Led Zeppelin Prevail!

The verdict is in:  Led Zeppelin did NOT rip off Spirit!  The jury in Michael Skidmore v. Led Zeppelin, et al, Case # CV15-3462, US District Court, Central District of (Randy) California, ruled that “Taurus” (a brief instrumental) is not significantly similar to “Stairway To Heaven”, a longer song most of us know well.  Bravo.  Subjectively, that was my opinion.  As a lawyer AND a Led Zeppelin fan, I paid attention to this case, even to the point of downloading the court’s decision denying the band’s preliminary motion to dismiss. 

Spirit.  I actually do like this band, and I have their first four albums, Spirit, The Family That Plays Together, Clear, and The Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus.  “Taurus” is from the first, self-titled album, as is “Fresh Garbage”.   I don’t really consider both bands the same, though they are both very eclectic in their songs.  Spirit is decent quality rock music of that era, and worth listening to in their own right.  Equals to Zeppelin?  Not in popularity, certainly, but I say not in quality either.  But since Zeppelin is already such an excellent band, that’s like saying someone is “not as rich as Bill Gates”. 

The main “character” is guitarist Randy Wolfe, better known as Randy California.  He’s an excellent guitarist in his own right, even if he looks like Ben Stiller portraying a 70s rock guitarist. He died in 1997.  During his lifetime he made conflicting noises about whether he considered “Stairway To Heaven” a ripoff of “Taurus”; in any case he made no legal efforts in his lifetime.

Statute of Limitations.  Nominally the standard passed ages ago since Led Zeppelin IV was released back in 1971.  But when the band remastered the albums and re-released them, that reset the statute, notwithstanding the decades that passed AND California’s earlier failure to bring suit.  Of course, Zeppelin had competent counsel and tried to kill the case on these procedural grounds long ago – and failed. 

Voir Dire.  I would have loved to attend the trial in person, though it was not an option – I don’t live anywhere near L.A. At the least I would have enjoyed seeing the voir dire – picking the jury.  Naturally anyone showing up for jury duty wearing a Led Zeppelin t-shirt or a Spirit t-shirt (do they exist?) would have been stricken for cause.  I suppose a LZ fan could have sandbagged and pretended not to know – the same with stealth Spirit fans.  I’d have been disqualified as an attorney, but I suppose I could have persuaded both attorneys, Malofiy (Plaintiff/Spirit) and Anderson (Defendant/Led Zeppelin), that I could be objective and make a decision.  “I have both Spirit and Led Zeppelin IV.  Let them persuade me.”

Attitude.  From what I could tell, Page and Plant acted fairly flippant and arrogant during the trial.  I was concerned this would turn off the jury.  And let’s face it:  Zeppelin did in fact rip off many other artists during their early days.  I also found their convenient memory lapses to be implausible.  Since they toured with Spirit and were familiar with their material, even covering “Fresh Garbage”, from the same album as “Taurus”, their denials of familiarity with that song sounded highly insincere.  A band with a known track record for blatantly expropriating other bands’ material, who toured WITH Spirit?  Sorry, that doesn’t compute.  And unlike Led Zeppelin, no one has sued Black Sabbath or Deep Purple; those bands were far more original than Led Zeppelin. 

Taurus vs. Stairway to Heaven.  This is why reading the court documents were important.  My subjective impression was, “sure, the intro is very similar, but ‘Stairway’ has lyrics, a much larger middle section, a solo, and an outro.   Much as I hate Robert Plant, his lyrics are great (if somewhat pretentious) and his vocals are stunning.  Overall the song is EPIC.” This alone should be sufficient to put the case away.  Not so fast.  The Court cited the standard, which in part says that “even if a copied portion be relatively small in proportion to the entire work, if qualitatively important, the finder of fact may properly find substantial similarity.”  Thus even the small intro to a larger song could be “substantially similar” and meet the standard; thus a jury could go either way.  This case had to be tried on the facts.  Moreover, it was the music itself at issue, not the recordings, so the jury was not played the actual recordings of the songs.  Be that as it may, in my humble opinion, and apparently the jury agreed, the acoustic descending chord progression of “Taurus” was not qualitatively important enough to merit a finding of substantial similarity. 

Aftermath.   I suppose Skidmore & Malofiy can appeal.  Even if they had won, the verdict would have been for 50% of Wolfe’s share of the royalties of Led Zeppelin IV remaster sales, into the future – not the royalties from 1971-2011.  Even the loss probably generates enough interest in Spirit’s back catalog, particularly the first album.  Enough to pay Malofiy’s expenses, though?  I doubt it.     

