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Otto Masson

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  1. I haven't seen this photo before. It's great! But also taken by Pennie Smith are the well-known pictures from Wandsworth Common in September 1974. Here's one of them, and it's definitely the same guitar.
  2. There is a short passage about Royston Ellis in a book by David Williams called First Time We Met the Blues. The author became a bit of a blues purist - no accident, because he wasn't a musician himself and after all there was an older scene of blues collectors in the UK which tended to see things from that kind of purist perspective ... of course, Jimmy and Jeff Beck both had a rockabilly sensibility and an interest in the possibilities of the guitar that made them see the blues legacy differently. We all have perspectives, however, and Williams's book is delightful reading, especially for those interested in the very beginning of Jimmy Page's musical life.
  3. Well people, while you're at it, also check out The Union, a British band too. This song sounds like they wanted to mix together a lot of different things from Led Zeppelin - there's quite a bit of Traveling Riverside Blues there, the stomp from Bron Yr Aur Stomp, some of the slide things from In My Time of Dying, and so on. Another song - hard rock indeed.
  4. Hi Ally! Take the first song, a very basic kind of rocking number. In terms of the actual music, much of that one sounds like something that could have been on Exile on Main Street, boogie piano and all ... but it's not just nuances of arrangement that are different from the Stones, as the rhythmical surging, the waves the band is making, sounds more like you would get with Guns 'n' Roses. And you have the slide parts that are very southern rock, no doubt more in the style of Skynyrd than the Allmans.
  5. Go on Youtube and look up the band Saint Jude from London. They are fronted by a female singer, Lynne Jackaman, who is very obviously influenced by soul music, but is using that in the framework of what is basically a rock band; when asked about it, she has herself cited Aretha Franklin, Etta James and early Tina Turner. There are people who maintain that the band sounds a lot like the Black Crowes, but that seems dubious to me - they are moving within what is a somewhat similar musical landscape, but from a different angle, so that their take on things is quite different. I am hearing a bunch of all kinds of different influences in their songs. Lynne has guested with The Answer, and also made appearances with The Union. Now, the band was formed about six years ago - they are still struggling to get people's attention, have mostly gigged in London so far, but have also participated in various festivals. Their original guitarist and main songwriter, with Jackaman, on their first and thus far only album, Adam Green, died of cancer in January of this year. Their current lineup however includes two really good guitarists, Ivor Sims and Marcus Bonfanti, a blues musician, basically. The band sounds great - I also like their drummer, Lee Cook. They performed at High Voltage in the summer of 2011 - this is one of their songs: Let's take a couple of examples from their studio album, Diary of a Soul Fiend (2010). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGNmq2IjXVk&feature=related Check out the bit of Beatle psycehedelia towards the end of this song: They performed at the Genesis book launch for a volume of the lyrics Jim Capaldi wrote, where Robert Plant was present ... they performed Mr. Fantasy there, which I don't think suited the band - but hey, bear in mind what the occasion was, and who doesn't love that song? Ron Wood is a fan, as they are fans of his work especially with The Faces. I believe Jimmy Page has also seen them live in London.
  6. I really have fun listening to Dazed from Texas Pop in '69 these days ... I usually tend to prefer the shorter, early versions of the song, where they also play it a little faster than they later would, which to me really makes it more eerie and psychedelic - when it's not too stretched out, the song will just seem like a more pointed statement. But the Texas Pop version in fact is somewhat in between here, about 15 minutes long. Jimmy had recently acquired the Les Paul and it sounds aggressive, evil, ominous ... and the band is fantastic.
  7. Ah, thank you 3hrs (and Knebby)! I missed that one the first time around.
  8. A part of the riff from Out on the Tiles, yeah - which itself originated in a ditty Bonzo used to sing. If you listen to more of their songs, however, I believe you will find that while there is a certain resemblance to Led Zeppelin, they do have a distinct identity. In places they remind me a little bit of an Icelandic group that has very deliberately played on a combination of certain influences, Deep Jimi and the Zep Creams - I wonder if people can guess what the influences are.... They started out sometimes doing covers by these bands, anyway, so that's why they chose that name (the original band name was Pandora though, and they've always written their own songs as well, since the late 1980's); and then, as sometimes happens, it just stuck, so they call themselves Deep Jimi now. They are actually really good players, and the rhythm section is phenomenal. There isn't as much up on Youtube as I would have hoped to see, but here's one of their songs: Bonzoghost, perhaps I shouldn't either... But I wonder if these guys can be persuaded to do a gig here when they go back to England in November? I would certainly love to see them.
  9. Long time, no see, BG. Just had a look at a few Youtube videos. I agree, they're excellent - all of them are good, but I especially like the drummer and the singer.
