Posted on 04/26/2010 6:26:23 PM PDT by Artemis Webb
"What is the big deal about Bob Dylan?" Julia Schrenkler wondered on Gather.com three years ago. Well, according to fellow folkie Joni Mitchell, he's a plagiarizing fraud.
"Bob is not authentic at all," Mitchell tells the Los Angeles Times. "He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I."
True, Dylan's name is a "fake" -- he was born Robert ... um, Zimmerman -- but he'd have to be some kind of crazy to invent a voice like his current subterranean croak. Let's assume she's talking about his Woody Guthrie-isms of the '60s, just to be on the safe side.
But Mitchell (birth name: Roberta Joan Anderson, btw) doesn't restrict her remarks to male performers of her generation, letting us know that "Grace [Slick] and Janis Joplin were [sleeping with] their whole bands and falling down drunk."
Well, yes, but what of the Canadian-born Mitchell's own work? Time for a little self-examination, perhaps?
"My work is set against the stupid, destructive way we live on this planet," she announces. "Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980. Madonna is like Nero; she marks the turning point."
Ladies and gentlemen, Joni Mitchell: Special Ranting 2010 Edition. Approach her at your own risk...
(Excerpt) Read more at knittingcrochet.gather.com ...
But [Dylan] didn’t forget why he wrote his classic “It Ain’t me Babe”. He was giving the finger to the protest movement.And here I thought the closing lyric of the closing song on the album (The Times They Are A-Changin') previous to the one (Another Side of Bob Dylan) featuring "It Ain't Me, Babe" was his eff-you to the protest movement:
Oh, a false clock tries to tick out my time
to disgrace, distract, and bother me
And the dirt of gossip blows into my face
and the dust of rumours covers me
But if the arrow is straight and the point is slick
it can pierce through dust no matter how thick
So I'll make my stand and remain as I am
and bid farewell and not give a damn.---From "Restless Farewell."
I didn’t realize, “Furry Sings the Blues” was autobiographical . . .She wrote it about her encounters with Memphis music; the title alludes to bluesman Furry Lewis---who actually hated the song and demanded Mitchell pay him royalties if she was going to use him as a subject. (Furry Lewis also toured with the Rolling Stones once upon a time.
As for Bob Dylan, I still think Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, Planet Waves, The Basement Tapes, and Blood on the Tracks are the man's best music . . .
Sheesh. Joni seems all Tangled Up In Blue.She should only know just how many people not named Dylan have borrowed or rewritten what came before them. I could run her down a volume equal to the Manhattan telephone book, but I'll just begin with these:
Original: Robert Johnson, "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom"; most famous rewrite: Elmore James, "Dust My Broom" and "Dust My Blues."
Original: Skip James, "Devil Got My Woman"; most famous rewrite: Robert Johnson, "Hellhound on My Trail."
Original: Howlin' Wolf, "Killin' Floor," and Robert Johnson, "Stones in My Passway"; most famous rewrite: Led Zeppelin, "The Lemon Song."
Original: Willie Dixon (for Sonny Boy Williamson), "Bring It On Home"; most famous rewrite: Led Zeppelin, "Bring It On Home." (They took the writing credit over that riffy midsection but never acknowledged Dixon writing the bookends they used.)
Original: Willie Dixon (for Muddy Waters), "You Need Love"; most famous rewrite: Led Zeppelin, "Whole Lotta Love."
Original: Bo Diddley, "I'm a Man" and the Yardbirds, "Over Under Sideways Down"; most famous rewrite: The Count Five, "Psychotic Reaction." (Actually, they nicked that one entirely from the Yardbirds---they used the famous percussing guitar finale of the Yardbirds' version of "I'm a Man" with the basic verse structure of "Over Under Sideways Down," a Yardbirds band composition.)
And let's not get started on how many instrumental licks were borrowed over the years, none of which began with a) Steely Dan nicking the bass line of Horace Silver's "Song for My Father" to use in "Rikki Don't Lose That Number"; or, Grand Funk Railroad borrowing the guitar lick that kicked off the Monkees' "Pleasant Valley Sunday" and using it to kick off "Closer to Home (I'm Your Captain)" . . .
No one else is even close to making real American musicEver hear of Hank Williams?
Ever hear of Muddy Waters? Robert Johnson? Duke Ellington (who once said he preferred his music be called "American music" rather than jazz)?
Sure. [Hank Williams is] great. But he had a very short career. He’s penned about 10 classics that will remnain in the great American songbook forever.Robert Johnson only penned twenty-nine songs in a career even shorter than Hank Williams . . . and those songs became blues standards and should be considered part of the great American songbook.
As an aside, when Columbia assembled the box set of Johnson's complete recordings (all 29 master takes and several alternate takes), they were figuring they'd be lucky if it sold 20,000 copies. It went on to sell more than two million copies---the first purely blues box that ever sold a million copies or more. And that was 52 years after Johnson's death.
