Yeah, Page and Plant get roasted for apparently stealing delta blues music on an on- going basis, yet much of that music had been shared many times before that by generations of performers in the south.
Zeppelin also took the basic elements of East Indian music and middle-eastern music and built their own from those foundations and went back years later and performed with those musicians in tribute.
Most of European classical music was based on folk ballads “stolen” from the pre-existing cultures.
Were they really thieves, or honoring their own musical roots?
I don’t think it has to be an either-or proposition here. You can say much the same of many of that era’s rock stars, who drew on that tradition. I think it’s less about Plant and Page, who were indeed talented, and in some ways contributing to the tradition as much as they were taking from it. It’s less about that, and more about profiting from it when the guys who really laid down the sound in the first place were consistently stiffed. I think that the blues revival of the 60s was helped along by mostly white, middle class kids finding their way to that music via bands like the Stones or Zepplin. The problem is less about them, and more about the structure of the recording industry. To some extent bands like that were operating within some changing standards of the industry. It was this crop of musicians who were the first to really start to be cognizant of the importance of publishing rights, I think. Obviously, people in the 30s and 40s weren’t as likely to know about such issues and across the board were less likely to own their own publishing rights, the label owned them. Obviously, white artists had a leg up in the US and UK, just by being white and could negotiate a better pay rate than a blues guy being recorded in Texas. And plenty of sharing went on between artists, but things change a bit when you have the label acting as intermediary, and also you have a very real power difference between a well known white peformer and a much lesser known black one, even into the early 1960s. So’ it’s more like the labels were thieves.
From the stuff I’ve been reading lately, I’m sort of formulating a hypothesis about this very issue (related to the idea of sharing culture vs. appropriating it). The industry operated for the first half of the 20th century along a particular division of labor worked out largely in tin pan alley - where the work of the performer (either the personality performer or the session musician) was different from that of the song writer. Musicians didn’t really perform their own work either on sound recordings or live (professionally, I mean), but performed the work of songwriters, who were often employed by labels (staff writers). So everyone got a salary. The 60s changed that, because you had the conflation of performers and songwriters, which was the new norm going forward for anything under rock (pop was still often driven by standards, but eventually shifted to having performers work with a songwriting team). But at first, copyright issues still worked along the old ways - the labels set up publishing companies and reaped the benefits of that from copyright. It’s really with the advent of rock and with more white performers playing rock that we see a shift to more artist owning their publishing rights.
So, this is less about calling Page and Plant thieves and more about understanding how the industry worked, and how it privileged one group of people, white industry guys and musicians, over black performers and song writers. Just look into the situation with the majority of black performers into the 60s and early 70s - they had a much worse set of contracts than white performers did.
So true. I think that exploration would make an engaging read.
My fascination with Zeppelin and Floyd and similarly with Black Sabbath ( other than the sounds they made) was in their ability to exist without many of the strictures creatively from management keen to have creative input.
Thankfully none of these bands succumbed to horn sections and back-up singers.
As a Rock player and session player in the 80s I found most projects I worked on were micro managed by non musicians and technicians looking to be like the others on the play lists. This created some remarkable situations in and out of the studio which I laugh at still.
After carrying my 4x12 cabinet up three flights of stairs one morning I was greeted at reception by a nervous man in a thin leather tie (1981 I believe it was) who told me that they didn’t record live into mics any longer and that was a thing of the past.
I think it might make a side appearance on my chapter on rock and in my theory chapter I’m for some unknown reason tacking onto the end of the dissertation… Maybe one day, all of this will see the light of a book and be published… But best laid plans, mice, men, dissertations, academia, blah, blah, blahty-blah. >_< I need to finish the dissertation first, I guess!
They were quite lucky to be able to do so - many, many artists just got screwed. Remember when Prince changed his name to the symbol and then changed it back again? All about his relationship to Warner Bros and copyright ownership.
As you’ve seen from your own experiences as a working musicians which you mention, the non-musicians were very much keen to include their input. Go read The Last Sultan by Robert Greenfield, which is a biography of Ahmet Ertegun. I also have the documentary about Muscle Shoals AL, and the recording studio there, which I’m sure has a bunch of stuff on Wexler on my netflix queue, which I haven’t gotten around to watching yet. These executives think they are doing the world a favor by profiting off musicians (and in some cases, that’s true), but there is a whole lot of shady shit in the history of the music industry.
Good. session musicians should get paid… Making a living as a musician isn’t always easy. The Dire Straights song is just wrong on that point. The rock stars are the outliers in the music biz.
I was in a club in owen sound and the owner said we drank our paycheque.
I pointed out that we didn’t drink only the sound and lights guys drank, and he supplied them.
We got paid.
Life in a band was the best and the worst. It was the best when we were playing and the crowd was into it, and worst when the truck wouldn’t start in a snow storm at 4 in the morning and you just wanted to get home inside of a week.
I’m not sure if creative integrity on Zeppelin’s part was luck. They formed their own label, had a hard man as a manager and they took their enormous chrismatic talent to the audience 300 days a year. The first 5 albums came out within three years and they were doggedly determined to bash on.
I may be blinded by love for Zeppelin’s raw power but I’m not wrong in understanding how they became such a presence.
Many other bands did similar things, but got caught up in drugs, intrigue or a limit to their talent.
I’m continually surprised by how many really good bands self-destructed after a good first and second album.
Another good documentary on Netflix is The Wrecking Crew, which is about session players who sometimes played entire albums for famous acts who either couldn’t cut it or were too stoned.
Rumour has it that the first Aerosmith album was done by session players, and that the only band performance left on the record was Steve Tylers voice.
Well, I think they were lucky to be born when and where they were, at a time in British history when class was actually less of a determining factor on your life, to be the gender and race that they were, and to have access to the choices they were able to make. That doesn’t at all diminish their work ethic or talent, but all these things certainly smoothed things for them a bit. Of course, all that wouldn’t matter if they didn’t have a fanbase to connect to, which they obviously had and continue to have.
They likely were also cognizant of how the industry worked, how to best navigate that system without getting too caught up in the BS (drugs and excess, which became an expectation of 60s rock stars - although, as you know, John Bonham didn’t make it out, as well as the corpoate BS), and some of that came from being late to the rock generation and having that path laid out for them to some degree. The Beatles formed Apple Records the year that Zepplin formed, so there was precedent.
Already on my list, too! Thanks for the recommendation!
Who knows about that! Plant has an amazing voice, but I suspect those shows are going for a particular sound that’s popular within the mainstream pop industry. I’ve never really watched that show, though, so I’m not sure what they’re looking for… I’m also not sure how impactful those shows really are on the industry.
[ETA] Also, I’m not entirely sure about class here (given we’re discussing British bands) but Sabbath was from Birmingham, and seem more working class to me (accents, doncha know), and it seems like they had less on the controlling the means of production than Zepplin did. Food for thought.
Again, you are correct. They are looking for minor talent to perpetuate the pop message.
I never watch either. Yet another programming device for half-awake wage slaves…and I mean no disrespect in that. It’s just sleepy people drink the kool-aide more easily.
I don’t know about that. It’s not my taste, but everyone thinks that everyone else has drank the kool-aid, you know? I think if it gives people joy, that’s fine. It’s all pop culture, we’re just consuming it in different ways, for different reasons, I think.
Of course, that’s most of America, because what are our options.
And back to the topic at hand, I still love me some Lou Reed, asshole or no.
