Joni Mitchell on Bob Dylan

Joni also trashed Leonard Cohen at one point. It is something I don't like about her. She actually seems insecure in these remarks.

Joni Mitchell has been an Artist - as in drawing portraits, pictures, etc. She doesn't do music anymore.

What songs did he plagiarize?

The version of this I remember reading wasn't so harsh. She said she admired Dylan a lot but thought it must be exhausting to have to live behind a persona for his entire career, which I think is a fair and interesting observation even if you think Dylan is a stunning genius.

[quote]Joni also trashed Leonard Cohen at one point. It is something I don't like about her. She actually seems insecure in these remarks.

Joni's never really gotten the respect she deserves as an artist. It's not a case of insecurity so much as wanting her talents framed in the appropriate way.

She used to get pissed when she was lumped in with Carole King, Carly Simon and other female singer-songwriters. She thought her peers were Piaf and Rachaminoff.

I'm a relatively new Joni fan, but a lifelong Dylan fan (not a fanatic, don't worry). The fact that Dylan has been so committed to being an enigma is what I've found so fascinating about him, R4. I suspect for many people it WOULD be exhausting to hide behind a persona for an entire career, but with Dylan I think the artifice has become his identity. His name and voice are fake, of course, but then I think... after 60 years... so what?

Anyway, I like both!

She's great but she's also a nut and a crank.

The internet was the worst thing that ever happened to Dylan - now everyone can track down all of his cribbing.

Plagiarists are accused by the original authors and sued.

Dylan had been accused by no one.

I don't get how adapting and re-arranging folk songs, in the public domain, makes one a plagiarist.

[quote]The internet was the worst thing that ever happened to Dylan - now everyone can track down all of his cribbing.

List the songs.

Thanks in advance.

He's smarter than that, R9. But I'm not going to argue with St. Zimmy's followers. One of the worst and most virulent boomer splinter factions.

Based on reading "Hotel California..." by Barney Hoskyns, "Goodnight L.A." by Kent Hartman and "Canyon of Dreams" by Harvey Kubernik, my opinion is that Joni Mitchell is over-rated and Linda Ronstadt is under-rated.

I second what R11 said.

R12 LOL. Just as I thought.

For starters, all of his rollicking jokey "talking" songs on the early albums are blatant Harmonica Frank rip-offs.

R16 = R12. And let's get real. He plagiarized his Nobel speech. Do you people go to sites other than DL? I'm not a random crank, this is all pretty well documented.

This is hilarious.

Her pussy stinks to say nothing of the absolute reek of nicotine from her 5 packs a day. Bitch should just die already.

And don't tell me Harmonica Frank is the goddamned folk tradition.

At least Joan Boaz had the guts to diss him via song. Joni just seems desperate here.

Dylan's Nobel speech???

Inspiration from old folkies?

Is this the best you can do?

LOL.

r7- She's hanging on by a thread.

Is this an actual thing on Facebook--warring Dylan factions?

Fuck, sorry--not Facebook. I meant Datalounge.

You are right, R22, Joni and I made the whole thing up.

R24 The battle probably rages on at the Steve Hoffman forums. Where boomers lose their shit over younger generations preferring "Here Comes the Sun" to "Hey Jude."

This is an interesting topic. I wonder if people like Jack White and Bowie might sort of fit into this? Probably less so Bowie, as he was always reinventing himself. White is good friends with Dylan and has changed his name etc to create an aura about himself.

Joni Mitchell is not underrated. She's always has had a chip on her shoulder.

Jack White stole his act from the Flat Duo Jets. Bowie I don't know anything about.

Agree on both counts, R29.

R26 And who would ever accuse Joni Mitchell of making things up...

"Speaking of her Morgellons syndrome, Joni said: “Fibers in a variety of colors protrude out of my skin like mushrooms after a rainstorm: they cannot be forensically identified as animal, vegetable or mineral.”"

R13 Joni Mitchel>Linda Ronstadt>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Steamy Knickers

Make Bob Great Again

He fakes his voice?

R35 Yes, I think his real singing voice isn't as nasal. I want to say that his "real" singing voice is similar to the voice he used on Nashville Syline.

