Spiritualized stealing??

ryansocash · Post by **ryansocash** » Fri Aug 26, 2005 8:44 am

Before I ask my question I'd just like to note that I have nothing but respect for Jay and his work. But I'm interested in finding out if anyone else has noticed that he seems to borrow alot of ideas / words / song names from other artist.. I will start with things that I noticed.

1. Cop shoot Cop lyric's = John Prime Sam Stone
2. Rated X = the name of an ellington song.
3. Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space music = canon in d
4. Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space live contain Elvis lyrics.
4. She hit me and it felt like a kiss = The Crystals, He hit me & It felt like a Kiss)

Horrorflick · Post by **Horrorflick** » Fri Aug 26, 2005 9:47 am

Can't get much past you can we?

anorthernsoul · Post by **anorthernsoul** » Fri Aug 26, 2005 2:10 pm

i think that's kind of the tip of the ice berg, but 'stealing' is a pretty harsh word; i really like the idea of adaptation and traditions in music. i never hear lou or mick singing 'suitcase in my hand' and think, rip-off, that was sam cooke or robert johnson ... it's nice the way that things evolve or are re-used.

i remember reading a lengthy debate about the relative merits of canon in d vs ladies and gentlemen; i'm quite aware of some similarity but i still don't think it's as blatant as everyone implies - ladies and gentlemen's a different song entirely, really, and to insinuate that everything with a similar pattern of notes is derivitive of pachelbel credits him with a large chunk of music ...

stanislav leskie · Post by **stanislav leskie** » Fri Aug 26, 2005 5:47 pm

quote from jason in drop-d magazine, dec 22, 1997:
"some of the earliest bands i got into were bands like the cramps or the gun club or the fleshtones. they informed people about music, they said 'check out the count five, check out hazel adkins and ronnie hawkins, check out all this wigged-out rockabilly nonsense, have a look at this whole whacked-out world of music.' and the gun club, y'know, reading between the lines of their songs they were saying to check out robert johnson and all this primitive blues stuff"

twentysixdollars · Post by **twentysixdollars** » Fri Aug 26, 2005 5:48 pm

Ha! Oh, this is a woeful little topic! Here is my (necessarily incomplete) list, from another thread, here: http://www.spiritualized.com/message2/v ... .php?t=203

twentysixdollars wrote: For Spiritualized alone there's a lot more. Firstly the things you missed: LAGWAFIS from Pachelbel, Run Run Run from the VU, the fact that Why Don't You Smile Now is not an early Velvets song at all but rather a pop tune that Reed and Cale had a hand in as studio hacks at Pickwick records in 1964.

We could go album by album. For example, on LGM:
If I Were With Her Now - intro quotes VU's Jesus riff
I Want You - probably a reference to the Troggs song
Run - see above
Smiles - a probable Beach Boys reference
Sway - written by Mark Refoy
200 Bars - sounds like a Bob Marley tribute like Peter's I Love You

Pure Phase:
The various "phases" - Steve Reich
Born Never Asked - Laurie
Good Times - dozens of songs with that title
Spread Your Wings - sounds like "Heart and Soul"; typical doo-wop progression
Feel Like Goin Home - includes a Star Wars lightsaber duel.

LAGWAFIS:
The title track =Pachelbel's Canon
Come Together - reference is probably to the MC5, but it could be anybody
Home of the Brave - probably another Laurie reference
Electricity - probably from the Beefheart tune of the same name
Cop Shot Cop - lyrics from "Sam Stone"

and that's just the ones off the top of my head.

Add to that the fact that:
1. Rated X sounds a whole lot like something off of "In a Silent Way"
2. "The Power and the Glory" is also the title of a contemporary jazz tune but at the moment I've forgotten whose
3. "Hold On" is just the old spiritual, "Amazing Grace" with (slightly) different lyrics
4. "Lay It Down Slow" is (possibly) derived from Van Morrison's "Street Choir" (listen to the fade)
5. "Do It All Over Again" is a pretty straight Spector pastiche, confirmed pretty much by the "She Kissed Me" title riff
6. "Don't Just Do Something" pretty much equals "You Still Believe In Me"
7. "Lord Can You Hear Me" is a ripoff of an old tune by an eighties British group whose name eludes me (so was "All Of My Tears")
8. "The Twelve Steps" has a midsection with strings like an Isaac Hayes soundtrack

