Jake Holmes is suing Jimmy Page again over songwriting credit for Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused.” He’s named the Sony Pictures film studio as one of several co-defendants, after noticing that the track was miscredited in the Becoming Led Zeppelin documentary.
The complaint was filed in California federal court and alleges copyright infringement and breach of contract. Holmes claims that two early live recordings of the song were included in the movie without permission or payment.
Page and his co-defendants “willfully infringed the Holmes composition by falsely claiming that the Holmes composition is the Page composition,” according to the suit, “by purporting to license use in the film of the Holmes composition as if it was the Page composition, and by collecting license fees for use of the Holmes composition in the film.”
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Holmes said an earlier cease-and-desist order had been ignored. He’d originally filed a copyright infringement suit in 2011 after Page took sole credit for the song over a period of decades, first with the Yardbirds and then with Led Zeppelin. Page’s Yardbirds bandmate Jim McCarty said they first heard Holmes’ original when he opened for the group.
“‘Dazed and Confused’ is a song with a great rock ‘n’ roll story,” McCarty said in 2013. “We played with Jake Holmes in New York when we had the last lineup — Jimmy, Keith [Relf], Chris [Dreja] and myself — and were looking for songs, as a lot of the group’s creative chemistry had suffered after Paul [Samwell-Smith] and Jeff [Beck] had gone.
“I wandered backstage to watch the support act and heard some quite pleasant folky songs,” McCarty added. “Then they played this song in a minor key with a very haunting guitar run down, and I immediately thought it would suit us. I went down to a record store in Greenwich Village, bought Jake’s album, and we worked out our version — later to be recorded by Zeppelin, becoming one of the classics of all time.”
Holmes’ complaint added that Page has released several other live versions of “Dazed and Confused” without proper credit or payment, including on Yardbirds ’68, Live at the BBC Revisited, and The Yardbirds: The Ultimate Live at the BBC, among others. He’s requesting damages of at least $150,000 per instance of copyright infringement.
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