When Frank Zappa accused John Lennon of ripping him off: “Whoops”
Theft and plagiarism in music are far from being recent. It seemed as though Ed Sheeran blatantly stole from Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’ for his song ‘Thinking Out Loud’, and yet he won the case against the soul singer’s representatives in a lengthy lawsuit. Both Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood hold songwriting credits and were set to earn a chunk of the royalties from Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ after they judged its verses to be lifted from their hit ‘The Air That I Breathe’ that was famously performed by The Hollies.
While Radiohead came back and admitted that they took more than a few liberties from the original composition, causing Hammond and Hazlewood to only take a fraction of their earnings, others remain staunch in their position that they wrote a song when, in fact, they pilfered it from another artist.
The Beatles are certainly no strangers to having been stolen from, as their work as a group and as separate solo artists has been copied to death. John Lennon could probably flag up a large number of complaints on that front alone, with elements of ‘Sexy Sadie’ having also been repurposed by Radiohead on their song ‘Karma Police’, and the immediately recognisable piano riff from his 1971 classic hit ‘Imagine’ was shamelessly stolen by Oasis on ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ – although neither of the aforementioned examples were ever taken to court.
That being said, considering how prolific Lennon was as a songwriter, would it not be reasonable to imagine that he might have sneakily tried to get away with pinching someone else’s ideas every once in a while? One person who seems to think so is Frank Zappa, who levelled an accusation towards the late Beatle for taking a composition of Zappa’s that they had performed together in 1971 during what Lennon believed to be a jam session.
The song in question is ‘King Kong’, which Zappa originally wrote in 1967 and had recorded several live versions of. When invited to play with Zappa, he began to play the track for Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, to join in. The session was recorded, and as Zappa recalled in a later interview, “the deal that was made, according to the usage of the tapes, was he got to use the tapes for his purpose and I got to use the tapes for my purpose.”
What Zappa might not have predicted was that Lennon would then go on to release the recording as ‘Jamrag’, a cut from the live section of his 1972 album, Sometime in New York City, and claim it as his own original song, which just happened to feature Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention on it. Understandably incensed by this move, Zappa says of the incident that “obviously this song has a melody and chord changes – somebody did write it, and it was not them.”
It’s clear that this is quite a different set of circumstances to the examples laid out at the start of the article, as Lennon lifted the entirety of a Frank Zappa song and professed it to be his own, yet it isn’t clear whether this was due to a misunderstanding between the two over whether the 1971 performance was a jam or not. However, Lennon did go on record in the past to be highly critical of Zappa and his personality, branding him as “a fuckin’ intellectual” in a rather unsavoury fashion in the book, Lennon Remembers.
Given that, it could have all been a deliberate ploy to steal the song in an attempt to rile Zappa up, though Zappa himself summed up his feelings with a sly sarcastic remark in his interview, simply shrugging and saying, “Whoops…”
