Was John the most prone to 'borrow' music from others | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

They all were. Quoting Macca (my bold):

“Here’s one example of a bit I pinched from someone: I used the bass riff from “Talkin’ About You” by Chuck Berry in “I Saw Her Standing There ”. I played exactly the same notes as he did and it fitted our number perfectly. Even now, when I tell people, I find few of them believe me; therefore, I maintain that a bass riff hasn’t got to be original.”

Nor do I think there is any benefit to claims that one Beatle was “more prone” than anyone else in the business. Artists have a different view of art than owners, you see.

J Alesait said

Yeah, but a bass line is part of the arrangement of a song. I was talking about the songs as compositions.   

It’s both. If you don’t believe that, check out the Beatles Complete Scores. The bassline’s there. I know what you mean though, and I’m well aware of the irony of Lennon’s jibes about Harrison’s borrowing, I’m just saying that Macca did it too and there’s no value in singling John out. I just happen to think Paul’s far better at it than John or George. For instance:

Well Paul did say it was a tribute 

J Alesait said

Regarding the bassline for ISHST being on the Beatles Complete Scores, it proves nothing. It’s still just part of the arrangement, the lyrics and melody being the key elements of a ‘composition’ in popular music. Not even the harmony is necessary. If one thing distinguish ‘clasical’ from popular music is the role of the composer (the songwriter in popular music). Whereas in the former, the composer establish every note and nuance that has to be played (involving melody, harmony, instrumentation, orchestration, time signatures, tempos, and so forth) and put them on paper on a musical score, in popular music there’s no proper score, and the songwriters only can claim authorship of lyrics and melody, they not even need to write or read  music (in fact pretty almost no one does). 

Sorry, that’s rubbish. Scores for popular music have been published for over a century; if there were no need for them, there’d be no market for them. Some popular composers have written their music in detailed form and not every classical score is complete to the detail. If anything, one of the things that keeps classical performance (and recording) alive is the freedom of interpretation of that music, because that aspect of the music often can’t be written down. Paul can say the bassline doesn’t have to be original for legal reasons. It doesn’t mean he thinks the bassline is unimportant to the composition. And it makes no difference if he wrote it down or not.

I think you’re conflating what is considered to be part of a piece of music with what publishers and record companies consider to be copyrightable. That definition of copyright is getting extended all the time thanks to greed and bad business models and for popular music, was problematic from the start in the early 20th century after the invention of the gramophone. But just because publishers and record companies deem arrangements to be minor (and why would that be, do you think?) components of a work and not copyrightable as part of a composition, does not make them unimportant or less important to the song. They defined it that way in order to make the most money. If arrangements or genres or types of instruments or numbers of instrument had to be taken into account, popular music would be more expensive to produce and prevent cover versions. So what Paul did is what artists do and borrowed, and that was recorded and the publishers wrote the music down themselves in order to monetise their right to publish it. Just because they didn’t have to write the bassline down doesn’t make it unimportant, they did the minimum to collect royalties.

I hope that is clear to you because what musicians consider important in a piece of music and what publishers and record companies think is important are two very different things. Things that have to be spelt out in contracts, not artistic things or things that affect your emotional appreciation of a piece of music. Things that can be sold in different packages over and over again without having to register them as new songs or even pay the composer. Ironically this definition for the purpose is getting stretched thinner and thinner and it’s getting stupid. I’m pretty sure Paul’s Boutique would never have been made today even though it’s arguably an original work made from a lot of samples.

Oh god, samples. That’s really been the death note for the industry. Let me spell that one one out: samples, regardless of length, are deemed to infringe mechanical copyright (this is where that wonderful money tree of repeated compilations comes from), the rights that record companies usually have to recorded music. This is why, as shown below, we’re seeing an increase in the number of what even non-musicians feel are a flimsy basis for a lawsuit. The Creep case which may or may not end up as a lawsuit is an illustration of the can of worms you can open even with something that sounds as open-and-shut as it does. Most people would just say oh what a copycat and get on with their lives but not the music industry. It’s not like a trademark that you must defend or lose your right to defend it, but the music business (and to a similar extent, the movie business) seems to act as though it is. They fear a return to the bad old days when popular tunes could be set to different lyrics like Gilbert and Sullivan were accused of doing.

As for Bad Penny Blues, it’s the arrangement again, the feel to it. Not the melody nor the lyrics. If anything, it’s a precursor of Come Together (listen for the repetitive notes on the piano)… in fact of You Can’t Catch Me 😉

Read that Rolling Stone article. If you’re claiming ‘feel’ is unimportant, sorry that’s been used to press copyright claims. It doesn’t matter what part of the song it is. There’s only many notes and there’s a lot of common chord progressions. And who gets sued and who don’t is clearly a matter of who got their stuff published first, not the artistic merit.

Obviously a lot of jazz was listened to at Paul’s home. Most likely he ‘borrowed’ (unconsciously or not) the first notes of All My Loving from Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Kathy’s Waltz, released in 1959. The premonitory fragment is (note by note melody, rhythm AND harmony) from 1:02 to 1:08

That’s nothing, Honey Pie is practically a pastiche of several popular 20’s standards; George Martin had even recorded some of them as covers.