And on his first album too, lots of fake voices, none really like the classic whine.

Shakespeare was such a fake and plagiarist, too. He stole the idea for Hamlet from an old Scandinavian myth, and Romeo and Juliet from a contemporary Italian writer. Fake. Plagiarist.

Dylan is fake. One of my high school teachers (in her sixties or seventies I think at the time of this) had him as a student in one of the first classes she taught decades earlier up in Minnesota (I live in Iowa). She remembered "Bob Zimmerman", a quiet introverted boy. Definitely not the "too cool for this but would sell out to Victoria's Secret" persona we know now. She brought him up because I wore a Hendrix shirt to school one day & we talked about music.

R39 So, what you're saying is... if people deviate from their high school personae they are fake? Got it.

This isn't exactly a secret. It's basically the plot of the movie I'm Not There.

[quote]OP: His popularity with NY critics vis-a-vis Joni never sat well with me either.

Such an objective view. Are you a genius or just a gifted analyst of music, celebrity and the business that is show? What power.

Children, take heed! You do NOT want to approach Joni if you see her in public. Nor Bryan Ferry. They are capable of sending you home in tears. I haven't experienced this personally, but I've heard enough stories. I was lucky to see Joni in Vancouver, British Columbia over Labour Day weekend 1979. All of her family were there, so it was really good. I took pics during the first couple of songs and stood practically nipple to nipple with Joel Bernstein, her photographer in residence at that time. I recognized him and shook his hand. He seemed thrilled that someone would recognize him. I was *also* lucky enough to see Bob Dylan & The Band in Seattle on 9th Feb. 1974, at the afternoon show. I must say at neither show did my attention waver for one moment. Nowadays my attention span is so short I have no interest in attending a show. I think it's kind of tacky to get up and walk out while it's in progress.

I never liked his schtick anyway.

Despite having been blessed with unique creativity, enormous success, mass adoration and beauty, Mitchell is embittered and nasty. It isn't a good look. I remember reading about a fight between her and the now reunited daughter she gave up for adoption, that became violent and police had to be called. And then there's the Morgellons Disease, which seems to be something nonexistent. I love her music but I think she's mental. As in borderline.

He stole "Blowin in the Wind"

Scorsese's documentary on Dylan, Rolling Thunder Revue, from 2019, got him down pretty well, I thought. Dylan was and is an eccentric, the sort of American eccentric very peculiar to the 60s--think Richard Brautigan and Ken Kesey in writing, neo-Beat, truly odd, not an oracle, limited in lots of ways. Giving him the Nobel Prize in literature was preposterous, but a few of the songs--"Tangled up in Blue"--just lift off into glory from the first second. I know people who grew up on post-punk, Joy Division and New Order and so forth can find him very crunchy and cornball, which I get, but when it's good it's very good.

[quote]my opinion is that Joni Mitchell is over-rated and Linda Ronstadt is under-rated.

Well, I think your OVERREACTING!

People (like Joni) approach Dylan in such an all-or-nothing way--supreme genius or fraud--and of course he's in-between. He's written great songs and lots and lots of throwaway junk, and a lot of his work is derivative.....There's just so much of it. And he's a terrible self-editor: why have four verses when you can easily produce sixteen?. Personally, I've always found his elusiveness aggravating--his thing has been "change before they know who you are" for sixty years, and it's worked....Still: "All Along the Watchtower" and "Blind WIllie McTell": no one else could have written those songs. And he changed popular music forever. Not Joni. Bob.

Yes, I'm the guy bitching about Harmonica Frank, and I have listened to Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding dozens of times. He is not the devil. I like the levity on display in the last few posts. But let's not pretend that people haven't been fairly hounding him about plagiarism for quite some time now.

Joni is 77 years old. I doubt she still smokes five packs a day.

[quote]But let's not pretend that people haven't been fairly hounding him about plagiarism for quite some time now.

Please list the songs that he has plagiarized.

Some songs on Love and Theft are suspect. You can use google too, R52. He doesn't steal songs wholesale, he just lifts lines here and there from extremely random sources. Again, google is your friend, I'm not a lawyer and you aren't the judge, MISTER JONES.