Again, off the top of my head.
...and nearly every Spacemen 3 tune before Playing With Fire (and after) is an unauthorized cover or rewrite of something.

a beautiful noise · Post by **a beautiful noise** » Fri Aug 26, 2005 6:35 pm

hmm, i always thought that 'lord can you hear me' was a lift from an old staple singers arrangement, they use the exact phrasing.

xix

capsular · Post by **capsular** » Fri Aug 26, 2005 8:10 pm

Harbor City, you'll never catch me

jack white · Post by **jack white** » Fri Aug 26, 2005 10:17 pm

its just folk music. its allowed. its more than that, its whats meant to be taking place.

a beautiful noise · Post by **a beautiful noise** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 12:46 am

then again, the ol' saying goes "good bands borrow, great bands steal".

keep it up jase.

xmex

Post by **spzretent** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 2:20 am

who's saying is that? seems to me it would be the other way around.

and i'm not trying to pick a fight either.

Horrorflick · Post by **Horrorflick** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 6:25 am

a beautiful noise wrote:then again, the ol' saying goes "good bands borrow, great bands steal".

keep it up jase.

xmex

Fuckin' right...

u_nderscore · Post by **u_nderscore** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 11:03 am

a beautiful noise wrote:"good bands borrow, great bands steal"

spzretent wrote:seems to me it would be the other way around.

i take that phrase to mean that when you steal something, you make it your own but when you borrow something, it still belongs to somebody else.

i just see it all as an ongoing creative process, the whole thing. just that some people are better at it than others, and can use other peoples ideas to help bring out their own vision, rather than mimicking somebody elses.

here's one...which records can we honestly say come seemingly from the author alone and bear no signs of outside influences? any?
perhaps a new thread.

appledelphy · Post by **appledelphy** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 2:17 pm

I have a record with 60 min of ocean waves..
Those sounds have of course been slightly influenced by any creature who ever dipped their toes in the ocean.

Post by **spzretent** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 2:22 pm

u_nderscore wrote:
i take that phrase to mean that when you steal something, you make it your own but when you borrow something, it still belongs to somebody else.

I took it as the opposite. To take something and turn it into your own vision of it would seem to be borrowing. Stealing is just ripping off someone else. That was my interpretation of it anyway.

LunarTunes · Post by **LunarTunes** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 3:09 pm

ryansocash wrote:
2. Rated X = the name of an ellington song.

I'm not familiar with the Ellington song. But if Jason was "borrowing" that title, I think it's more likely he's referencing Miles Davis (from the "Get Up With It" album)...

Peace.

ORBITAL · Post by **ORBITAL** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 5:20 pm

A few years bcak after a real mad night in Edinburgh to see SPZ a friend of mine woke up having lost his shoes. He 'borrowed' two odd shoes from 2 different shops to get home in.

To this day we dont know what happened to the shoes. Maybe they were held in Lothian Shoe and slipper home for waifs and strays for 6 months before they were humanely destroyed. Who knows.

u_nderscore · Post by **u_nderscore** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 5:29 pm

spzretent wrote:To take something and turn it into your own vision of it would seem to be borrowing.

yeah, i think that's probably where the crutial point lies - if you take something and turn it into your own vision of it (i.e. another version of that same thing) then it's crap, but i think if you take something and use it/adapt it to help you achieve your vision, a different vision, that is of the moment, then i'd say that's cool.
=)

u_nderscore · Post by **u_nderscore** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 5:36 pm

ORBITAL wrote:...lost his shoes...

ORBITAL wrote:...'borrowed'...

a beautiful noise · Post by **a beautiful noise** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 7:50 pm

i think it was john lennon or keith richards, can't remember which one, they were talking about the influence of blues in rocknroll.

stating that you can 'borrow' a riff that everybody knows, or you can 'steal' the riff and make it yours. jase i think has done this quite well after SP3. i think before he was heavily borrowing.

wow retent, of all people it was you who helped me figure out why i'm a bigger fan of spiritualized than SP3.

xix

p/s- and that by no means is a dig at SP3. just a realization.

a beautiful noise · Post by **a beautiful noise** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 7:53 pm

even more wow! a quick google search and it appears that it's an old "adage".

hmm, maybe lennon borrowed it and richards stole it.

x

x

ryansocash · Post by **ryansocash** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 9:08 pm

LunarTunes wrote:
ryansocash wrote:
2. Rated X = the name of an ellington song.
I'm not familiar with the Ellington song. But if Jason was "borrowing" that title, I think it's more likely he's referencing Miles Davis (from the "Get Up With It" album)...

