You just damn them
I might too had I been classic radioed to death my whole life
I came up right as they peaked....I'm 55
Yes they lifted riffs....very few have not
My point was that being original purist doesn't guarantee greatness
I did feel they got stale after HOTH
what you missed is how unique they were for their time....hard rock...bluesy....tolkienish...Cotswalds feeling
I feel lacking with say Supertramp or Styx or Chicago. Like u do Zep
My kids love Zep but they like ACDC better....which to them is same era but to me quite different
I first heard whole lotta love at 12 years old 7th grade....late 1969
No one had ever done anything like it
Yes black blues was one root but they did not create their Rolling Fork sound....um from that area btw.....from thin air and all those Brit white boys sure transformed it way beyond Son....Patton ...Robert ....Broonzy.....Lemon. etc
Its PC today to bash the white boys
Its a matter of perspective
Plenty black bluesmen had electric guitars by the 50s.....only one u can think of who took old blues to true electric heights was Freddy King
The rest just played louder basic blues...and I love Albert King
Originality/authenticity is vastly over-rated.
If we were to consider originality a necessary component of greatness, Bill Shakespeare would be frequently mentioned on this thread, and I haven't seen him yet. :)
As is well known, few of Shakespeare's plots were original. What made him great was what he did with these plots, not that he borrowed from a common stock.
Similarly, IMO the most destructive meme to infect music in the last few decades is the idolization of the singer/songwriter. Writing well and being a good performer of a song are too entirely different skills and as with any two such skills they are seldom found in the same person.
As an analogy, I routinely listed to books on CD while driving. Once in a while a book is "read by the author." Most are a disaster. I assume a great many other authors don't read their own books because they realize they aren't any good at it. How many good books would be missed if we insisted authors also had to be good performers of the spoken word?