Led Zeppelin

Susmit Bose, the Bard Whose Songs Embody Protest and a Hope for a Better World

Forty-two years after its release, the urban folk singer’s debut album ‘Train to Calcutta’ – the first original English album to come out in India – was recently re-released digitally.

For the past five decades, Indian urban folk music has been synonymous with one name – Susmit Bose. Armed with a guitar and harmonica, Bose sang about the truths seen on the streets while his contemporaries played covers. And at 70, he is still going strong.

Bose was a familiar face for college students in the 1970s, when interest in pop and rock music was at its peak. But he went the folk route, like his heroes Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. He wrote his own songs and recorded them too.

Susmit Bose. Photo: Dhruba Jyoti Dutta

His first EP ‘Winter Baby’, was released in 1971 and ‘Train to Calcutta’ (1978), was the first original English album to come out in India. Forty two years later, it was re-released digitally on November 1 as one half of the double album ‘Then & Now’, to commemorate his milestone birthday. The other half is a compilation of songs from his later albums.

Singing for change

“’Train to Calcutta’ was the first album which addressed social change for a better world,” says Bose, who was inspired to become an urban folk artiste after hearing Pete Seeger’s song ‘I Can See A New Day’ at school. Dylan’s unconventional songwriting had an enormous influence as well. “I was so caught up with the idea of change – a better vision and perspective, that I started writing my own songs. ”

These were first played to the crowds at the Cellar, a Delhi discotheque which held folk nights every Monday, where solo artistes sang covers. “During the performance, I would slip in my own songs without mentioning it. Some would notice and later, I would confess that it was my own. That’s how I got people interested in listening to my music,” said Bose.

Exploitation of the vulnerable, including children and protest songs were major themes he dealt with. The albums ‘Public Issue’ (2006) and ‘Be the Change’ (2007) talk about the division of the world and man on racial, economic and territorial grounds. The song ‘Dear Sir’ broaches the topic of discrimination against women while capitalism becomes the target in ‘The Economic Hit Man’.

‘Essentially Susmit Bose’ (2009) contained songs about the Babri Masjid demolition, female foeticide and activist Dr. Binayak Sen, whose imprisonment for allegedly helping Maoists affected him deeply.

Bose also became the first singer to render ‘Hum Honge Kamiyab’, the Hindi version of ‘We Shall Overcome’, for All India Radio, which became a cult anthem for protests. In 1990, American broadcasting company CBS approached Bose to make an album called ‘Man of Conscience’ in honour of anti-apartheid movement leader Nelson Mandela.

Initially, he had wanted to be a classical musician like his father Sunil Bose, but took to English music. Conflicts between the rebellious teenager and the parent resulted in Bose being thrown out of the house. He would spend nights sleeping on railway platforms and public places like Connaught Place.

Once in a while, he would flee to Kathmandu, a cultural hotspot on the hippie trail, to immerse himself in music, radical ideas and psychedelia amidst ‘empowered and enlightened’ thinkers.

“One day, I was singing Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on a broken guitar. Somebody came up to me and said it was incorrect. He took the guitar to play and was terrific! I was too stoned to even look at him. When he went away, my group asked me, ‘What were you and Jimmy talking about?’ It was Jimmy Page (Zeppelin’s guitarist),” said Bose, narrating an experience he had in the Himalayan city, to which he paid tribute through the song ‘Kathmandu’ in ‘Train to Calcutta’.

The 1978 album was thought to be lost for good. Bose himself had given away all the copies he had. Today, only a handful of record collectors have the vinyl, making it extremely valuable.

Jaimin Rajani, who made the film If Not For You about Calcutta’s fascination with Bob Dylan, tracked down several collectors but finally struck gold with Kalyan Kamal Roy, a mechanical engineer based in Kolkata. His impressive collection of 5,000 records included two copies of ‘Train to Calcutta’ in mint condition. Consequently, all 13 tracks were salvaged and cleaned. A lot of those songs are seeing the light of day for the first time and are now preserved forever. Rajani has produced ‘Then and Now’.

“I had found this record in a second-hand shop in the early ’80s. It was so incredible that when I come across a second copy a few years later, I bought that as well,” says Roy, revealing that he had to walk back home because he had spent all the money he had on the vinyl.