Peace.

My mistake, I knew it was the name of an old jazz tune though. Before I started this post I pretty much pre concluded that when the amount of people on this earth who create music is so large it would be totally impossible not to cross paths with creations of the past. recently my band (Let me introduce you to the end) was accused of ripping off a riff from a murder by death song and things got well out of hand.. In reality I had no idea that there was such a band as Murder by death or that they had a song with almost the exact riff my band had. Thank god I had the protection of the library of congress.

Post by **spzretent** » Sat Aug 27, 2005 11:45 pm

a beautiful noise wrote:
wow retent, of all people it was you who helped me figure out why i'm a bigger fan of spiritualized than SP3.

xix

p/s- and that by no means is a dig at SP3. just a realization.

squirrel · Post by **squirrel** » Sun Aug 28, 2005 1:40 am

Rated X was also a great Loretta Lynn song. Jack White used to perform it live. And I know Jason went on the record about his appreciation of what Jack was doing when he made AG.

Many of the greats have been shameless theifs. The Stones and Zeppelin are the prime examples. And for a more recent case, and one that's more blatent than Jason, see The Flaming Lips. I here familiar melodies in many of their songs. And they finally got called out on it with Fight Test.

twentysixdollars · Post by **twentysixdollars** » Sun Aug 28, 2005 3:46 pm

squirrel wrote:The Stones and Zeppelin

Especially Zeppelin. In some cases they merely credited traditional songs to themselves ("The Gallows Pole"), evidently unaware that the more accurate "Trad. Arr. Jimmy Page" would have gotten them just as many royalties. At other times they stole melodies wholesale from contemporaries and hoped no-one would notice ("Dazed and Confused", probably the funniest single example) or did the same to old bluesmen (too many to count).

This is why I love the Byrds - they so scrupulously documented when they ripped someone off that even almost entirely original songs ("He Was a Friend of Mine") are credited to "trad arr" or "trad additional lyrics". The only burp was "I Come and Stand at Every Door" where they failed to acknowledge Seeger's hand. To say nothing of all those tunes that credit Harvey Gerst that he had nothing to do with, or the couple of trads here and there credited to Hoyt Axton (!) or Bob Gibson.

veep23 · Post by **veep23** » Sun Aug 28, 2005 9:26 pm

i was playing guitar last night... just strumming an E chord with some tremolo... I totally ripped off Spacemen 3

appledelphy · Post by **appledelphy** » Mon Aug 29, 2005 2:06 am

[quote="a beautiful noise"] they were talking about the influence of blues in rocknroll. .[/quote

- Loh miuthafuck..!, Yes IÂ´ve heard that rÂ´nÂ´r stole some of their grooves from boogie-woogie!

Why dontcha just fade away.. and while youre at it please kill those of us over 30..

stanislav leskie · Post by **stanislav leskie** » Mon Aug 29, 2005 4:01 am

neal · Post by **neal** » Mon Aug 29, 2005 10:40 pm

"rated x" is probably an ellington reference. J namechecks the duke in the interview that is on the dvd single for "electricity".
i'm suprised no one picked apart "run" yet. the verses are jj cale, the chorus is VU. honestly, if you listen to "electricity," musically it is a pretty direct reiteration of the 13th floor elevators...and J was a huge fan of them..."OD catastrophe" is obviously a rewrite of "TV eye."
so yeah, spiritualized borrows a lot...does it matter? look at 90% of blues records...the same 1-4-5 progression gets used in almost every song...it happens. J's genius lies more in the delivery, the overall sound.

radioshack · Post by **radioshack** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 7:13 pm

I'm sure "The Power and The Glory" is also the name of a book that was written by a famous author, though who it is escapes me right now. I'm sure the book touches on themes such as religion, people's relationship with God and the effects of vice and substance abuse. Surely these themes couldn't provide lyrical content and subject matterfor a 20 year recording career, could they?

