The suit claims the riff was lifted from Spirit’s song “Taurus”. During his 30-minute opening statement in front of a packed courtroom, Malofiy said the jury can look at the lawsuit “almost like a taste test”. He emphasizes that although the instrumental section from “Stairway” and “Taurus” are both at the center of this debate, “There’s no evidence that because he has an album now, it doesn’t mean he had it 45 years ago”.
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Two of Led Zeppelin’s founder members, singer Robert Plant, now 72, and guitarist Jimmy Page, 67, testified.
But as the proceedings got under way, there were suggestions of a possible mistrial following a dispute over whether a video played as evidence had been correctly submitted to the case.
Although Led Zeppelin and Spirit didn’t perform together, they were contemporaries and Led Zeppelin covered another of Spirit’s songs, “Fresh Garbage”.
US District Judge Gary Klausner ruled in April that “Stairway to Heaven” bore “substantial” similarities with “Taurus” after Michael Skidmore, a trustee for California, filed a lawsuit alleging that Page had been inspired to write his hit after touring with Spirit in the late Sixties. Defendants include Led Zeppelin band members Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, who are attending the trial, and three companies involved in the Led Zeppelin catalog. While Page and Plant are “incredible musicians” and “incredible performers”, Malofiy says they’re not songwriters and became famous by covering other bands’ music and making it their own. “If it’s not been received in the evidence, it’s the basis of a mistrial”, Klausner said, according to U.S. music magazine Rolling Stone, which had reporters present in court. Anderson also suggested that the chromatic scale used in both songs were nothing more than “basic commonplace musical devices” – or just common cliche guitar melodies. He also claims that Plant and Page “created “Stairway to Heaven” independently without resort to Taurus or without copying anything in Taurus”.
Francis Malofiy, the prosecutor representing the Wolfe trust said that the entire case “can be summarized in six words: Give credit where credit is due”.
Led Zeppelin opened for Spirit in their debut US show in December 1968 in Denver, Malofiy said.
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The trial follows a high-profile victory past year when a federal jury found that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams copied a Marvin Gaye song to create their 2013 hit, “Blurred Lines” and awarded Gaye’s children $7.4 million.