Also read: Neil Mukherjee’s New Bengali Album Continues His Fascination With Urban Lives

The album’s lyrical themes range from vignettes of city life and love songs to observations about human behaviour. The title track is about how a poor boy is ridiculed and thrown off the train as he has no ticket., The upbeat ‘Street Soliloquy’ talks of poverty and hunger faced by an unemployed man and his child. Also included are the anti-fascist Spanish song ‘Viva La Quinte Brigada’ and the album ender ‘Baul’, a Bengali folk song taught to Bose’s father by its writer, the revolutionary poet Kazi Nazrul Islam.

This song was only the beginning of Bose’s long association with the Bauls, nomadic minstrels from Bengal’s countryside. Ethnic folk instruments such as the percussive khamok can be heard on several of his albums while the worlds of urban folk and rural Bengal folk merged on ‘Song of the Eternal Universe’ (2008).

“The Bauls were famous all over the world but their language was not understood. So, the Ford Foundation supported me to bring out this album. I sang the thematic equivalent of the Bengali lyrics in English,” said Bose.

Are protest songs still relevant? “These songs are ageless,” Bose says emphatically, “But I wonder the real meaning resonates with today’s generations. A person may be a Dylan fan but perhaps may not imbibe the values the songs preach, which are antithetical to the consumerist good life. “

Protest songs will always be overshadowed by the mainstream, believes Bose. “For new guys doing this today, they aren’t many opportunities. Music has become far more ornamental and visual. Artistes have to be sexy. There is a lot of pretense. This is because music is a trade now,” he said.

But Bose is acutely aware of his role. “A folk singer isn’t out there to change the world. He just keeps the thought and ideology alive, so that people listen and there’s a chance of listening and possibly getting influenced,” he says.

Shaswata Kundu Chaudhuri is a freelance journalist based in Kolkata and interested in music.

Led Zeppelin Wins ‘Stairway To Heaven’ Plagiarism Case

The US Supreme Court has declined to hear a copyright case against the band, ending a yearslong legal dispute. The Led Zeppelin case has had a wide impact on other musicians facing their own copyright claims.

British rock band Led Zeppelin effectively won a long-running legal battle on Monday over claims that they stole the opening guitar riff for their classic song ‘Stairway to Heaven’.

The US Supreme Court declined to take up a copyright case against the band, meaning a decision made in March this year by a US appeals court will stand.

The lower court in California court ruled that Led Zeppelin had not copied musician Randy Wolfe in the opening guitar riff to the song.

The Supreme Court’s move to not take up the case has effectively ended the legal challenge, which could have had massive effects on the music industry.

Long-running case

The case was originally filed in 2014 by the estate of musician Randy Wolfe; Wolfe died in 1997 and never took legal action. Wolfe’s band, Spirit, had Led Zeppelin as an opening act during the British band’s first US tour in 1968. The song in question was written in 1971.

Experts called by the plaintiffs in lower courts said there were substantial similarities between Spirit’s song ‘Taurus’ and ‘Stairway to Heaven’. But defence witnesses said the chord progression in Led Zeppelin‘s song was so common that copyright did not apply.

Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page said in a 2016 jury trial in Los Angeles that he had not heard ‘Taurus’ until recently.

The US appeals court decision had an impact beyond classic rock music. It was also key in ending a similar six-year copyright case involving pop star Katy Perry and her song ‘Dark Horse’.

The Led Zeppelin decision prompted a judge to throw out the verdict in the Perry case, clearing her of charges that she copied Christian rapper Flame.

This article was originally published on DW.

The Go-To Destination for All Things Beat Generation

The Beat Museum in San Francisco houses items that help understand the seminal influence that Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky and others had.

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…”

The poet Allen Ginsberg first read out these lines from his poem ‘Howl’ at a reading at the Six Gallery in December 1955. The reading was an immediate success and nearly 65 years on, the lines still resonate and the influence of Ginsberg, then 29, still continues on literature, social movements, popular culture and politics.

The Beat Generation – the literary movement formed by Ginsberg and his fellow writers such as Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky, William Burroughs and Lucien Carr – which explored post-war culture and set the stage of much that came later, including hippies and the quest for spiritualism which brought many to India.

Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlowski. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Herbert Rusche CC BY-SA 3.0,

Though many of the writers first met in Columbia University in New York, it was in San Francisco they flowered. Fans from all over the world still make a beeline to San Francisco to soak in the atmosphere in which the Beats lived and thrived, creating some of their greatest works. After the 2012 movie based on Jack Kerouac’s book On the Road, and before that Howl (2010), starring James Franco as Ginsberg, interest in the Beats has heightened.

And there is much to see in San Francisco – from walking tours based on Kerouac’s brief stays in the city to the Big Sur, celebrated in his works to the bookshop set up by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti who published ‘Howl’ and fought and won an obscenity case about the book. Ferlinghetti, himself a significant poet, recently turned 100, a milestone celebrated by the bookshop and the city too.

Right across City Lights is the Beats Museum, a private initiative by a long time devotee of the Beats. “The Beat Museum is a labour of love,” says Jerry Cimino, who worked in sales for large companies such as IBM and American Express before he decided to pursue his passion for the culture that the Beats spawned. His wife and he opened a bookshop and a museum in 2004 right across City Lights – which is next to Jack Kerouac alley – and began collecting memorabilia associated with the writers and the poets.

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Photo: The Wire

It is here that for the price of admission (eight dollars) the visitor can see books, posters, photographs, even typewriters and jackets belonging to Ginsberg, Kerouac and others — and understand the seminal influence they had on their own generation and beyond. Many of the items come in via mail or are handed over by people for display in the museum.

“The Beat Generation writers influenced everybody. Both Dylan and John Lennon read Howl and On The Road in 1959. There’s even evidence that the Beatles changed the spelling of their name from the Silver Beetles in 1959 to The Beatles in 1960. Dylan and The Beatles exemplified the values of The Beat Generation’” says Cimino.

Jerry Cimino. Photo: The Wire

“Young people today believe in racial equality, gender equality, gay and lesbian rights and, of course, climate change. The Beats would’ve called that “Environmentalism” back in the 50s and 60s, when they were writing about saving the whales and saving the dolphins. The Beats made it OK to be different. Allen Ginsberg came out of the closet as a gay activist before we had the term “gay”, before we had the term “activist,” he says.

In 1961, Allen Ginsberg, along with Orlovsky, left by boat to Bombay to get away from the controversies generated by ‘Howl’ and to explore India, visiting ashrams, the ghats of Benares and opium dens in Delhi. In Calcutta, he met the writers of the Hungrialist Movement, including Malay Roychowdhry, Samir Roychowdhry, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Debi Roy. Ginsberg’s Indian journey is chronicled in Deborah Baker’s A Blue Hand: The Beat Generation in India.

Also Read: Allen Ginsberg, a Calcutta Story

Cimino says he is keen to visit India to follow in their footsteps. The museum gets visitors from India. Many international celebrities have visited the Museum to pay homage to the Beats. He rattles off the names – Patti Smith, Tom Waits and Jimmy Page, the lead guitarist of Led Zeppelin. “After the Beats went to India, we had to as well,” Page reportedly said.

Jimmy Page shows his museum membership card. Photo: Jerry Cimino

The museum struggles against the tide of rising rentals and the burst of start up companies competing for space in the expensive city. “As a not-for-profit, it is not easy to get employees who can afford to live here.” But he intends to continue, as he has all these years. “We need the Beats probably more than ever. The Beat Generation embraced diversity. That’s important, especially in a global environment. The Beats encouraged people, especially young people, to find their own path and live their lives in their own ways. That’s especially important as the world moves faster and faster.”

Plagiarists or Innovators? The Led Zeppelin Paradox Endures

How can a band so slavishly derivative – and sometimes downright plagiaristic – be simultaneously considered so innovative and influential?

Fifty years ago – in September 1968 – the legendary rock band Led Zeppelin first performed together, kicking off a Scandinavian tour billed as the New Yardbirds.

The new, better name would come later that fall, while drummer John Bonham’s death in 1980 effectively ended their decade-defining reign. But to this day, the band retains the same iconic status it held back in the 1970s: It ranks as one of the best-selling music acts of all time and continues to shape the sounds of new and emerging groups young enough to be the band members’ grandchildren.

