Obvious references to other songs

Oh, Stop it with the Beefheart already!
You're conjuring up all sorts of crazy memories in my mind from my past life.

The girls in my drum line like the Captain. They have never heard him before tonight.
They are marching all out of step now, ever since I played all of his You Tube vids for them.

Girls, Girls, You start marking time with the left foot!
We've been through this a million times!

Werewolves of London and sweet Home Alabama.
 
The lyrically, most obvious are, as mentioned, Sweet Home Alabama that responds to Neil Young's "Southern Man."

And the 80's new wave act Peter Schilling's song "Major Tom" was a continuation of David Bowie's "Space Oddity".

Dream Theater cross-reference their own songs all the time, and often slip in little riffs or lines that play tribute to other artists songs.

Rush have been known a few times to have a song on one album that continues a theme of a song from a prior album. Such as their "trilogy of fear" and the instrumental song "Where's My Thing" has a similar title to an instrumental a few albums later "Leave that Thing Alone".

The Offsprings "Get a Job" is from the Beatles' song "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da".

Led Zepplin's Boogie with Stu is from Richie Vallens "Oh, my head".

The one I've never understood why there isn't song writing credit given, is the bridge on Bryan Adam's "Run to You" is the same riff as Journey's "Send her my Love."
 
I just heard Captain Beefheart's Abba Zaba and it immediately had me thinking of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk.

If we talk about Beefheart we might aswell talk about Uncle Frank.

Zappa did a musical quotation of Herbie Hancock's song Chameleon in "The Adventures of Greggery Peccary".
 
The Offsprings "Get a Job" is from the Beatles' song "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da".

Led Zepplin's Boogie with Stu is from Richie Vallens "Oh, my head".

Oh yeah, they are clear. The Zep song is downright plagiarised, even worse than Tusk. Should have been called Boogie with Ritchie.

To me, one of the more bizarre examples of plagiarism started with Jimi recording Third Stone from the Sun in 1967.

Cozy Powell recorded Dance with the Devil in 1973 using Jimi's exact melody (see at around 55s of the clip).

In 1978 Boney M's Nightflight to Venus lifted Cozy's solo patterns verbatim.

No one lifted anything from Boney M as far as I can tell :)
 
The Doobie Brother's "Long Train Runnin" and Led Zeppelin's "Trampled Underfoot".
 
Oh yeah, they are clear. The Zep song is downright plagiarised, even worse than Tusk. Should have been called Boogie with Ritchie.

It's not really plagiarism in Zepplins case because they gave Richie Vallens writing credit on the song.

The story goes Zep had heard Richie's mother hadn't gotten any money from his songs, so they borrowed the part, and gave Vallens credit to try to fund money into his estate that would hopefully go to his mother.
 
It's not really plagiarism in Zepplins case because they gave Richie Vallens writing credit on the song.

The story goes Zep had heard Richie's mother hadn't gotten any money from his songs, so they borrowed the part, and gave Vallens credit to try to fund money into his estate that would hopefully go to his mother.

Thanks DED. I take back what I said about plagiarism of that song (Willie Dixon's are another matter). In this case it was a great thing they did!
 
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