1969, became the top-selling record in
the U.S. by the end of the year, with
three million copies sold by April. In
Britain, it knocked “Abbey Road” off
the No. 1 perch. In August, 1970, Led
Zeppelin embarked on its sixth Amer-
ican tour in two years. In a Los An-
geles studio, the band recorded “The
Lemon Song” live, and in one take.
And so on.
On those first four albums are most
of the band’s major songs, the ones that
have dominated the past fifty years,
including “Black Dog,” “Stairway to
Heaven,” “Whole Lotta Love,” and
“Dazed and Confused.” Listeners clam-
ored for this music; by 1973, Spitz tells
us, the band’s revenue constituted thirty
per cent of the turnover of its label, At-
lantic Records. The professionals were
harder to convince. Mick Jagger and
George Harrison hated the début album.
At Rolling Stone, a young critic named
John Mendelsohn, who loved the Who,
mauled Led Zeppelin in piece after
piece. In “Awopbopaloobop Alopbam-
boom” (1972), a tartly opinionated ac-
count of the quick rise and fall of pop
music in the nineteen-fifties and sixties,
Nik Cohn—also a fan of the Who—
excoriated Led Zeppelin for reducing
blues-playing “to its lowest, most ham-
fisted level ever.” Pete Townshend seems
never to have liked the band’s music.
Nowadays, skeptics are likely to
judge Page’s project of “narrowing the
distance between genres” as entitled
cultural appropriation, or even plagia-
rism. Extending its traditional hostil-
i t y, Rolling Stone has accused the band
of having a “catalog full of blatant mu-
sical swipes.” Words like “plunder” and
“stolen” are thrown about online. Spitz
prefers the gentler phrase “suspiciously
close.” Through the years, the band has
been sued or petitioned by Willie Dixon
(“Whole Lotta Love” took words from
Dixon’s “You Need Love”), Howlin’
Wolf (“The Lemon Song” borrowed
its opening riff and some lyrics from
his “Killing Floor”), Anne Bredon (who
wrote the original song that Joan Baez,
and then Led Zeppelin, made famous
as “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”), and
the band Spirit, whose “Taurus” con-
tains a passage that indeed sounds “sus-
piciously close” to the opening chords
of “Stairway to Heaven” (though Spirit
lost a lawsuit it brought in 2016).
Page has certainly been parsimoni-
ous with credit-sharing, and, in at least
one case, shabbily slow to do the right
thing—he should have credited the
American performer Jake Holmes, who
created the musical basis for “Dazed
and Confused,” on “Led Zeppelin I.”(Holmes sued and won a settlement
in 2011.) But the blues evolved as an
ecosystem of borrowing and recycling.
The musical form cleaves to the twelve-
bar template of I-IV-I-V-IV-I. Musi-
cally, you need some or all of this chord
progression to cook up anything that
feels bluesy, as a roux demands flour
and fat, or a whodunnit a murder; orig-
inality in this regard would be some-
thing of a category error. In the Delta-
blues or country-blues tradition that
flourished before the Second World
War, words tended to drift Homeri-
cally free of their makers. Performers
might write a couple of their own verses
and then finish with lines of a bor-
rowed formula—so-called f loating
verses, or, the scholar Elijah Wald
writes, “rhymed couplets that could
be inserted more or less at random.”
In fact, the postwar Chicago blues mu-
sicians who excited a generation of
English performers—Willie Dixon,
Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf—were
themselves nostalgically repurposing,
partly for a white crossover market,
the Delta sound of lost prewar giants
like Robert Johnson, who died in 1938.
As early as 1949, the music industry
cannily decided to baptize this mod-
ernized, electrified blues sound as
“rhythm and blues.” In this sense, you
could say that English players like
Clapton and Page were double nostal-
gics, copiers of copiers.
Robert Plant’s tendency to lift words
and formulas from old songs should be
seen in this light. Plagiarism is private
subterfuge made haplessly public. But
to take Willie Dixon’s “You’ve got yearnin’
and I got burnin’” and put the words
into “Whole Lotta Love” as “You need
cooling/Baby, I’m not fooling”; to re-
verse the opening lines of Moby Grape’s
1968 song “Never,” from “Working from
eleven/To seven every night/Ought to
make life a drag,” and put them into
“Since I’ve Been Loving You” as “Wor-
kin’ from seven to eleven every night/Re-
ally makes life a drag”; to punctuate
“The Lemon Song,” which is obviously
indebted to Howlin’ Wolf ’s “Killing
Floor,” with the repeated allusion “down
on this killing floor,” while guilelessly
referring to Roosevelt Sykes’s “She
Squeezed My Lemon” (1937)—to make
these moves, in a musical community
that was utterly familiar with all the“I wouldn’t be too concerned. They say the bear
is more afraid of us than we are of it.”