Yet, even after all this time – when every note, riff and growl of Zeppelin’s nine-album catalog has been pored over by fans, cover artists and musicologists – a dark paradox still lurks at the heart of its mystique. How can a band so slavishly derivative – and sometimes downright plagiaristic – be simultaneously considered so innovative and influential?

How, in other words, did it get to have its custard pie and eat it, too?

As a scholar who researches the subtle complexities of musical style and originality as well as the legal mechanisms that police and enforce them, such as copyright law, I find this a particularly devilish conundrum. The fact that I’m also a bassist in a band that fuses multiple styles of music makes it personal.

A pattern of ‘borrowing’

For anyone who quests after the holy grail of creative success, Led Zeppelin has achieved something mythical in stature: a place in the musical firmament, on its own terms, outside of the rules and without compromise.

When Led Zeppelin debuted its eponymous first album in 1969, there’s no question that it sounded new and exciting. My father, a baby boomer and dedicated Beatles fan, remembers his chagrin that year when his middle school math students threw over the Fab Four for Zeppelin, seemingly overnight. Even the stodgy New York Times, which decried the band’s “plastic sexual superficiality,” felt compelled, in the same article, to acknowledge its “enormously successful… electronically intense blending” of musical styles.

Yet, from the very beginning, the band was also dogged with accusations of musical pilfering, plagiarism and copyright infringement – often justifiably.

The band’s first album, Led Zeppelin, contained several songs that drew from earlier compositions, arrangements and recordings, sometimes with attribution and often without. It included two Willie Dixon songs, and the band credited both to the influential Chicago blues composer. But it didn’t credit Anne Bredon when it covered her song “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.”

The hit “Dazed and Confused,” also from that first album, was originally attributed to Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. However in 2010, songwriter Jake Holmes filed a lawsuit claiming that he’d written and recorded it in 1967. After the lawsuit was settled out of court, the song is now credited in the liner notes of re-releases as “inspired by” Holmes.

The band’s second album, Led Zeppelin II, picked up where the first left off. Following a series of lawsuits, the band agreed to list Dixon as a previously uncredited author on two of the tracks, including its first hit single, “Whole Lotta Love.” An additional lawsuit established that blues legend Chester “Howlin’ Wolf” Burnett was a previously uncredited author on another track called “The Lemon Song.”

Musical copyright infringement is notoriously challenging to establish in court, hence the settlements. But there’s no question the band engaged in what musicologists typically call “borrowing.” Any blues fan, for instance, would have recognised the lyrics of Dixon’s “You Need Love” – as recorded by Muddy Waters – on a first listen of “Whole Lotta Love”.

Dipping into the commons or appropriation?

Should the band be condemned for taking other people’s songs and fusing them into its own style?

Or should this actually be a point of celebration?

The answer is a matter of perspective. In Zeppelin’s defense, the band is hardly alone in the practice. The 1960s folk music revival movement, which was central to the careers of Baez, Holmes, Bredon, Dixon and Burnett, was rooted in an ethic that typically treated musical material as a “commons” – a wellspring of shared culture from which all may draw, and to which all may contribute.

Most performers in the era routinely covered “authorless” traditional and blues songs, and the movement’s shining star, Bob Dylan, used lyrical and musical pastiche as a badge of pride and display of erudition – “Look how many old songs I can cram into this new song!” – rather than as a guilty, secret crutch to hold up his own compositions.

Why shouldn’t Zeppelin be able to do the same?

On the other hand, it’s hard to ignore the racial dynamics inherent in Led Zeppelin’s borrowing. Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf were African-Americans, members of a subjugated minority who were – especially back then – excluded from reaping their fair share of the enormous profits they generated for music labels, publishers and other artists.

Like their English countrymen Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones, Zeppelin’s attitude toward black culture seems eerily reminiscent of Lord Elgin’s approach to the marble statues of the Parthenon and Queen Victoria’s policy on the Koh-i-Noor diamond: Take what you can and don’t ask permission; if you get caught, apologise without ceding ownership.

Led Zeppelin was also accused of lifting from white artists such as Bredon and the band Spirit, the aggrieved party in a recent lawsuit over the rights to Zeppelin’s signature song “Stairway to Heaven.” Even in these cases, the power dynamics were iffy.

Bredon and Spirit are lesser-known composers with lower profiles and shallower pockets. Neither has benefited from the glow of Zeppelin’s glory, which has only grown over the decades despite the accusations and lawsuits leveled against them.