  10. Great to see these pictures, thanks for posting. I am pretty sure the well known photo of Jimmy and Rory Gallagher was taken at Pistoia, but does anybody know for sure?
  11. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2rPIdqsVLg At about 3.40 in the video Jimmy starts explaining what the chord is.
  12. Jahfin knows what he's talking about, and you are simply wrong. If Clapton's career hasn't been particularly exciting or innovative for a long time now, it's due in large part to the fact that he had been both to such an amazing extent in the 1960's. He influenced Jimi Hendrix, who paid tribute to Cream for instance at the famous Winterland shows now up for a new release. He influenced Jimmy Page, who produced him with John Mayall in 1965 on a couple of tracks, and Jimmy himself has always acknowledged that the whole Les Paul into a Marshall with a degree of natural distortion from a very loud volume, etc. came straight from Clapton, who did it first. Practically every important guitarist in that period was influenced by what Eric did, first with Mayall and then Cream. After Blind Faith and then Derek and the Dominoes things his musical output hasn't really had this quality so much. There have in fact always been opposed tendencies in his music, not least the blues purism that was never something Jimmy or Jeff were inclined to, as opposed to a tendency to go for the simple pop song - mind you, even if you don't necessarily like the latter so much, they are still often excellently written. He's still one of the greats. The period when he established his influence is long gone, and was more or less limited to the period from 1965-1970, but then that's how it works. Jimmy's influence was established decades ago too, from approximately 1967-1976, and it came after Clapton's for the most part, and presupposed Clapton's.
  13. I like The Jam's version of the old Kinks tune, David Watts - it's not necessarily better, but they really make the song a statement of their own. Here they are playing it in Newcastle in 1982. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaF67NGvP6s&feature=related And this is the original version. It's also on Something Else.
  14. 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? Well, they kind of responded to it!
  15. 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 ) 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).
  16. 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 [...]
  17. A minor point: Johnny Moynihan was Anne's accompanist in the sixties, until she had gained more confidence as a guitarist herself. She plays the guitar on the 1971 version, using an arrangement by Stan Ellison, a Manchester-based guitarist. Also, you might enjoy reading Karl Dallas's note I referred to: KARL DALLAS
  18. I started having second thoughts about something I said in the first post here, and typically enough, my memory was playing tricks on me: Jansch came up with his accompaniment before Moynihan. Since I have to correct that anyway, I might as well add some comments and explain why I think swandown is not on the right track here. The thing is, it was actually Bert Jansch who made Anne Briggs change her mind about accompaniment, because when she heard his playing she figured there was a way after all to avoid the simplistic chords that people tended to use, which of course really amounts to a simplified interpretation. And this happened very early. Anne Briggs was one of the later recruits to the first generation of folk revivalists, and extremely young shen she started singing. One of the people that had inspired her as a teenager, listening to radio, was in fact Isla Cameron, who had recorded an album with Ewan MacColl in 1958 (Blackwater Side is not on that album though) - and it was MacColl who Briggs auditioned for. Now Ewan MacColl and Bert Lloyd were collaborators, and really the main driving force behind the nascent folk revival scene. They were different men (importantly MacColl also worked in the theatre, for instance on Brecht's Three-Penny Opera, which is a connection Lloyd didn't have), but shared a passion for popular "roots" music, and they both collected songs, worked directly with the sources, but were also performers themselves, and both of them were communists and saw the whole project very much in political terms - the scene did in fact become leftist, although many people already then will not have shared their old-fashioned communism (the new left in Britain was born in the exact same era, after 1956). You get the picture. These men were who others turned to for songs that they could then perform (and in fact Lloyd and MacColl also turned to these people as performers - it wasn't a competition). In many cases with these old songs there is no way you can actually get straight to the "roots", because already in the wake of the industrial revolution people were moving around a lot and different traditions were thus "uprooted" and the new plants had their "roots" in a different soil. And one shouldn't also forget that orally transmitted traditions also interact with media throughout the same time framework - because you did have printing, of books and sheets, etc. and later recordings and records. "She Moved Through the Fair" - the number Jimmy Page played on the Yardbirds album under the title "White Summer" - was thought to be a discovery when the revivalists in England heard the traveller Margaret Barry (from Ireland) do it. When asked about it, she said it's from a record by Count John McCormack... which it is, and thus not really a folk song as such. Anyway, the background story of this music, the question where it actually comes from, while interesting, is very often indecidable in the end. Blackwater Side is one of these songs. There were versions in England that seem to be older than the Irish ones, but they are also different, lyrically, and presumably musically as