the 1970s. The chorus has a distinctive, catchy hook — the kind of tune that millions of Americans probably hummed in the shower the year it came out. Then he put on “Taj Mahal,” by the Brazilian artist Jorge Ben Jor, which was recorded several years before the Rod Stewart song. In his twenties, my friend was a DJ at various downtown clubs, and at some point he’d become interested in world music. “I caught it back then,” he said. A small, sly smile spread across his face. The opening bars of “Taj Mahal” were very South American, a world away from what we had just listened to. And then I heard it. It was so obvious and unambiguous that I laughed out loud; virtually note for note, it was the hook from “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.” It was possible that Rod Stewart had independently come up with that riff, because resemblance is not proof of influence. It was also possible that he’d been in Brazil, listened to some local music, and liked what he heard.
My friend had hundreds of these examples. We could have sat in his living room playing at musical genealogy for hours. Did the examples upset him? Of course not, because he knew enough about music to know that these patterns of influence — cribbing, tweaking, transforming — were at the very heart of the creative process. True, copying could go too far. There were times when one artist was simply replicating the work of another, and to let that pass inhibited true creativity. But it was equally dangerous to be overly vigilant in policing creative expression, because if Led Zeppelin hadn’t been free to mine the blues for inspiration, we wouldn’t have got “Whole Lotta Love,” and if Kurt Cobain couldn’t listen to “More Than a Feeling” and pick out and transform the part he really liked, we wouldn’t have “Smells Like Teen Spirit” — and, in the evolution of rock, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a real step forward from “More Than a Feeling.” A successful music executive has to understand the distinction between borrowing that is transformative and borrowing that is merely derivative, and that distinction, I realized, was what was missing from the discussion of Bryony Lavery’s borrowings. Yes, she had copied my work. But no one was asking why she had copied it, or what she had copied, or whether her copying served some larger purpose.
5.
Bryony Lavery came to see me in early October of that year. It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and we met at my apartment. She is in her fifties, with short, tousled blond hair and pale blue eyes, and was wearing jeans and a loose green shirt and clogs. There was something rugged and raw about her. In the Times the previous day, the theater critic Ben Brantley had not been kind to her new play, Last Easter. This was supposed to be her moment of triumph. Frozen had been nominated for a Tony. Last Easter had opened Off Broadway. And now? She sat down heavily at my kitchen table. “I’ve had the absolute gamut of emotions,” she said, playing nervously with her hands as she spoke, as if she needed a cigarette. “I think when one’s working, one works between absolute confidence and absolute doubt, and I got a huge dollop of each. I was terribly confident that I could write well after Frozen, and then this opened a chasm of doubt.” She looked up at me. “I’m terribly sorry,” she said.
Lavery began to explain: “What happens when I write is that I find that I’m somehow zoning in on a number of things. I find that I’ve cut things out of newspapers because the story or something in them is interesting to me, and seems to me to have a place onstage. Then it starts coagulating. It’s like the soup starts thickening. And then a story, which is also a structure, starts emerging. I’d been reading thrillers like The Silence of the Lambs, about fiendishly clever serial killers. I’d also seen a documentary of the victims of the Yorkshire killers, Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, who were called the Moors Murderers. They spirited away several children. It seemed to me that killing somehow wasn’t fiendishly clever. It was the opposite of clever. It was as banal and stupid and destructive as it could be. There are these interviews with the survivors, and what struck me was that they appeared to be frozen in