Bob 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.
Joni Mitchell

Joni, Joni, Joni. If you are going to bash Bob Dylan at least use a heavy hammer, one with some weight in it. And swing from the shoulders and rotate through the curve. Have a follow through if you're trying to knock his block off.

But this? Joni, it's akin to the behaviour of a petulant child who breezes through a schoolyard, says her bit between bitter lips to one but so that all may hear, and then departs just as breezily.

Mitchell made her comments recently during a phone hook-up interview with The Los Angeles Times and singer/actor John Kelly, who has been performing as Mitchell in the tribute concert Paved Paradise: the Art of Joni Mitchell.

This is the relevant excerpt from the interview published by the newspaper:

Los Angeles Times: '. . . You've had experience becoming a character outside yourself (Mitchell caused controversy when she appeared as an African-American male on the cover of her 1977 album Don Juan's Reckless Daughter.) The folk scene you came out of had fun creating persons. You were born Robert Joan Anderson, and someone named Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan.'

JM: 'Bob is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.

'As for name, my parents wanted a boy, so they called me Robert John, when I came out a girl, they just added two letter As to that. Then I married Chuck Mitchell; I wanted to keep my maiden name - I had a bit of a following as Joni Anderson - but he wouldn't let me.'

And that's it.

Is it a raw nerve that's been touched here? Do the words Bob Dylan stimulate this type of response everytime in Mitchell? Is there a secret history the greater world does not know about between these two? It's not like they haven't performed together: they did a West Coast tour in 1998 (with Van Morrison). A couple of years later, Mitchell announced her retirement in a vituperative, arsenic-dripping, parting shot to the music business. The word 'cesspool' was mentioned.

In the past 10 years she has remixed her back catalogue for two gorgeous orchestral-backed albums and, in 2007, released Shine, her first album of original work since 1998's Taming the Tiger.

Dylan, on the other hand, has just kept rolling. His triplet of Love and Theft (2001), Modern Times (2006), and Together Through Life (2009) shows him at one of the peaks of his career, actually the peak is more an elevated ridgeline, given that he brought out Time Out of Mind in 1997. Even without the recordings, Dylan has shown through his constant touring that retirement is the last thing on his mind. (Let's pretend that last year's Christmas album was really made by a doppelganger from Mars.)

Neither artist does many interviews these days - although Dylan opened up to writer Bill Flanagan on his website for the release of Together Through Life - and when Mitchell has, it is usually to bemoan virtually everything.

It's worth quoting Mitchell again from the Los Angeles Times interview: 'My first four albums covered the usual youth problems - looking for love in all the wrong places - while the next five are basically about being in your 30s. Things start losing their profundity; in middle-late age, you enter a tragedian period, realising that the human animal isn't changing for the better. In a way, I think I entered straight into my tragedian period, as my work is set against the stupid, destructive way we live on this planet. Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980. Madonna is like Nero; she marks the turning point.'

It's hard to argue against the point of humans' destruction of their environment. Pinning Americans' stupidity to 1980, however, is more problematic; though they did elect Ronald Reagan president in that year. Madonna burst on the scene a couple of years later, around the time Mitchell released Dog Eat Dog, which contained one of the truly insightful songs about famine and the Western world called Ethiopia.

Alas, her insight these days closer to home has abandoned her. To the first two sentences: Bob is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake.

These are all profoundly misguided assertions. Not authentic? What exactly does that mean? His name and voice are fake? He changed his name from Robert Zimmerman to Bob Dylan. Dylan is as real a name as Zimmerman. There's no fakery involved. And if it's not his voice then whose is it? What an extraordinary feat of endurance to have maintained this charlatan voice for half a century.

Despite whatever else people may say about Dylan, all would be one in this: no one has a voice like Dylan's. You couldn't fake it if you tried, well not for long. Many have tried over the years - Loudon Wainwright III, for instance, and Adrian Belew on the Frank Zappa album Sheik Yerbouti who nailed both the Dylan voice and harmonica in the parody Flakes.

The most serious accusation against an artist is plagiarism. Dylan would be the first to admit he's been borrowing from the folk and blues tradition since he began. Indeed, Blowin' in the Wind is based on an old spiritual No More Auction Block. It's been the way of the tradition: you find the roots, dig them up and plant them in new soil.

The plagiarism claims against Dylan have been more vocal in recent years, particularly with Love and Theft and Modern Times.

They show if nothing else the cavernous accommodation wherein resides Dylan's acquisitive nature. Critics accuse him of lifting words from a Japanese gangster novel Confessions of a Yakuza by Junichi Saga for Love and Theft, especially the song Floater.

On Modern Times, the theft is said to have occurred from American Civil War writer Henry Timrod. It first surfaced in The New York Times in 2006, and set internet forums and newspaper columns alight as fans, critics, professors of music and literature and fellow musicians manned the barricades for and against Dylan.

It prompted singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega to write in the Times: 'Being influenced by a text and reworking it is not the same as directly quoting, which is what he has done here. Still, Bob Dylan doesn't have to steal from anybody. Go into any club that still has hoot night, and you will hear someone at the mike stealing from Bob Dylan. His singing and writing style is one of the most influential and recognisable of the last century. And the phrases that he lifted were only details in the scope of this new album.

'Did he do this on purpose? I doubt it. Maybe he has a photographic memory, and bits of text stick to it . . . I am trying to imagine a Bob Dylan album with footnotes, asterisks, ibid.'s and nifty little anecdotes about the origins of each song. It's not going to happen. He's never pretended to be an academic, or even a nice guy. He is more likely to present himself as, well, a thief. Renegade, outlaw, artist. That's why we are passionate about him.'

Mitchell's comment that 'everything about Bob is a deception' is enigmatic. Everything, Joni? His songs, his performances, his personal life. Everything? How can one so far removed know one so intimately? Perhaps Mitchell could argue that one can see more clearly, more objectively, from a distance.

I don't know, of course, but perhaps Dylan might take it as a compliment. As he might of Mitchell's final observation that 'we are like night and day, he and I'. In this, she is right. Two giants of popular music are as different as night and day. Mitchell's music has a level of harmonic and structural complexity to which Dylan's could never aspire. But it was Dylan who rended the rock heavens asunder. It was he who changed everything.

Dylan doesn't need to reply to Mitchell and, if he did, I'd walk to New Zealand. His reply can be found in the only place that stays true for, and to, an artist. Their creations. Joni, if you're looking to label me, stop: 'I'm not there, I'm gone.'

Really, it's deceptively simple.