Long story short: Bowie and his Young Americans band had been jamming on a song called “Footstompin’,” a funkified cover of a 1961 Top 40 hit by the Flares. Anyways, here’s some guitar tabs for you mashup enthusiasts. Inadvertent or not, the resemblance has also been noted by … Jensen Ackles from TV’s Supernatural? Huh. Commentary from either party on the resemblance is sparse at best, though the fact that Aaron Neville’s 1996 cover version of “Crazy Love” featured “Weight” writer Robbie Robertson might be a quasi-subliminal nod. But double that up with the fact that “Caravan” comes from the same Moondance LP that Van did one of the most blatant lifts of the eminently liftable “The Weight” - recorded in summer of 1969, just a little more than a year after the Band’s Music From Big Pink dropped - and you’ve really got something. Here’s twenty of the best from the last fifty years.Īs far as Van-meets-the Band-based chutzpah goes, it’s pretty damn hard to top his full-force George Best-kicking performance of “Caravan” in The Last Waltz - the wildest bit of physical performance Scorsese would ever film until DiCaprio’s “trying to get in a Countach while zonked on ludes” scene from The Wolf Of Wall Street. But the more interesting stuff is the litany of cases where you can pretty much tell something’s up, yet nobody went so far as to actually try to prove it in court - the nagging suspicions that start debates that rarely actually get settled.
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The real egregious stuff can still happen - fandom lingo likes to call this kind of thing the “Jimmy Hart Version,” in honor of the Gentrys songwriter turned pro wrestling theme composer who, among other things, ensured that WCW star Diamond Dallas Page strutted to the ring to the tune of the most butt-ass naked imitation of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” imaginable. Best of all are the scenarios where the element that gets “ripped off” has become so ubiquitous over time - think the opening drum figure to the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” - that it’s considered part of pop music’s common language, and nobody even gets mad. And sometimes it’s one of those weird subconscious situations where a musician hears a song, only to later forget they heard it and assume they came up with the melody or the beat when it surfaces in their memory later on. Sometimes it’s a total style jack - Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust” as a shameless Chic-alike, for instance - but not easily connected to a specific work. Sometimes you get a situation like Elastica’s knowing imitations of Wire and the Stranglers on songs like “Connection” and “Waking Up,” where recognizable homage seems like an open nod to influence that still draws lawsuits and out-of-court settlements. Sometimes artists claim mere coincidence the old “there’s only so many notes” argument applied to scenarios like the aforementioned Jean Buster Block Genie case.
Whether it’s MPB great Jorge Ben going after Rod Stewart for (supposedly unwittingly) swiping 1976 África Brasil samba-disco classic “Taj Mahal” for “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy” (with a side order of Bobby Womack), the parameter-shifting controversy over “Blurred Lines” not-quite-sampling Marvin Gaye’s “Got To Give It Up,” or the perpetually-unsettled matter of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven” nicking from Spirit’s “Taurus,” there are constantly cases made over who owes who, not just artistically, but financially.īut then there’s the question of why artists do this kind of thing, even all-time greats like James Brown or New Order or Nirvana.
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(The only action Bowie took against Sweet, at least apocryphally, was addressing them as “you bastards” when he ran across them at a nightclub.)Īnd at its worst? People get sued. Sometimes, the most you get from soundalike controversies is an excuse to have music-dork arguments - at its best, something like the bizarre coincidence of RCA labelmates Sweet and David Bowie going 1-2 on the UK charts with the remarkably similar-sounding and near-concurrently-recorded “ Block Buster!” and “ The Jean Genie” respectively. Plagiarism’s been a sticking point in popular music ever since money got involved, with everything from hip-hop sampling to Weird Al parody to stylistic homage coming under fire from whatever quarters generally feel concerned about these kinds of things (i.e.