A matter of motives

So how did the band pull it off, when so many of its contemporaries have been forgotten or diminished? How did it find and keep the holy grail? What makes Led Zeppelin so special?

I could speculate about its cultural status as an avatar of trans-Atlantic, post-hippie self-indulgence and “me generation” rebellion. I could wax poetic about its musical fusion of pre-Baroque and non-Western harmonies with blues rhythms and Celtic timbres. I could even accuse it, as many have over the years, of cutting a deal with the devil.

Instead, I’ll simply relate a personal anecdote from almost 20 years ago. I actually met frontman Robert Plant. I was waiting in line at a lower Manhattan bodega around 2 am and suddenly realised Plant was waiting in front of me. A classic Chuck Berry song was playing on the overhead speakers. Plant turned to look at me and mused, “I wonder what he’s up to now?” We chatted about Berry for a few moments, then paid and went our separate ways.

Brief and banal though it was, I think this little interlude – more than the reams of music scholarship and journalism I’ve read and written – might hold the key to solving the paradox.

Maybe Led Zeppelin is worthy because, like Sir Galahad, the knight who finally gets the holy grail, its members’ hearts were pure.

During our brief exchange, it was clear Plant didn’t want to be adulated – he didn’t need his ego stroked by a fawning fan. Furthermore, he and his bandmates were never even in it for the money. In fact, for decades, Zeppelin refused to license its songs for television commercials. In Plant’s own words, “I only wanted to have some fun.”

Maybe the band retained its fame because it lived, loved and embodied rock and roll so absolutely and totally – to the degree that Plant would start a conversation with a total stranger in the middle of the night just to chat about one of his heroes.

This love, this purity of focus, comes out in its music, and for this, we can forgive Led Zeppelin’s many trespasses.

Aram Sinnreich, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, American University School of Communication

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Will Led Zeppelin Ever Reunite?

Will the founding fathers of modern rock ever give their fans the farewell tour now almost four decades overdue? A Led Zep historian considers the prospect.

US President Barack Obama chatting with the surviving members of Led Zeppelin – John Paul Jones, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page – during intermission at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2012. Credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza/Wikimedia Commons

The mighty Led Zeppelin existed for twelve years between 1968 and 1980. The sudden death of drummer John Bonham effectively signalled the end of the band in their eyes. How could they possibly have carried on without their powerhouse drummer and dear friend?

After the death of Bonham (pictured in July 1973) in 1980, the remaining members of Led Zeppelin decided to disband the group. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Of course, this did not stop fans from hoping the band would reform with a new drummer. There has been the odd get–together for charitable appearances, such as Live Aid in 1985 and Atlantic Records 40th Anniversary in 1988. Although these shows were met with mass delirium from eager fans, in reality, both inevitably fell short on the performance side. (Then again, to be fair, this is not the band’s fault: multi-act events with short three- or four-song sets are never hugely successful from a creative perspective.)

By 1994, Robert Plant had distanced himself from the whole “rock singer” tag. After being approached to perform an MTV Unplugged show, he felt uncomfortable flying the Led Zeppelin flag under his own name. A meeting took place between Plant and Jimmy Page where they talked about doing the show together. Much to his surprise, the Led Zeppelin baggage Plant had been carrying around for years had completely dissipated. The men found common ground and decided to do Unplugged together and see if anything came of it (much to the vexation of a miffed John Paul Jones, who was not invited – or even told – of the event!). They did not go out as Led Zeppelin, but rather as Page & Plant. Also, the MTV show was retitled Unledded due to the electric nature of some numbers. A live record and video from the show, which consisted of rearranged Led Zeppelin classics, were hugely successful. A new studio album and a few tours later, it was all over. When all the bad memories of Led Zeppelin playing huge arenas returned, Plant had enough. He told Page he was leaving, as he much preferred playing small clubs and reconnecting with his audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q7Vr3yQYWQ

If the band was ever going to reform for a tour, it would have been after playing the O2 Arena in London in 2007 to celebrate the life of Ahmet Ertegun. The rehearsals had gone extremely well and millions of people applied for tickets. Although Plant had made his feelings very clear, Page expected that the successful concert would have given Plant the encouragement necessary to embark on a tour. It would have been a perfect time, with the crew in place and the band nicely rehearsed, but it was not to be, much to the chagrin of Zeppelin fans (and Page in particular). Since that time, there have been some acrimonious spats between the two men, both privately and in the press. All things considered, the prospect of Led Zeppelin actually reforming – with Jones and Jason Bonham (John Bonham’s son) – seems very remote.