I'd hipped to Robert Johnson (as also a lot of bluesmen including B.B. King, who first moved me to try to play a guitar seriously in the summer of 1969 when "The Thrill Is Gone" hit) in the late 1960s when I heard Eric Clapton, whom I admired growing up, rhapsodise about Johnson; on that alone (and certainly Clapton's rearrangement of "Crossroads"---on which he gave Johnson the writing credit he deserved, as always he did) I went out and bought the Columbia LP King of the Delta Blues Singers, issued first in 1963. I got the second volume when it came out circa 1970. Losing those two LPs over the years was a heartbreaker; when the box set came out I pounced on it. It's still music I listen to at least once a week. And, if only based on "Long Gone Lonesome Blues," I'd be willing to bet Hank Williams was aware of Robert Johnson, too. I often thought Hank Williams took a slight wrong musical turn---listening to him even now, that man was born to sing the blues.
Clapton once said that there was a time in his life when, if you didn't know who Robert Johnson was, he wouldn't talk to you. I can't exactly say I blame the man.
As for rock stars sleeping around, Joni seems to have forgotten about her own reputation in Laurel Canyon -- much as she forgot about her own daughter.
I think she is wrong about Dylan, but she was one of the most creative, original musicians I have ever heard, and her opinions on music are better informed than mine.
I suspect my GGGGGGgrandkids and their heirs will enjoy those works. I know my granddaughter does!Talkin' bout your g-g-g-g-g-g-generations? ;)
(Yep---I also love the Who. Especially The Who Sells Out and the complete Live at Leeds.)
. . . much as she forgot about her own daughter.She gave her daughter up for adoption, a subject to which she's alluded in several of her songs, including especially the striking "Little Green" (she recorded it for Blue, one of her best albums, several years after she first wrote the song).
The man who sired the child with Mitchell in Canada left her; she married a folk singer named Chuck Mitchell rather hastily, hoping to make a home for the baby, but the marriage collapsed and Mitchell didn't think herself strong enough to raise a child single. In a 1990s interview, she revealed why: I was dirt poor. An unhappy mother does not raise a happy child. It was difficult parting with (her) but I had to let her go.
Child with a child pretendingAnd she got the happy ending in due course---Mitchell and her daughter were reunited in 2001. It was a mutual search; Mitchell, who never spoke publicly about it until a Canadian tabloid exposed it a few years prior to that (and when she did talk about it, she expressed hope of meeting her birth daughter again), was more than receptive when the young lady (who apparently had a happy childhood after all) reached out to her (following an arduous search, after her parents told her of her being adopted) through her manager.
weary of lies you are sending home
so you sign all the papers in the family name
you are sad and you're sorry but you're not ashamed
Little green have a happy ending.---From "Little Green"
Mitchell also alluded to the daughter she surrendered for adoption in a 1982 song, "Chinese Cafe": Your kids are coming up straight/My child's a stranger/I bore her/But I could not raise her.
She seems never to have forgotten the daughter she felt compelled to give up for adoption. For her part, the daughter has said that reunion with Mitchell (with her parents' blessing, incidentally) made her feel complete.
Peter Pan syndrome.....the folk stars never grew up and faced the realities of being adult and making adult decisions.....
That’s a very compelling analysis. You obviously are a music aficionado. The only part I might disagree with is the reference to the songs Frank sang as “forgettable garbage.” I think some of Porter’s and Gershwin’s lyrics, for example, will stand the test of time.
Joni Mitchell? Isn’t she ranked right after Albert Morris and right before Bobby Sherman?
That’s low!!!
(funny but low)
Indeed...sounds like our Ty! When I was in high school in the 60s, I was obsessed with baseball, and The Sporting News had a series of articles on Cobb. Great stuff...really opened my eyes.
I think what sets Dylan apart from at least most if not all of his peers from the 60s is that he continues to write great music, although not at the clip he did between Bringing It All Back Home and Blonde on Blonde. I would put especially Time Out of Mind and Love & Theft on your list as well.
What’s your take on Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah etc...
This wasn’t big news when I posted her original interview last week.
And Bob’s nasal voice does seem to be a put on. I’ve seen him sing in the modern era without it.
He certainly has done what he can’t to AVOID being labeled “the voice of his generation” and “a folk purist”.
Late to the party, as usual.
I can’t help it. I love both Joni and Dylan – always will.
Some of my favorite artists are hopeless lefties, but I don’t let that get in the way.
Except for Springsteen. I’m really steamed at him.
So pissant is a Dylan fan. I knew it!
Anyway, not my favorite Joni album, but one of her best.
http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/playlist/Apr+20+2010+joni+mitchell+hejira/27934178
Took me a minute LOL!
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