Jam Bands II

I took another trip up to New Jersey, and the soundtrack to the second half of the journey was Dick’s Pick #4, the Grateful Dead live at the Fillmore East in February 1970.  The Allman Brothers were the opening act at that show, but their famous live album was recorded at a headlining show the year after.  Much of this set was actually from Anthem of the Sun, including a 30 minute “That’s It For the Other One”, and a 14 minute “Caution: Do Not Stop On Tracks” – plus a 30 minute version of “Dark Star”.  The GF and her son were not impressed with the remainder of the set, which I played for them later.  Panda was also relieved, rather than upset, when I told her that I had purchased one ticket, not two, to see Widespread Panic at Coney Island in September.  “Music for men”, is how a friend’s wife described this type of music – although the audience typically has a good proportion of women.  Just not from China or Russia, it seems.

I’d last addressed this issue on 11/14/2008.  Since that time I’d heard more – while still listening to the others.  Here are revised comments.

Chris Robinson Brotherhood (CRB).  Robinson is better known as the singer for the Black Crowes.  Apparently he doesn't get along with his brother Rich.  He formed this jam band which sounds - hardly surprisingly enough - remarkably like the Grateful Dead.  They have three albums, Big Moon Ritual, The Magic Door, and Phosphorescent Harvest, with a fourth that just came out, Anyway You Love, We Know How You Feel. I saw them in concert recently.  If you like jam bands, you'll probably like this one.  If you don't, you won't.

Skid Row.  The Gary Moore incarnation from the late 60s and early 70s, not the Sebastian Bach version from the 80s.  In Live and On Song, they play two extended jams (including an endless drum solo), “Christian Blues Brother” and “Felicity”.

Quicksilver Messenger Service.  Has John Cippolina, who I’d heard with Man.  I listened to Happy Trails and enjoyed it.

Allman Brothers Band.  I mentioned them earlier, but hadn’t heard more than Fillmore East.  Like the Dead, they have two drummers, Butch Trucks and Jaimoe Johanson.   I chronicled them in more detail very recently.

Widespread Panic.   Based in Jawja like the Allman Brothers; they’ve been around since 1986.  John Bell is their singer-guitarist, i.e. their Jerry Garcia.  They sound very similar to the Dead and ABB. 

Phish.  Bernie Sanders fans, they’re from Vermont.  Their “Jerry” is Trey Anastasio, who played with the Dead on their most recent “farewell” tours.  These guys only have one guitarist and one drummer.  I’ve seen them twice in concert, in 2011 and 2013, both at Merriweather Post Pavilion. 

Frank Zappa.   We think of Zappa as a humorous artist, but his earlier material had some serious jamming going on.  Hot Rats is the go-to album for his jamming.  Sadly, I never got to see Zappa play while he was still alive – he played in Paris in 1984, shortly before we saw our first concert, AC/DC – but I’ve been making up for it by seeing Dweezil carry on with Zappa Plays Zappa. 

Santana.   Before he settled down to shorter, more radio-friendly songs, he was into long, spaced out jams, which he briefly revisits on his latest album, IV, with a tribute, “Fillmore East” – which clocks in at 7:44, the longest song on the album.  Neil Schon and Greg Rolie – probably more famous with Journey – return for that album.   As his later output has been substandard – aside from “Smooth” – I was pleasantly surprised at how good this album was.  Live at the Fillmore 1968 – before Woodstock, even – has a 14 minute “Soul Sacrifice” and a 30 minute “Freeway”. 

Fleetwood Mac.  Another band that jammed before they found fame.  The first three albums have Peter Green on guitar, and it was several albums later – long after Green’s departure - that Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks came around.  Green was a big fan of the Dead and loved to jam.   I got the Boston Tea Party live album, which includes both “Black Magic Woman” and “Green Manalishi”.  Fans of Santana and Judas Priest take note, neither of those songs came on the first three FM albums, so this live album was a good way to get the original versions – albeit in a live, jam band context – of those songs.  

Firefly

I’d been hearing debates about whether this series – one season only, it seems – is “libertarian”, so when I found the complete series/season on DVD for $5, I decided, “What the hell”.  It’s only 14 episodes (one season), so it’s not hard to watch all of it fairly quickly.  And they made a movie, “Serenity”, as well.  Joss Whedon, responsible for the more recent Avengers films, is behind it.