Then again, hell did freeze over in early 2016 when Guns n’ Roses announced they were reuniting after a hugely caustic break of 23 years by playing a small club show at Los Angeles’ famed Troubadour club before announcing a huge tour. Of course, Led Zeppelin is a very different beast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiLKT5rPHBA

On one hand, Page, Jones and Bonham would love to get together: at one point, there was even talk of hiring Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler on vocals. Luckily, that fell through, but what were they thinking! The inconvenient truth for many is that Plant is pretty intransigent when it comes to getting the band together again. He is clearly enjoying himself with a great band and re-inventing Led Zeppelin classics to high praise from critics and fans alike. Why would he want to get back on the crazy Zeppelin merry-go-round?

Page, on the other hand, has kept himself busy while serving as the perfect curator for Led Zeppelin’s discography. It was his band; he has always had the vision. The two year re-issue of their entire catalogue has been received with huge critical acclaim, and justly so. Their catalogue is without doubt the benchmark for other bands to follow.

Meanwhile, Jones has kept himself occupied with various production projects as well as playing with musical friends around the globe. Clearly, the individual band members are keeping busy, but fans still want to see the band on stage once more, many for the first time. Will it ever happen?

Well, 2018 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the group. If anything were to happen, it would surely be then. The band, including Plant, owes it to the fans to play one last tour!

Marc Roberty is the author of Led Zeppelin: Day By Day, is an award-nominated author, music journalist, and music historian.

This article first appeared on backwing.com and is being reproduced here with the permission of the author.

Stairway to Court: Led Zeppelin on Trial for Copyright Infringement

The lawsuit alleges that the British band lifted the opening chords of their iconic 1971 song ‘Stairway to Heaven’ from the instrumental number ‘Taurus’ by the American band Spirit.

A colour photograph of Led Zeppelin’s lead singer Robert Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page. Credit: Wikipedia

Led Zeppelin has gone on trial in Los Angeles for copyright infringement over their iconic 1971 song ‘Stairway to Heaven’.

The lawsuit alleges that the British band lifted the opening chords of ‘Stairway’ – considered one of the most popular rock compositions in history – from the instrumental number ‘Taurus’, released three years earlier by American band Spirit.

Michael Skidmore, trustee of the late Randy Wolfe, also known as Randy California, Spirit’s guitarist and composer of ‘Taurus’, filed the plagiarism complaint.

Two of Led Zeppelin’s founder members, singer Robert Plant, now 72, and guitarist Jimmy Page, 67, testified. They said that the opening chords are not unique. In his opening arguments at the Los Angeles federal court, defence attorney Peter Anderson said: “No one owns common musical elements.”

In 1968 and 1969, Led Zeppelin and Taurus toured together. Skidmore said that hearing Spirit perform ‘Taurus’ in Denver may have inspired Page to write ‘Stairway’, but Wolfe never received credit. Plant and Page said that although the bands toured together, they had very little interaction.

Andersen said his side would show that neither Skidmore nor Wolfe’s trust own the copyright to ‘Taurus’.

The final decision of whether ‘substantial’ similarity exists between the first two minutes of ‘Stairway’ and ‘Taurus’ and whether Led Zeppelin is guilty of plagiarism will be up to the jury, said US district court judge R. Gary Klausner. The jury was finalised on June 14, after seven of the first 14 possible jurors were dismissed.

Janet Wolfe, Randy California’s sister, was the first to testify, and said that her brother had written the song for his wife Robin. She also said that the issue had “upset him for many, many years”.

When Led Zeppelin Visited India

Legendary rock group Led Zeppelin are to unveil previously unheard tracks recorded with Indian musicians during a visit to Mumbai more than four decades ago

This article originally appeared in BBC News.

Led Zeppelin in Juhu.

The news that iconic rock band Led Zeppelin will release tapes of their Bombay Sessions has sent a frisson of excitement among their fans all over the world.

