How Wolfmother ripped off Bob Dylan and AC/DC for one of the defining songs of the 2000s
In 2011, The Hangover Part II made $86million in its opening weekend, doubling the performance of the first Hangover film, and proving the old showbiz adage: “familiar beats fresh”. That’s a made-up maxim, actually, but since we’re here to talk about Wolfmother, it seems okay to take some liberties.
There’s a scene in the first Hangover, incidentally, in which Zach Galifianakis starts Rain-manning his way through a casino blackjack montage while a Wolfmother song gets a prominent, extended needle-drop. That track, ‘Joker & The Thief’, originally appeared on the band’s self-titled debut album in 2005, and if it wasn’t already one of the defining rock songs of the 2000s, its appearance in the decade’s biggest comedy film certainly solidified its place.
The strange thing about ‘Joke & The Thief’, though, is that it somehow now exists both as an instantly recognisable piece of Aughts nostalgia, and yet also as a remarkably derivative Frankenstein’s monster of classic rock, mashing together Wolfmother’s primary influence, Led Zeppelin, with less-than-subtle nods to both AC/DC and Bob Dylan.
Actually, the idea of Dylan fronting AC/DC sounds a lot more interesting than what ‘Joker & The Thief’ ultimately is. Had Wolfmother formed in the 2020s rather than the 2000s, it’s likely they would have looked at the current dominance of rock tribute acts and resigned themselves to joining that circuit as “Less Zeppelin” or “AC/Deceit”.
20 years ago, though, rock was enjoying a mainstream revival, and Wolfmother were happy to collect the fruits of the labour already handled by the Strokes, the White Stripes, and their fellow Aussies the Vines. Their first album, led by the freakishly spot-on Led Zep impression ‘Woman’, reached the top five in Australia and the top 25 in both the US and UK.
Speaking specifically about the single ‘Joker & The Thief’, Wolfmother singer/guitarist Andrew Stockdale has been pretty open over the years about his sources of inspiration, but that’s not to say he doesn’t bring some defensiveness to those explanations.
Way back in 2006, pre-Hangover, Stockdale was asked by Ultimate-Guitar about the song’s title characters. This was an obvious lyrical reference to Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’, right?
“Yeah, probably,” Stockdale replied. “I’ve totally ripped it off from Dylan. I have. I have. Every time you see a hip-hop artist go, ‘Make some noise,’ does everyone give them shit for doing the same thing? This is like one line from a song 40 years ago. It’s a good line.”
As for the riffage of ‘Joker & The Thief’, Stockdale claimed that he wasn’t inspired by a specific AC/DC lick, so much as their overall existential brand.
“I was in a shop one morning walking into where we jam,” Stockdale recalled, “and I saw this AC/DC ‘Thunderstruck’ [poster], and I was like, ‘I want to write a stadium rock song,’ I went into the studio and said, ‘Doo-duh-lee, doo-duh-lee,’ what’s the best thing to do after that – just do something cleaner: ‘Doo, doo, doo,’ because, you know, you’ve got to have a big intro and then you have to have a balls-to-the-wall riff to knock it on the head in the next stage, but yeah, that’s it, that’s what I wanted to do, and that’s how I did it.”
There’s something almost charming about the matter-of-fact nature of that origin story, how it’s almost like a school kid explaining why he decided to be Iron Man for Halloween instead of Spider-Man, but in the end, Wolfmother were skilled enough in their execution that even their own heroes eventually gave them a nod of approval, as Page and Plant welcomed the band to perform at Led Zeppelin’s 2006 induction into the UK Music Hall of Fame.
“You’ve got to find out what you want to do, who you are, and how you want to live your life,” Stockdale said in 2006, weirdly continuing his lengthy, tangential reply to that same question about ‘Joker & The Thief’. “That’s the never-ending mystery… our own little way, how can we make our existence a positive part of a global consciousness? What can we do? That’s what I want to know.”
The answer, it seems, was “doo, doo, doo.”
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