Jake Holmes is suing Jimmy Page over songwriting credit for Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused,” naming Sony Pictures and others as co-defendants after the track was miscredited in the “Becoming Led Zeppelin” documentary.
The complaint, filed in California federal court, alleges copyright infringement and breach of contract. Holmes claims two early live recordings of the song were used in the film without permission or payment.
According to the suit, Page and his co-defendants “willfully infringed the Holmes composition by falsely claiming it as the Page composition” and by “purporting to license use in the film of the Holmes composition as if it was the Page composition,” while collecting license fees.
Holmes stated that a previous cease-and-desist order was ignored. He initially filed a copyright infringement suit in 2011 after Page took sole credit for the song for decades, first with the Yardbirds and then with Led Zeppelin. Yardbirds bandmate Jim McCarty recalled 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.”
McCarty added, “I wandered backstage to watch the support act and heard some quite pleasant folky songs. 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 also states 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. Holmes is seeking damages of at least $150,000 per instance of copyright infringement.
