Dylan and Joni: unexpected tension lasts

by Tony Norman
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
April 30, 2010

I'll always have a soft spot for Roberta Joan Anderson, a.k.a. Joni Mitchell. I fell in love with a girl in college who floored me with casual a cappella versions of "Help Me" and "A Case of You" as we stood in her painting studio.

When Ms. Mitchell came to West Philadelphia in late August 1979 to play a concert at the Robin Hood Dell less than a mile from where I lived, I was already full of nostalgia and regret.

Her sidemen were a who's who of jazz fusion at the time -- guitarist Pat Metheny, bassist Jaco Pastorius, drummer Don Alias, saxophonist Michael Brecker and keyboardist Lyle Mays.

I wasn't there to see jazz royalty, though. I was there to hear Joni Mitchell make sense of the inchoate romantic longings that had become associated with her songs in my mind. In what was generally a summer of personal discontent, her music had become a refuge as I attempted to sort out my life's weird trajectory.

Although she was an unlikely muse to a kid from West Philly, Ms. Mitchell was the only woman outside my family I implicitly trusted. I made room in my heart for her because her songs resonated with such crystalline beauty and depth. Her music -- along with Bob Dylan's -- had become a dependable emotional bridge for me during the long stretches between girlfriends.

If Mr. Dylan's music provided the vocabulary of redemption and experience I sought at the time, Ms. Mitchell opened me up to the music of the heart. For a while, they were as important to me as my left and right hands.

So it was a surprise to come across an interview Ms. Mitchell gave to the Los Angeles Times recently where she said: "Bob [Dylan] is not authentic at all. 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."

The only thing more stunning than the lack of a follow-up question by the interviewer is the hostility with which Ms. Mitchell dismissed someone she had previously cited as the artist who "sparked" a deepening of her interest in songwriting in the 1960s.

To be sure, Ms. Mitchell's putdown of Mr. Dylan could be interpreted as righteous payback for his rudeness when he "pretended" to nod off when she played an acetate of her then-recently completed "Court and Spark" album at a listening party. Someone snoring through what is arguably your greatest work could make a gal bitter thinking about it many decades later.

Their encounters, at least as described by Ms. Mitchell to interviewers, have consistently included an element of teasing that had not exactly endeared him to her. She once told an interviewer that she considered herself "anti-Dylan" before she was won over by "Positively Fourth Street."

That's why the bitterness of her most recent comments can't erase their history of mutual respect. Mr. Dylan covered "Big Yellow Taxi" way back in 1970. Ms. Mitchell covered "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" early in her career.

She also sang Mr. Dylan's "Girl from the North Country" in a duet with Johnny Cash on his variety show. She and Mr. Dylan toured together on the Rolling Thunder Revue in the late '70s and performed a series of sold-out concerts with Van Morrison in 1998.

In other words, they have a complicated history that is bound to include elements of repulsion and attraction given their egos and accomplishments. Mr. Dylan once paid Ms. Mitchell a high, if somewhat left-handed, compliment by differentiating her from other female performers by saying she walked and played guitar "like a man."

As to the meat of her complaint that Mr. Dylan is a plagiarist and a fake, she got the letter -- but not the spirit -- of the charge right. Mr. Dylan is definitely a magpie and a trickster who has lifted lines, tunes and images from others his whole career. His interviews are master classes in lies and evasions. That doesn't make him a fake. It makes him an artist. As U2's Bono, one of Mr. Dylan's most ardent disciples, once said: "Every artist is a cannibal. Every poet is a thief."

But for every line he's lifted, Bob Dylan has crafted hundreds of songs and images other artists will be imitating for centuries. He's a bank robber who snatches $10 from a teller's window while tossing gold bricks to terrified witnesses during his escape.

Joni Mitchell is an artist, too, but she's no thief. She's too well-behaved for that. Now retired, her comments about Mr. Dylan might reflect her regrets about "playing other people's parties" while her rival filled his pockets and headed to the exits.