Does It Matter If Led Zeppelin Stole ‘Stairway to Heaven’?
“All epic anthems must measure themselves against ‘Stairway to Heaven,'” Rolling Stone wrote of the Led Zeppelin classic on its 500 Greatest Songs list in 2011. Guitarist Jimmy Page said the song “crystallized the essence of the band.” And ever since a copyright infringement suit was brought against Zeppelin in 2014, people have questioned whether that essence is fraudulent.
Led Zeppelin were sued by Michael Skidmore, administrator of the trust of the late Randy Wolfe (a.k.a. Randy California), who wrote a ghostly instrumental track called “Taurus” in 1968 for his band Spirit. Wolfe died in 1997. The instrumental cut he wrote, Skidmore claimed, is the original Medieval-sounding ascending scale heard in “Stairway,” which Led Zeppelin released on its untitled 1971 record.
To prove copyright infringement, the plaintiff must show that the defendant had reasonable access to the original work and that the works sound substantially alike. The court found that Page had the Spirit album (the band’s self-titled 1968 debut) in his personal collection. Led Zeppelin also covered Spirit’s song “Fresh-Garbage,” which appears on the same album as “Taurus.” The court found that the respective arpeggiated melodies of “Taurus” and “Stairway” sounded enough alike that a jury should weigh in.
Similar issues were at play up in 2013’s “Blurred Lines” case, which ended with musicians Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke being found guilty of infringing upon Marvin Gaye’s song “Got to Give It Up.” Defendants were ordered to pay a reduced sum of $5.3 million. The case is now on appeal.
Christopher Sprigman, an intellectual-property and copyright-law professor at New York University, believes the “Blurred Lines” case was botched. “They didn’t copy the melody or the lyrics,” Sprigman told Rolling Stone. “They only copied the bass line, which was absolutely a standard funk walking bass line.” Sprigman contends that the jury likely connected the general vibes of the two works – the cowbell percussion and funk instrumentation – and that’s not actionable, he says: “That was a terrible verdict.”
The “Stairway” case is a little different than “Blurred Lines.” The composition of “Stairway to Heaven” includes the melody and the chord progressions heard in the “Taurus” clip. Led Zeppelin’s camp maintains that the song is rooted in musical traditions that go back thousands of years to Celtic folk music. The songs are similar because Spirit shared those musical touchstones, Led Zeppelin’s lawyers claim.
The all-art-comes-from-prior-art stance often leads to a cyclical argument in copyright cases: The Beach Boys ripped off Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones ripped off Muddy Waters, and so on. “Bob Dylan copied a lot of things from Woody Guthrie, who copied a lot of from Mississippi bluesmen,” Sprigman says, but in his view, what Dylan produced was no less new than the works that inspired him.