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Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page testified Wednesday that until a few years ago, he’d never heard a song that the megastar band is accused of ripping off for “Stairway to Heaven.”
“Something like that would stick in my mind. It was totally alien to me,” Page said of the instrumental song, “Taurus,” by the band Spirit.
A lawyer for the estate of Spirit’s late guitarist, Randy California, contends that the famous descending-chord guitar riff that begins 1971’s “Stairway” was lifted from the Spirit tune, which was released a few years earlier.
An eight-member jury is hearing the copyright infringement case in federal court. Jurors must decide whether the two sequences are substantially similar.
Earlier in the day, former Spirit member Mark Andes testified that riffs from both songs, played by an acoustic guitarist on a video aired in court, were the same.
Musical experts not involved in the case have said the sequence is common and has appeared in other pieces from decades and even centuries ago.
Page acknowledged that Led Zeppelin used a riff from another Spirit song in a medley during their first tour in Scandinavia, but Page said he’d heard it on the radio — and never heard “Taurus.”
In his testimony, Andes said Spirit played “Taurus” in 1968 at a Denver show where Zeppelin was the opening act, and that in 1970 he and Zeppelin singer Robert Plant drank beer and played the billiards-like game snooker after a Spirit show in Birmingham, England.
“Yeah, we hung out. We had a blast,” Andes said.
Musical experts not involved in the case have said the sequence is common and has appeared in other pieces from decades and even centuries ago.
originally posted by: athousandlives
What do you think?
I see a lot of similarity's but I seem to remember a mathematical study of music that showed all music has a set of shared mathematical principle's and so deliberately or not the same tune or tune section is often reinvented independantly.