I could be wrong though.

feetsies · Post by **feetsies** » Wed Aug 31, 2005 4:09 am

I don't know if this has been said yet but jason didn't take lyrics from elvis, or if he did elvis took them from Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism.

IF the lyric is "fools rush in where angels fear to tread"

..hence human..

runaway · Post by **runaway** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 4:48 am

When I was a kid we used to steal Chunkyâ„¢ candy bars from the grocery store while my Mum shopped.

I'm sure I will go to Hellâ„¢ for this.

I don't think Jason will be treated as harshly when it comes time for him to pay for his sins.

feetsies · Post by **feetsies** » Sun Sep 04, 2005 9:12 pm

um, I don't think anyone is saying anyone is going to hell. I think it's good to see where and how people are influenced. Personally, I'm inspired by Pierce and therefore think it's important to see where his inspirations come from so we can get to the sources of all of this work. What it comes down to, of course, is the blues (and r&b) and great literature. All of this is part of musical evolution in my eyes, but I am very bias AND american

andrewstevens · Post by **andrewstevens** » Thu Oct 06, 2005 9:33 pm

I've got LAGWAFIS on right now, in terms of the following tracks on there can anyone provide a definitive set of "allusions" to "borrowed" material, lyrical or otherwise?

1. Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space
2. Come Together
3. I Think I'm In Love
4. All Of My Thoughts
5. Stay With Me
6. Electricity
7. Home Of The Brave
8. The Individual
9. Broken Heart
10. No God Only Religion
11. Cool Waves
12. Cop Shoot Cop

Obviously I don't expect a response by the time it's finished playing (must be like 40 minutes' time...) but I'll stick it on again if one of you kind sorts has a think...

Christ we're anoraks!

Post by **runcible** » Thu Oct 06, 2005 10:24 pm

Home of the Brave = Hawkwind, Wind of Change

I've said that a zillion times.

anorthernsoul · Post by **anorthernsoul** » Fri Oct 07, 2005 1:44 pm

Home of the Brave = Hawkwind, Wind of Change

I've said that a zillion times.

i thought you'd said that about broken heart; i still don't really see it ...
it's a great song though ... i'm toying with getting hall of the mountain grill if i can ever find a copy, is it all that good?

minus two points to the first person to say pachelbel.

mighty_scoop · Post by **mighty_scoop** » Fri Oct 07, 2005 3:22 pm

if you're struggling to find Hall of the Mountain Grill..I'll set you up with a copy...

I love that album...

I think i've had about 5 copies...

they keep goping missing....

bleh

I've developed an obsession with listening to SPZ's I Didn't Mean To Hurt You on repeat

nice

simonkeeping · Post by **simonkeeping** » Fri Oct 07, 2005 3:41 pm

This is going to sound very obvious but knowone has said it here so I will, the main riff of "come Together" and the end of "Rock and Roll Suicide" are identical.

With the beefheart thing mentioned earlier I remember Jason saying the band had been listening to "Clear Spot" alot during the recording of LAGWAFIS

Post by **runcible** » Fri Oct 07, 2005 5:21 pm

anorthernsoul wrote:
Home of the Brave = Hawkwind, Wind of Change

I've said that a zillion times.
i thought you'd said that about broken heart; i still don't really see it ...
it's a great song though ... i'm toying with getting hall of the mountain grill if i can ever find a copy, is it all that good?

The good bits are incredible on Mountain Grill. You'd Better Believe It contains one of the best improv instrumental sections I know. D-Rider and Web Weaver are phenomenal psychedelic ditties and Wind of Change is sublime. A few dull moments but enough good ones to make it an essential purchase as far as I'm concerned.

anorthernsoul · Post by **anorthernsoul** » Sat Oct 08, 2005 12:35 pm

good stuff, cheers for that ... i'll defo check it out. i think i've heard another thing off it, 'it's so easy', which might've been a bonus track or something?

and double thanks to whoever offered the copy of it, i might get back to you on that. i'll try and hunt it down on vinyl first.

Spiritualized

Spiritualized stealing??

Spiritualized stealing??

Re: Spiritualized stealing??

Re: Spiritualized stealing??