I love Led Zeppelin as much as the next classic rock snob. It’s hard not to. They’re one of the most iconic, influential acts of their day and still arguably the best hard rock band to ever run a Gibson Les Paul through a Marshall stack. However, loving Jimmy Page and Robert Plant’s mob in 2025 means reckoning with some seriously concerning stuff.
It’s a damning state of affairs when one of the less important things to reckon with about Led Zep was their somewhat laissez-faire attitude towards crediting their influences, especially on their early records. The ranks of their first two albums were bolstered by a set of blues and R&B standards that the band had cut their teeth rattling through on the British rock circuit.
Some of them were even credited as such! ‘You Shook Me’ and ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’ from Led Zeppelin I were correctly credited to Willie Dixon, and that was basically it. ‘Babe I’m Gonna Leave You’ was credited as a traditional song arranged by Jimmy Page. This was despite the song’s creator, Anne Bredon, writing it in the late 1950s, barely a decade before its release on Led Zeppelin I.
In fairness to the band, they were just doing what Joan Baez did when she released it originally, so perhaps they thought they could get away with it. They got even more shameless on Led Zeppelin II, though. The aforementioned Willie Dixon didn’t get the credit on ‘Whole Lotte Love’ that he absolutely deserved until decades later. Howlin’ Wolf also got a belated writing credit on ‘The Lemon Song’ shortly after the record’s release.
So, who else did Led Zeppelin steal from?
However, it wasn’t just their heroes and influences that were feeling the effect of Led Zep’s magpie’s eye for a good hook. Their peers also found themselves being paid “tribute to” on Led Zeppelin records when they felt they should also be paid “royalties”. Chief among them was the man who Page briefly replaced on guitar in the Yardbirds, mercurial blues wizard Jeff Beck.
This was happening right from the very beginning of the band, too. While Led Zeppelin’s version of ‘You Shook Me’ was correctly credited to Willie Dixon (which was bold of them), the arrangement is another matter. Jeff Beck put a version of the song on his first solo album, Truth, and the resemblance is uncanny. While Beck’s version came out after Led Zep’s, he swears blind that he had the idea first, and Page pilfered it for his own band.
Perhaps the intro to ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ was an olive branch of a kind. Page’s guitar intro to the song is the exact same five note riff that Beck himself used on a Yardbirds track called ‘New York City Blues’. The two were friends since childhood, and their time in The ‘Birds actually overlapped, so perhaps this isn’t Page getting sticky fingers but more a tribute to a fellow guitar legend.
It didn’t stop Page from being cheeky about it in an interview conducted for the book Light And Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page, though. When asked about that intro, the rascal quipped, “That’s quite a traditional way to open up a blues, on those first few notes, isn’t it?”
