Kevin Hanson, a former member of the band Huffamoose, said on the stand that “Stairway” and “Taurus” are similar. When listening to videos of the two played simultaneously, he said there was nothing discordant about them.
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On cross-examination, however, Hanson, who doesn’t have a college degree and is not a musicologist, said he can easily tell the songs apart.
LOS ANGELES | Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page demonstrated a deft touch at deflecting questions aimed at showing he might have lifted a passage for the introduction to the 1971 hit “Stairway to Heaven”.
The estate of Spirit’s late guitarist, Randy Wolfe, also known as Randy California, is now hoping to get credit and a piece of the hundreds of millions of dollars in royalty income the song has earned over the years.
Questioned by a plaintiff’s attorney for a second day, Page said Thursday that the chord progression to “Stairway” probably had more in common with “Chim Chim Cher-ee” from the 1964 film musical “Mary Poppins” than anything else.
‘I think I may have said the chord sequence is very similar because the chord sequence has been around forever’.
“I said, “do you need a bass player?'”. I have several thousand albums of many different kinds.
Page (72) had entered the courtroom carrying a guitar, but finished giving evidence without playing a note. “That was part of a staple diet”.
The Wolfe trust contends that Page first heard key musical elements later used in “Stairway” when Spirit performed “Taurus” when the band shared the bill with Zeppelin on the British band’s first United States date, in Denver in 1968, and at three pop festivals the following year.
He said similar chord pairs other experts highlighted as important was like comparing pairings of the words “and the” in one short story to another.
Michael Einhorn said that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, Zeppelin’s main songwriters, have collected around $58.5 million for their work, including “Stairway to Heaven”, which is at the center of the lawsuit. Page claims that it was only when the similarities were pointed out to him by his son-in law that he dug the album out of his collection and listened to “Taurus” for the first time.
Jones, whose real name is John Baldwin, told the federal court in Los Angeles that Page never said he was a fan of Spirit in the late 1960s.
An agitated Page disagreed, testifying, “I didn’t say that”.
Lawrence Ferrara, a music professor at New York University, said 17th century Venetian opera singers and Mozart used music techniques featured in both songs. Perhaps a larger hurdle for the plaintiffs is that the jury must find the recording of “Stairway” substantially similar to the sheet music for the song because that’s what is filed with the U.S. Copyright Office. He was hired as a studio musician at 17 – seven years junior to the next oldest musician – because he said he understood what younger artists were playing and could supply blues or rock riffs, a talent that put some older guitarists out of work.
However, when Page was asked to compare Stairway with the Taurus sheet music, he said he preferred to hear it.
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Page replied: ‘I didn’t say that.