Characters.

Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) leads a ragtag team of misfits across the universe doing various freelance assignments for consenting parties – some legitimate, some a bit shady - under the watchful eye of the Alliance, some space dictatorship similar to The Empire but without any compelling villain like Darth Vader to spice things up. 

Zoe (Gina Torres) is nominally Mal’s partner and Wash’s wife.  She served with Mal in the war and shares his battlefield experience.  So far as I can tell, she serves as “first mate”.  Despite the close relationship there doesn’t appear to be any romance between them, but that doesn’t stop Wash from being a bit jealous anyway, and matters eventually reach a climax, so to speak.

Wash, the pilot (Alan Tudyk, the pirate guy from “Dodgeball”).  He knows what he’s doing, but doesn’t bring anything special besides that.

Jayne (Adam Baldwin, “Animal Muther” from “Full Metal Jacket”), the muscle.  He can be counted on to make off-color remarks and threaten to sell out the crew to a higher bidder.  His loyalties remain in question.  However, he isn’t as brutal and stupid as he pretends to be, but the rest of the crew can ascertain that, as can Mal.

Kaylee (Jewel Staite), the ship’s cute female engineer, rounds out the actual crew.  She has no formal training in engineering, she simply has a natural aptitude for it and won the job when she clearly knew more than the engineer who was banging her.

In addition to the crew, there are a few characters who serve as passengers and assist as their skills permit.

Inara (Morena Bacccarin, Deadpool’s GF, who is actually a carioca! From Rio de Janeiro) a “companion” (courtesan) – she rents a shuttle from Mal and conducts her business discreetly.  She doesn’t really get along with Mal, and they spar off about his hangups about her affairs.  Tacitly he acknowledges his hypocrisy – he is, after all, a smuggler and a rogue – but he can’t avoid acting on it.

Shepherd (Ron Glass, aka Venus Flytrap from WKRP in Cincinnati) is what passes for a priest in this universe, and he typically acts as a spiritual advisor (though Mal is overtly atheist) and a “ship’s counselor” like Deanna Troi, minus any special empathic powers. 

Doctor Simon (Sean Maher) and his sister River (Summer Glau) are refugees, fleeing from the Alliance.  River was a test subject for bizarre experiments, and the Alliance is actively searching to get her back, which no one on board wants, though they still resent the unwanted Alliance attention this causes.  A few times Mal threatens to dump the pair off on the nearest inhabited moon or planet, except that he can’t be sure they won’t be picked up by the Alliance in the near future and doesn’t want to be responsible if that happens.  For his part, the doctor is mostly useful as a doctor – which the crew lacks - while the sister is the “freaked out chick who was molested by the Alliance but occasionally adds something useful to the plot”. 

Plot.  Each episode features some sort of “job” or trying to escape the clutches of the Alliance, or even both.  I think of Mal as loosely analogous to Han Solo – if anyone had bothered to chronicle the various jobs and assignments Han & Chewie had handled prior to taking Luke, Obi-Wan and the Droids to Alderaan. The humor is attenuated.  There’s a modest degree of romance and naughtiness – despite having a courtesan on board.  By the way, Christina Hendricks, “Joan” from “Mad Men”, adamantly insists she has not had a boob job.  She’s in TWO episodes as Saffron, a beautiful but deceitful woman, and is clearly NOT as well-endowed as she was in “Mad Men”. 

Oddly, there are no robots/droids and no alien species.  All planets/moons are terrestrial with breathable atmospheres.  The special effects are virtually non-existent and no one “uses the Force”, although River seems to have various powers which are unusual, misunderstood, almost never controlled and which only come out when the plot needs them.  However, all this strikes me more as a function of the show’s budget and not due to the writers’ lack of imagination. 

Serenity (DVD).  This was the movie that followed the season.  From what I can tell, “Firefly” will NOT get a Season 2, and this movie was intended as a de facto S2 to keep the fans happy.  The same characters, the same actors, the same things going on, but a bigger story over two hours, also featuring a special Alliance operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor – good actor, horrendous name) tracking down River and the gang.  And finally they tell us where the Reavers came from.  Overall an excellent finish to a good show. 

Politics.

