Joni Mitchell Sets Us Straight: Bob Dylan "A Plagiarist," Americans "Stupid and Shallow"

gather.com ^ | 042610 | Kevin Zimmerman

[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...

[Clemenza]

Joni: How much of paradise have YOU paved over to build your house and parking lot, er, driveway? Fargin’ hypocrite...

[Clemenza]

Bob Dylan attends a Chabad-affiliated temple in southern California. He is no longer a Christian, but has returned to his ancestral faith in Ya-weh.

[my_pointy_head_is_sharp]

John Vernon? I recognize him from Topaz (which I just saw), the only movie I’ve ever seen him in. I picked out a few Hitchcock movies to buy, and that was one of them.

[dfwgator]

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)" . . .

And the most blatant, The Byrds ripping off Coltrane on "Eight Miles High."

[Favor Center]

“We are like night and day, he and I”

Well, that part’s true. He has talent.

[BluesDuke]

Not to mention the following most-often-borrowed licks or motifs . . .

John Lee Hooker's "Boogie Chillen" (My own picks for best borrowings/adaptations: Canned Heat, "On the Road Again"; Booker T. and the MGs, "Green Onions"; Sonny Boy Williamson, "Help Me.")

Bo Diddley's "Bo Diddley." (Best subsequent uses of the beat: Buddy Holly, "Not Fade Away," even if it took the Rolling Stones to make it obvious; the Who, "Magic Bus"; the Stooges, "1969.")

Chuck Berry, the theme lick to "Johnny B. Goode."

The Kingsmen, "Louie, Louie" (Which they nailed in the first place by accidentally mis-timing the Richard Berry original, which was actually a cha-cha derivative, and kind of combining it to an earlier take by another Pacific Northwest band, Rockin' Robin Roberts and the Wailers. Best appropriations of that famous duh-duh-duh. duh-duh.: The Troggs, "Wild Thing"; the Rolling Stones, "Get Off My Cloud" [it's there, if you listen closely enough]; Boston, "More Than a Feeling" [listen real close]; the Seeds, "Up In Her Room." Honourable mention, but you have to listen even more closely to catch on: Jimi Hendrix, "Purple Haze," which figures if you knew Hendrix's youth that included hanging at the Spanish Castle club where the Kingsmen and a lot of the legendary Pacific Northwest rockers of the early 1960s held court---Hendrix's "Spanish Castle Magic" and "Castles Made of Sand" are thought to have been his tributes to that club and the music he loved there . . .)

Lou Reed (for the Velvet Underground), "Sweet Jane." (Best appropriations: Alice Cooper, "Be My Lover"; the Who, "Baba O'Reilly"; Bachman-Turner Overdrive, "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet.")

[BluesDuke]

And Bob’s nasal voice does seem to be a put on. I’ve seen him sing in the modern era without it.

That wasn't exactly news, or at least an unheard rumour, to anyone who heard the Dylan of Nashville Skyline and "Lay Lady Lay" in 1968 . . . ;)

[Borges]

Sinatra did great stuff as early as ‘Songs for Young Lovers’ in 1954. It's been claimed that he invented modern pop singing. The idea of actually interpreting a song and not just crooning it mellifluously.

[pissant]

Well, Picasso was 41 years old when the USSR was created. And very well known and wealthy by then and long established in his avant garde, so to speak, styles. I consider alot of what he did as crap, but he was certainly talented when he wanted to be.

[Mr. Blonde]

Can’t leave out La Grange by ZZ Top under Boogie Chillen.

[pissant]

I don’t think so.

[ETL]

Well, Picasso was 41 years old when the USSR was created. And very well known and wealthy by then...

A new book suggests that Picasso's commitment to the Communist Party—and the Soviet cause—was much greater than previously thought

by Hugh Eakin

{excerpt}

"At the height of his involvement, his activities included debriefings by top party apparatchiks, trips around Europe to promote the international peace movement, and donations of large sums of money—often in the form of artworks—to dozens of Communist–supported causes. (Picasso supported numerous party and party–affiliated initiatives through his dealer Daniel–Henry Kahnweiler, including, for example, gifts of 2.5 million and 3 million francs in 1955 and 1956, respectively, for an annual party event.)

