Originally Posted by: aschlemanI think the best thing about Led Zeppelin is that you can bring them up in conversation and within 30 seconds of conversing you can tell whether or not a person is a pesimist or an optimist...

The pesimist point of view... Zeppelin are thieves and get too much credit for what they did... they're not that good of a band....[/quote]
That's not my view of Zeppelin at all.

There can be no doubt of their talent, their importance to rock and roll and that they moved the genre forward in ways that no other band could have done.

However, we should also remember that in doing so, they stepped on a lot of people and did a lot of things which are simply inexcusable. It's not about taking credit away; it's about historical accuracy, it's about personal and artistic accountability, and it's about giving due credit to those who deserve it.

Originally Posted by: aschlemanI personally... don't care if Zepp used lyrics or previously written music. I know plenty of songs that use the exact same chord progressions... does this mean they stole it on purpose... no... What if a song uses the same chord progression and arpeggoiation??? There are only so many notes on a fretboard... and only so many ways to play... some things are going to sound similar... I've written songs before then heard a song that I'd never heard before and have to completely throw out a whole music section because a riff sounded too much like it for my own taste...

1. There are, for all practical purposes, an infinite number of ways to play. People come up with new ideas all the time. It's a question of how creative a person an individual is or how willing they are to work at doing something new.

2. Led Zeppelin opened for Spirit on their first US tour something like three years before Stairway to Heaven was written. Taurus was part of Spirit's set on that tour, so to suggest that Led Zeppelin plagiarized that very unique melody by accident is absolutely ludicrous.

3. Page and Zeppelin established such an extensive pattern of plagiarsm, it's really a moot point if any one example is an 'accident;' this is something they did a lot because it made them money and they usually got away with it.


[QUOTE=aschleman]I think the only people that have ever downloaded Taurus by Spirit are the ones that are curious to see how much it sounds like Led Zeppelin... perhaps Zepp did them a favor by "stealing" their music... Otherwise... who here would have never heard of Spirit... nor cared who they were... *raises hand*

I'd hardly describe a handful of [mostly] illegal downloads 30 years after the fact to be a "favor."

Getting permission at the time, giving due credit and making sure to say "Hey! Check these guys out!" at the time they released it... now THAT would have been a favor.