Fans in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) are even more agog because now they can get the entire set of the famed recordings which are available only in bits and pieces on the Internet.

These sessions were recorded in the HMV studio in south Bombay in October 1972 along with Indian musicians. Though reports have suggested the rockers – actually just two, guitarist Jimmy Page and singer Robert Plant – jammed with the Bombay Orchestra, my research shows that there was no such formal entity.

It was more likely a group of freelance musicians brought together under the leadership of flautist Vijay Raghav Rao, who at the time was associated with the Films Division. Not much is known of who participated in the sessions except that the sarangi – a traditional Indian instrument – player was Sultan Khan. The veteran confirmed that to me when I called him at his home in Rajasthan in 2011.

I came across the Bombay recordings quite by accident.

‘Hippies not allowed’

I was working on a magazine article (and later for my book) about an impromptu gig by Plant and Page at a Bombay discotheque called Slip Disc. That visit – which took the young regulars at the disco by surprise – had become a kind of urban legend, the details lost or mangled over the years.

I knew that the visit had taken place and there had been a bit of coverage too, but it was quite a task to put the pieces together.

Over a period of four months, after talking to musicians, disco regulars and rock fans, a wonderful story emerged.

The two musicians, along with their manager Richard Cole, had walked to the Slip Disc from their nearby hotel, the posh Taj Mahal.

Slip Disc was a grungy joint, open to all who paid the princely entry fee of five rupees (8 cents; 5 pence), unlike the Taj Mahal hotel’s fancier club Blow Up, where only members were allowed.

A magazine reporting on Led Zep’s time in Mumbai.

Plant and Page had gone to Blow Up but found it dull and boring. They tried to enter Slip Disc but were stopped at the gate by a security man who told them that “hippies were not allowed.”

A music lover, Yusuf Gandhi, who was heading to Slip Disc, recognised them and took them inside. The place was reeking of smoke, much of it from suspicious substances. “Back to Sanity at last,” Plant is supposed to have said. The entrants soon ordered themselves a beer and settled down to watch the night’s entertainment, a local band called Synthesis.

Gandhi had an inkling who they were, but was not sure. India at the time got few records of foreign bands and fewer rock and music magazines and was not fully up to the latest rock scene.

World music

But he asked, “Aren’t you Robert Plant and Jimmy Page” and was delighted to know that they indeed were the famous rock musicians.

“Except for the very hep crowd, no one even recognised us. They thought we were hippies. It’s a lovely feeling when no one recognises you and you can groove and do what you like,” Plant later told the Indian youth magazine JS.

Soon, there was a buzz in the crowd and it was confirmed when the manager of the disco walked up to them and requested them to play.

Page and Plant happily agreed. The instruments were a bit ramshackle – India did not have the finest instruments available at the time – but they didn’t care. They played a 20-minute set, including songs like Whole Lotta Love and an impromptu blues number.

Word spread that they would come again the next day and long lines formed outside Slip Disc, but they didn’t.

What they did do was to join the Bombay Orchestra to try and work on bringing in eastern elements into their music.

Led Zeppelin was famous for experimenting with world music – Kashmir, their greatest hit, was written while in Morocco, where they were trying to jam with local musicians. Page knew Ravi Shankar who had introduced them to Vijay Raghav Rao.

My research in 2011 led me to the Bombay Sessions that had just been posted on Facebook and barely had any views.

The two songs they tried out were Friends and Four Sticks. The attempts at fusion are somewhat awkward, but still enjoyable. Rao’s voice can be heard in some of the takes, as he tries to conduct the Orchestra.

Page later said, “We tried recording versions of Friends and Four Sticks with some percussionists, a half-dozen string players and a thing called a Japan banjo [sarangi?] and boy, was that tricky. They were great musicians but they were used to counting and feeling rhythms in a different way. Moving them from one-time signature and retaining the feel that we had in mind was difficult, but it was exciting and a learning experience.”

A Japanese company brought out a bootleg copy of the recordings but these are not easy to get. Many details are still unavailable. There was also a recording made of their Slip Disc set but it is nowhere to be found.

I have read somewhere that these Bombay Sessions were conducted in February-March of that year. That’s possible, though the flimsy evidence available points to the October visit.

Now we will get the official version and all the music, in one place. It is something to look forward to.

Read the original article here.