Some rock fans believe the genre didn’t get started until Led Zeppelin arrived on the scene. Though acts like The Rolling Stones had tried their hand at some nasty material in their songs, it was Zeppelin who took the blues tropes and turned them into something much more dangerous, to the point where some called their music demonic. Everyone gets it from somewhere, and Zeppelin was accused of stealing from the first song on their debut record.
When fans hear ‘Good Times Bad Times’, John Bonham’s relentless groove kicks everything off, giving way to muted power chords and some of Robert Plant’s signature wails. Though ‘Bonzo’ didn’t need to steal from anyone to make a song come alive, his work on the tune came from an unlikely source.
Around the same time Zeppelin cut their teeth, Vanilla Fudge arrived on the scene with a slightly similar slant. Hailing from America, Fudge was looking to interpret other bands’ songs and put big arrangements around them, like what Page had done with The Yardbirds a few years before. At the back of the stage was the piledriving Carmine Appice, whose drumming style struck a nerve with ‘Bonzo’ when coming up with the band’s intro to the world.
One of Appice’s signature sounds was a triplet beat he would play on the kick drum and right hand, which is heard in Vanilla Fudge’s take on The Beatles’ ‘Ticket to Ride’. At the very beginning of ‘Good Times Bad Times,’ before the groove kicks in, Bonham plays the same drum fill, only he’s playing the rhythm all with his foot instead of alternating between his arms and legs. Although the root accents might have varied slightly in the Led Zeppelin version, Bonham plays the main drum figure straight enough to recognise it from Appice.
Granted, it didn’t take long for the figure to be trademarked by Bonham, becoming one of the biggest songs off Zeppelin’s debut and making the entire band a hard rock force. When asked about Bonham copying him, though, Appice didn’t have much of an opinion on it at first, not even thinking he was being plagiarised.
When being interviewed for the book Beast: John Bonham and The Rise of Led Zeppelin, Appice remembered being introduced to Bonham and hearing him fess up to stealing his drum lick, saying, “When I finally got to meet Bonzo, I said to him, ‘I love that foot thing you did,’ and he said, ‘What do you mean? I got it from you.’ I went back and listened to the Fudge record again after that and found that, yes, I did a triplet between the hand and foot. But he did it all with his foot. That blew me away”.
A cut from Led Zeppelin II sees Bonham displaying all the mind-blowing speed and technique of a superhero as he took Vanilla Fudge drummer Carmine Appice’s technique of 16th-note triplets to make this one a memorable moment for the band. But while Appice used a double kick drum, Bonham trained his right foot to move double speed to complete the technique.
Not only did he double his efforts in that department, but Bonham also demonstrated his unique position within the band. In a band with one of the best rock singers of all time backed by one of the best rock guitarists of all time, it can be easy for the rhythm section to take a back seat. This was not in Bonzo’s vocabulary. On ‘Good Times Bad Times’ he puts the drums on equal footing with the rest of the group and superbly executes every moment.
This would be far from the last time that Zeppelin would be accused of plagiarism, from Page coming under fire for ripping off the band Spirit for the guitar figure on ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and Bonham pulling the drum break from Little Richard’s ‘Keep a Knocking’ for the intro to ‘Rock and Roll’. Vanilla Fudge may have gotten to it first, but no one else could compete with Bonham once he took this groove for himself.
