stating that Ellison deserves royalties for a melody that he had absolutely nothing to do with? Why?)

It's also interesting how she says "Bert Lloyd put the song together from fragments". But that can only be true if Lloyd taught the song to Isla Cameron! And while Lloyd and Cameron certainly worked together in the '50s, there's no evidence that proves he taught the song to her. We may never know the answer to that mystery.

Yeah, that part of what she says makes me smile! I think that's her way of saying she's just not interested in the legal side of things - and this despite the fact that she doesn't particularly like what Jimmy did on BMS. Transatlantic did look into the matter to see whether they could sue Led Zeppelin on behalf of Bert Jansch, but they couldn't find a way to do it. Years later they did something else instead. Ever seen that ad for Presence?

TheObject-SwanSong.jpg

Well, they kind of responded to it!

TheObject-Transatlantic.jpg

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What does it matter when I heard Jansch? (So, you wouldn't have heard of Bert Jansch without Page? Well, that's your own lack of music history)

.

dude, why so mad? you're starting to sound like the guy that stabbed george harrison...

oh, you're welcome, cookie!

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dude, why so mad? you're starting to sound like the guy that stabbed george harrison...

Are you kidding? Or is that your way of pretending like you didn't come off as a prick in your previous posts?

I'm providing information, based on facts, and like any thread where newbies get their eyes opened to the Zep thefts, there is bound to be a chorus of people in denial who create all the noise about how Page was justified, or that it didn't happen, etc.

Newsflash, I'm a fan too. Otherwise I wouldn't be here. I see the thefts for what they are, but I can still get passed them and enjoy the resulting music.

The trouble is, it seems that every time that someone like me points out the true history of these things, that's when all the smart-ass responses come out of the wood work. So, the only thing that ends up being consistent is that people like you get reallllly bent out of shape when you get given the facts. So you resort to the name-calling, etc.

Not my fault that Page did what he did. Take it up with him.

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Where did I mention that Page owed Jansch's estate a cent? I never did.

Yeah, sure. You only said that Page "would have to pay royalties" to Jansch. But those two things are totally different, right? :rolleyes:

You know, most of the people in this thread are enjoying a civil conversation, even when they disagree on certain points. You, on the other hand.........well, it's kinda hard to be civil when you're using the word "prick", now is it? Ironic that you so quickly accuse others of name-calling.

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Yeah, sure. You only said that Page "would have to pay royalties" to Jansch. But those two things are totally different, right? :rolleyes:

You know, most of the people in this thread are enjoying a civil conversation, even when they disagree on certain points. You, on the other hand.........well, it's kinda hard to be civil when you're using the word "prick", now is it? Ironic that you so quickly accuse others of name-calling.

Read the order of posts, friend. The name-calling came from others first. I kept it civil the whole way through until the comments from the fanboys got sensitive.

And the royalties comment....keep it in context. I posted that Page knew that he would've had to pay royalties to Jansch in reference to why Page did the Black Mountain thefts the way he did. Not out of some argument that Page owes "x" amount of $ to Jansch. Once again, the money is neither here nor there. The bulk of the posts here, including all of yours, have been attempts at denying that Page took anything at all, along with all of the other nonsense excuses about "everyone was doing it" or that Page had no reason to credit Jansch since the song was "traditional". Those are all just excuses that are beyond the point of the original topic here, which is whether or not Page stole music. He did. Thousands upon thousands of people know that. It's Zep 101. Again, read my posts for the examples. Clear. As. Day.

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The bulk of the posts here, including all of yours, have been attempts at denying that Page took anything at all

False. I challenge you to show exactly where I was "denying that Page took anything at all". Re-read the thread and point out my exact words.

Back up your claims with some evidence.

I can defend my reputation and my statements. You, on the other hand, seem to prefer to make exaggerated claims and then run away when challenged.

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