His art expanded to include numerous party posters, on–demand sketches for the party newspaper, L'Humanité;, and such overtly political paintings as Massacre in Korea (1951), an atypical, propagandistic piece denouncing American involvement in the Korean War. He even gave his daughter the name Paloma, Spanish for dove, after the Communist peace crusade adopted his drawing of the bird as its international symbol.

"For students of Picasso, the decade right after World War II has often been considered less interesting," says Utley, an independent art historian who stumbled on the subject a decade ago as a Ph.D. student at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. "People generally look at his paintings first, and that period, simply in terms of painting, isn't that exciting." Spurred on by William Rubin, the distinguished Picasso scholar and director emeritus of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she found there was much more to the story. "It was precisely the period of his most active commitment to the Communist Party..."

http://artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=809
_____________________________________________

Congressional Record--Appendix, pp. A34-A35 January 10, 1963

Current Communist Goals [1963]:

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."

23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."

24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.

25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.

http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/comgoals.htm

[ETL]

http://artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=809

[BluesDuke]

Can’t leave out La Grange by ZZ Top under Boogie Chillen.

I didn't think it was as good as the three "Boogie Chillen" derivatives I picked. I still don't think it is. But if you want to hear the worst cop of the "Boogie Chillen" motif, you'd have to hand it to Norman Greenbaum's "Spirit in the Sky," which sounded as though he'd been caught at a Canned Heat gig wired out of his kazoo and with "On the Road Again" the only thing he was liable to remember from the evening . . .

[pissant]

I knew he was a commie, through and through. I was just skeptical of his weird art being a soviet plot since his weirdness preceded the USSR by a good 15 years.

[ETL]

I was just skeptical of his weird art being a soviet plot since his weirdness preceded the USSR by a good 15 years.

"A new book suggests that Picasso's commitment to the Communist Party—and the Soviet cause—was much greater than previously thought"

"Picasso joined the Communist Party just as it was entering the period of its greatest influence on French cultural life. The Communist leader Maurice Thorez had been allowed to return from exile in the Soviet Union, and from 1945 to '47, Communists participated in the French government."

Pablo Picasso, Massacre in Korea, 1951

http://artnews.com/issues/article.asp?art_id=809
____________________________________________________

"In 1944 Picasso joined the French Communist Party, attended an international peace conference in Poland, and in 1950 received the Lenin Peace Prize from the Soviet government.[21]"

Dora Maar au Chat, 1941

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Picasso#Political_views
____________________________________________________

"The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union

[Mr. Blonde]

How does Picasso, btw, was part of the Soviet plan for screwing up American culture with meaningless garbage replacing traditional art.

square away with,

"For students of Picasso, the decade right after World War II has often been considered less interesting," says Utley, an independent art historian who stumbled on the subject a decade ago as a Ph.D. student at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. "People generally look at his paintings first, and that period, simply in terms of painting, isn't that exciting."

It would seem that if his job was to add meaningless garbage to American culture, he wouldn't have done a very good job since his paintings from that time aren't that well liked. And I'm not sure the stuff he occupied himself with according to the preceding paragraph would have had much use or effect in the US.

And finally, was your original post on this subject meant to imply that Dylan was/is some sort of Soviet plant in the US?

[ETL]

was your original post on this subject meant to imply that Dylan was/is some sort of Soviet plant in the US?

Not at all. If anything, he is, or was, just one of many useful idiots of the time.

[bmwcyle]

Old whores so what.

[x]

Mmmm ... Bitter and crazy ... What's not to like?

But she does sort of have a point. Dylan was an act that Zimmerman grew into. It wasn't really who Abram and Beatrice's kid from Hibbing was.

But he grew into the role spectacularly well. He made it original and his own. It was a "Good artists borrow, great artists steal" thing.

And while we're at it, Bill and Myrtle Anderson's child Roberta Joan from Saskatoon wasn't born "Joni Mitchell." That was actually a role she created. She didn't borrow as much from her sources as Dylan did, but she also didn't end up as wildly original.

While Joni is wrong about America, she does have a point about Madonna being our Nero and she puts it quite well.