well. The titles are different too, and there's a lot of them! The reference to Blackwater must have entered the picture when the song had travelled to Ireland...and was becoming an Irish song, if you like. What this really means is that there are traditional patterns that travel around and keep getting reinterpreted and changed around - there is no single composer or author, but what has been transmitted from tradition is still always essential. The basic melody and lyrics that everybody interested in folk knows today derives from Anne Briggs, and that version has certainly been mediated by Irish influences. It's pretty much already there in a compilation by Peter Kennedy, who worked for the BBC, published in 1952, Folksongs of Britain and Ireland (I haven't seen the book myself, just references to it). Kennedy and Sean O'Boyle had recorded the Irish tinkers Mary and Paddy Doran in 1952, who both performed the song - but different versions of it, with different melodies (as you can read about in an interesting note by Karl Dallas). You have to realize that when Bert Lloyd, in reference to Anne Briggs' eventual recording of the song (made in 1971), says something like "it's a popularized version of the song as done by Mary Doran" what he is doing is really minimizing his own role - "popularization" simply means it's more accessible to a modern audience than the tinkers' versions. Because he pieced it together for Anne Briggs, presumably relying on Kennedy's work for the essentials. And Anne Briggs has always been very consistent in saying that this was exactly how she got the song, from Lloyd, who had, in reality, pieced together yet another version of it. Thus there are no exact older versions of it, but it's still traditional. Anne Briggs met Bert Jansch, a bluesy acoustic guitarist who had been influenced by Leadbelly and also, closer to home, by Davy Graham's style, already in January 1963 (they had met each other briefly a few years earlier, but that was before Anne's musical career started). They were drawn to each other, romantically and artistically. They were both very young at the time, shared a completely wild lifestyle, and were both unusually talented (astonishingly so, I'd have to say). For Jansch, who had met many revivalist singers before but couldn't relate to them the way you do with somebody your own age, this meant he could actually sit down with Anne and learn the traditional songs from her, noting all the details, asking questions, etc. and for her in turn it was an eye-opening experience, because she could suddenly glimpse the possibility of accompanying the songs in a way that was more attuned to her own sensibility. So, they were lovers and friends, in a chaotic sort of way, and were communicating different things musically to each other. They did not perform together, although they were often both playing in folk clubs at the same date. At this time Anne Briggs was making her first recordings, and they are a capella - no accompaniment - and that's also how she was performing at the time. She didn't make a recording of Blackwaterside in this era, but her take on it live became legendary in folk circles, and Bert Jansch worked out his own version, basing himself on that. He had performed it live many, many times before he recorded Jack Orion in 1966. There is no question about it that this is where Jimmy's 'Black Mountain Side' comes from. The only question is how the tune came to him, and that we know pretty much (I reconstructed that whole story a few years ago on these forums, before they mutated into a part of an official website). Jansch's accompaniment incorporates the basic melody into a loose, flowing kind of harmonic framework (for want of a better description) and these are reproduced in Jimmy's version. As Jansch has said himself, he used that type of backing on several tunes back then - it was his style of playing, and inconceivable except in the full context of his peculiar background. Jimmy can't deny that; and he doesn't really. He has in fact said that he wasn't being entirely original on that. Yes, he made a reference then to having heard Anne Briggs perform the song in a club, but what he said about it was just that that's where he first "heard that riff" - remember, the melody is really embroidered into Jansch's accompaniment. What they really should have done is to acknowledge tradition - although in a way that's exactly what Jimmy's version broke with, because he related it to another musical framework (the Celtic, Indian and Arabic connection, what he's called CIA), emphasizing that with tablas and the accent you get from using DADGAD, instead of the drop D Jansch used. It's a quite ingenious really. Beautifully played as well. All these artists are wonderful, and it's still not a competition. Listen to Anne Briggs and Bert Jansch on Acoustic Routes, the soundtrack from a 1992 documentary on the latter, when they perform 'Go Your Way' - almost 30 years after they wrote it together. To say that it's moving is an understatement. Jimmy Page as a lad in the sixties had an entirely different background, but it's easy to understand that he would have been influenced by them.
  19. Well Dave, Black Mountain Side is based on a traditional song, and Jimmy didn't acknowledge tradition. That's really why people keep bringing it up. And of course that's also why Bert Jansch couldn't and wouldn't ever claim writing credit for the song, because all he did at the time was to create a new guitar accompaniment for it. However, he has stated in no uncertain terms that he feels BMS is very derivative of his guitar arrangement, which is hardly disputable really, although the actual story behind BMS is a bit more complicated than he seems to have imagined. No new information has surfaced here at all, however, and I don't feel inclined to pursue this discussion any further.
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