The Five Spot Rips The Jacker: Five Rarely Mentioned Rock Rip Offs

The Jacked: The Rolling Stones on “Angie”

The Jacker: The Eagles on “Hotel California”

I’m not a musicologist nor a musician, however if they’re calling guitarists like Philadelphia’s Kevin Hanson to the witness stand to play the intro to both Spirit’s “Taurus” and Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” in copyright court to display the differences…I’d certainly watch a video deposition of someone doing the same for the introductory acoustic guitar riff for “Angie” and “Hotel California”, a song now four full decades into being absolutely inescapable.

This was from the seventies Rolling Stones Records era of the Stones, which is to say a slightly less litigious time frame than the Allen Klein ABCKO Records mid-60’s era.  For those unfamiliar, it was Klein’s legal crew who crushed Richard Ashcroft & Company in court over their use of Andrew Loog Oldham’s symphonic rendition of “The Last Time” which they sampled for their first-and still only-worldwide smash hit “Bittersweet Symphony”. 

Did the Stones just decide they didn’t need to fully stoke the fires of a potential East of The Atlantic/West Coast rock beef? 

Would calling out their biggest competition for rock supremacy in the mid-70’s have re-ignited Old Country/Former Colony tensions and taken us straight back to the War of 1812?

“C’est La Vie, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell.”

Maybe Mick decided to let sleeping dogs lie because “Angie” has long been rumored to be a song about him being a dirty-macking dog with David Bowie’s first wife.

Or perhaps Keith, who was somewhat critical of his own band’s partaking in the “Bittersweet Symphony” case, simply decided that even without that he was “crazy straight” and “still spending Verve money from ‘98”. 

Props to the five people in here familiar enough with both Britpop copyright kerfuffles and Jay-Z’s debut album in order to fully get that joke.

Whatever the case, or non-case may be, you can’t say we never tried.

The Jacked: The Horace Silver Quintet on “Songs For My Father”

The Jacker: Steely Dan on “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number”

This one is a far more blatant example than the first.  The piano intro on “Rikki” is a note-for-note cribbed version of the same piano introduction that begins Horace Silver’s classic album released nine years earlier on Blue Note Records.

Editor’s Note: Shout-Out/Rest-In-Peace/Special-Thanks to Rudy Von Gellar, famed Blue Note engineer who passed away yesterday at the age of 91.

The thing that sticks in my craw about this one is that Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, two guys The Wudder loves dearly, apparently use the jazz tradition of “quoting” as their defense for not giving Horace Silver any bit of the songwriting or publishing royalty credit on the monster hit “Rikki”.

I suppose that’s for them to sort thru and if Silver is okay with it, then we’d be okay with it as well…however when we take a gander at Becker/Fagan being the sole writers now credited on Bronx-based rap duo Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz’ sole hit “Déjà Vu (Uptown Baby)” for the "Black Cow" sample, credit they got by waiting until that song blew up and then calling in some big dawg lawyers to threaten them in court…we are displaying some series side-eye at the band whose name was taken from a William S. Burroughs name for a dildo. For that good-for-the-goose-but-somehow-not-for-the-gander style of pretzel-logic hypocrisy, they deserve to get cooked in our book.

Now that Steely Dan is still headlining major festivals forty years later, likely playing "Rikki" at every stop, while Peter Gunz is running around wild-eyed on ratchet Love & Hip-Hop style reality TV to pay the rent...it's time these two rich musical titans do the right thing while there's still time. You could have a change of heart, kick some of that cash back uptown baby. 

The Jacked: Bob Marley & The Wailers on “No Woman No Cry”

The Jacker: Phish on “Farmhouse”

This is a rarely talked about one for a fairly simple reason: next to no one outside of Phish’s rabid, somewhat delusional niche/cult fan base likely knows that the Phish song exists.

But if you ever wanna get on the wrong side of any of your Phish Faithful friends, while still being totally in the right? If or when you hear this song in their presence…start singing the “Everything’s Gonna Be Alright” portion of the famous Marley bridge, later used by Naughty By Nature to great actually accredited effect, when Phish’s cornball lyrically revised chorus with the identical melody begins.

You might be able see a Phishead react as if their ears and eyes were being invaded by cluster flies.

The Jacked: Drummer Dave Grohl’s old band on “Scentless Apprentice”

The Jacker: Singer/Guitarist Dave Grohl’s next band on “My Hero”

This one may be a little bit petty but oh well, we're not above being that. The Wudder has always felt that the way the chord progression during Cobain’s “get awaaaaaaaaaay” caterwauling on the song “Scentless Apprentice” (a song that forced me to go read Perfume by Patrick Suskind as a kid) was simply re-appropriated for the more traditionally pretty hook that makes up the Foo Fighters’ “Hero” a year or two later…but acknowledges this is one that seemingly only we think smells like no other.

It’s probably even more petty due to the real possibility that Dave Grohl, who provided that sick drum-kick that introduced the Nirvana song, may have had at least a hand in writing both but as you will see on the next selection we don’t follow those rules any more than Sal Zantz did when he sued John Fogerty.

And while Dave Grohl is undoubtedly a very nice guy and we have a lot of evidence left by Kurt Cobain to say that he could be at the very least prickly if not a full-scale asshole…that’s still our man. So we shall continue to guard the legacy.

The Jacked: The Kinks on “You Really Got Me”

The Jacker: The Kinks on “All Day & All of the Night” and “Destroyer”

Talk about going back to the well. Ray Davies had zero shame about doing so. He milked the template of arguably his biggest hit, “You Really Got Me” for the almost equally big “All Day and All of the Night” just four months later for the band’s follow-up single. Then when punk was ruling London in the late 70’s, Davies re-appropriated his old hit-parading formula to devastating effect (replete with a “Lola” shout-out) on the hard-charging “Destroyer”. The crazy thing is he might have built on the first song’s momentum with each one.

It might be time for Ray to call his brother Dave and give this style one more go before one of them goes, although from everything we’ve read these two brothers somehow get along less famously than Noel and Liam Gallagher or Chris and Rich Robinson do.  Silly boys, you self-destroyaaahs. Make your family happy and make up, then give the people what you know they want to hear….”again and again and again”©Radio Call-In Request on Wu-Tang’s first album.

If Jim Morrison and Ray Manzerak were still with us, they’d likely agree. They rode this same musical snake to great chart success with “Hello, I Love You” in 1968.