Is it Libertarian?  If you call rebelling against the Alliance that, perhaps, but then “Star Wars” is much more so.   Hell, even “The Dukes of Hazzard” would qualify (Darth Hogg?  The General Falcon?).  However, it might be more appropriate to say that much of our current culture features protagonists who are highly individual, rebel against authority, and do their own thing.  Mistrust of government, especially any sort of authoritarian or totalitarian government, is a recurrent theme.  It’s such a common theme in American TV and movies that its appearance here is hardly original or groundbreaking.   However, I’m not aware that Joss Whedon is libertarian.  It looks like he has views which very closely match the libertarian ideology but expressly refuses to admit he’ s a libertarian.  “I believe in [all the central facets of the libertarian ideology] but I’m NOT a libertarian.”  Facepalm.  In fact, there appear to be quite a few celebrities who could be described this way:  Jesse Ventura and Clint Eastwood come to mind immediately. 

Anyhow.  Although not explicitly intended as libertarian propaganda, I’d say that – like P&R – it’s a show that winds up being libertarian by espousing, indirectly, many values libertarians hold dear while not endorsing any contrary views.  Or you could treat it as “Star Wars Light”.

The Allman Brothers Band

First, two humorous references.   In “Night at the Museum”, Ben Stiller’s character tries to defuse the conflict which erupts between tiny Union and CSA forces re-fighting the Civil War.  He tells the CSA soldiers that although they lost the war, they still have “NASCAR and the Allman Brothers”.

Even better was Dan Aykroyd’s 1977 SNL sketch, “Ask President Carter”, where unscreened callers get to ask Carter (Aykroyd) questions.  He successfully resolves an issue with a letter sorting machine, then tells a frightened teen having a bad trip to relax and listen to music.  “Do you have any Allman Brothers?”  I suppose the Grateful Dead might have been a better choice, but with Carter from Georgia, his go-to jam band would have been the ABB – especially since they supported his 1976 election campaign. 

I guess this was overdue, though I may have mentioned this earlier – just briefly in my blog on Jam Bands (11/14/08).  At that time all I had was the Fillmore East live album, although many would consider this their definitive work, for excellent reason, although it omits “Mountain Jam”.

Now I’ve had the benefit of purchasing and enjoying the first album (The Allman Brothers Band), Idlewild South, Eat A Peach, Brothers And Sisters and It All Begins, a more recent album.  Warren Haynes, now well known with Govt Mule, took over from Dickey Betts.  I even saw Haynes play with the Dead in 2004.

Core.  Studio-wise, Duane contributed to the first two albums.  Live, he’s on Fillmore East and the live elements of Eat A Peach (“Trouble No More” and “Mountain Jam”).  Obviously Fillmore East is the starting point, with the first three albums as backup.  I don’t find the “deep cuts” to be appreciably better than the “hits”, so the latter deserve their fame and the former their obscurity.

Band.

Duane Allman (guitar).  The man himself, on everything up to Eat a Peach.  Also played with the Dead a few times and plays on “Layla” by Eric Clapton.  With his mutton chops it looks like he took his styling cues from 1870, not 1970.  For that matter, it seems like Charlie Starr of Blackberry Smoke took his cue from Duane.  He died in a motorcycle accident in 1971.

Gregg Allman (keyboards & vocals).  Has anyone seen him in the same room as Rick Wakeman?  Well, not quite an exact copy.  I find him immensely cool.  He was even cooler as the bad guy in “Rush” (the drug dealer movie with Jason Patric and Jennifer Jason Leigh). 

Dickey Betts (guitar).  He stepped up to contribute more after Duane died, indeed as the band’s only guitarist until Warren Haynes joined up much later.  “Jessica” and “Ramblin’ Man” are his tunes.

Jaimoe Johanson (percussion – the INKEEPER is playing percussion).  Just kidding.  He plays drums.

Berry Oakley (bass).  Mysteriously he died one year after Duane, also of a motorcycle accident at almost the same location.

Butch Trucks (drums).  Uncle of Derek Trucks.  With a twin drum lineup – like Kreutzmann and Hart in the Dead – the ABB could do complex rhythms.  Trucks took care of the basic beats while Johanson added more exotic sounds.

Dead parallels.  Both bands are quintessential jam bands and both have two drummers and two guitarists.  They’ve played together in the past, and Warren Haynes toured with the Dead in 2004.  “Mountain Jam” winds up being 30-45 minutes long, depending on the version. Here’s an article about the bands’ relationship to each other: http://deadessays.blogspot.com/2009/08/allmans-dead.html. 

            Not everyone likes jam bands, however, and for good reason: those 30-45 minute songs.  However, just as the Dead have American Beauty, an album with short, excellent songs and no jams, most ABB songs in studio format are fairly brief and enjoyable.