It’s official, Led Zeppelin did not steal the iconic intro to their signature tune, ‘Stairway To Heaven’, at least not from the 1968 instrumental ‘Taurus’ by American prog-rock band Spirit, anyway.
As ABC News reports, the high profile plagiarism case arose when Michael Skidmore, a trustee for late spirit guitarist Randy Wolfe, sued Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in a Los Angeles court.
For a while there it seemed as though Skidmore had a solid case. The two songs sounded very similar and Zeppelin actually opened for Spirit during the former’s debut US tour in 1968.
But both Page and Plant, as well as Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, claimed to have never heard of Spirit or ‘Taurus’, though the jury rejected such claims.
Still, the panel found that the songs were insufficiently similar for ‘Stairway’ to be deemed a rip-off, bringing an end to a seven-day trial during which multiple expert testimonies were heard.
Among them was musicologist Lawrence Ferrara, who insisted the only similarity between ‘Taurus’ and ‘Stairway’ is a “descending chromatic minor line progression”, which has been used in many pop songs.
Ferrara also pointed to several ancient songs, including a composition by a pre-baroque composer dating back to the 1600s, which sounds very similar to both ‘Stairway’ and ‘Taurus’.
However, as Rolling Stone note, it’s not like Zeppelin don’t have a reputation for plundering old records to inspire their material, having reworked and reinterpreted many old blues songs.
Even some of the group’s most famous tunes, like ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’, ‘Dazed and Confused’, and ‘Whole Lotta Love’ were in fact taken from earlier songs, often by classic folk or blues artists.
