I was interested to hear the new debut album by longtime Tom Petty guitarist Mike Campbell’s band, The Dirty Knobs. The second track on “Wreckless Abandon” is “Pistol Packin’ Mama (feat. Chris Stapleton).” A few seconds in, I thought it sounded an awful lot like “Motorcycle Mama” from Neil Young’s 1978 album, “Comes a Time” … too much so to be a coincidence.
Please feel free to check me on this and let me know if you think I am overstating the similarity.
What other songs sound too similar to be a coincidence?
If you extend this to chord progressions, compare Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” with Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” at least during the verses. Try singing “Runaway” while listening to Neil. Works very well.
Well, in any major key (a pleasant reference pattern of tones), there are only seven different pitches (notes) and seven chords (each built from each pitch). These seven chords have three different sounding characteristics with three major, three minor and one diminished. Pop songs are short and repetitious by the likes of our ear/brain nature. Jazz bends things but when they do, the music is not so accessible and shifts reliance more on mood than pattern.
The three major chords are Louie Louie (aka I IV V). If you add a fourth chord, say the minor vi in this pattern I vi IV V, you have every Do Wop song ever recorded.
Keep in mind the rules of music (aka music theory, or music harmony) are not rules… they were not invented but discovered. It is what our ear/brain likes. Some day, all of the patterns that humans “like” will be discovered and published. These patterns can be chordal or single melodic. But, if you package them differently, you can have a new tune.
Sometimes writers blatantly steal like MC Hammer stealing Rick James… other times they just re-discovered a pattern innocently. The courts are fascinating place where this can play out.
Did George Harrison really steal He’s So Fine (aka My Sweet Lord) ? Probably not… but the courts made him write some checks anyway.
Oh, George most certainly copied “He’s So Fine”. Probably not intentionally, but it’s a tune that stuck in his head since childhood. The chances of him coming up with that melody without copying it is probably less that getting hit by lightning twice in one day.
I dunno… total speculation of course… but I write tunes. And when you try your hand at it… well… one of the first things I consider is plagiarism. It is hard to plunk out a melody and when I do, the first thing I wonder is did I discover it? Did my brain just play back a memory? Has this pattern been found before?
Plagiarism whether intentional or not, has to be at the forefront of any writer’s concern. Stealing a song as popular as “He’s so Fine” by someone so darn popular and subject to scrutiny… well that takes a massive balls to try and get away with. Even Paul McCartney when he woke up with Yesterday, the first thing he did that day was ask George Martin if he ever heard it before… It took a long time before Paul had the courage to publish it as his… he was just not sure.
We will never know… but having my hand at writing and knowing flat out that these patterns I come up with… as proud as I am… I just can’t beleive I created something that hasn’t been created before. Particularly for short-form pieces like tunes. There are just not that many notes!!!
Actually, if what I read is true, we do know. During the trial against Harrison, evidence in the way of scores of each was introduced showing that large chunks of My Sweet Lord were exactly the same as He’s So Fine, more than half the song note for note identical. As a result, Harrison lost the trial. I’m sure George didn’t do it consciously, but that song was so damn popular when he was when he was twenty and impressionable, I bet he heard it thousands of times. I think it just popped into his head one day, and he didn’t remember it having already been a song, and he put lyrics to it.
Frank Zappa was parodying Carlos Santana’s guitar style, and to drive that point home even further Frank referenced Carlos’s name in the track’s title. Frank was not attempting to pass off Carlos’s music as his own.
Chris Stapleton did not write “Tennessee Whiskey.” David Allan Coe and George Jones’s versions of the song (they did not write it, either) do not sound like the Etta James song, “I’d Rather Go Blind,” so it would appear that Chris Stapleton has some s’plaining to do!
