BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Monday, July 14, 2003
Dylan's Japanese connection.
News that Bob Dylan had lifted extensively from a Japanese book on
his 2001 "Love and Theft" CD sent me running for Bob Spitzer's
Dylan: A Biography (1989). Sure enough, just as I had
remembered, I found Spitzer's account of an interview with Rob
Stoner, who played bass on Dylan's 1975 Desire album and in
the Rolling Thunder Revue. Stoner's recollection of a conversation he
once had with Dylan in New York City is worth quoting at some
length:
At three o'clock in the
morning, in a city once referred to as "the most dangerous place
on earth," Bob Dylan and Rob Stoner went on a walking tour that
lasted until the sun came up. "We just wandered around until
dawn," Stoner recalls. "Bob staring off into space with his hands
in his pockets, walking with a bounce in his step. Taking it all
in. Later I learned that this was something he did in every major
city in the country. No one recognizes him and it allows him to
feel completely free and relaxed."
As usual, Bob was preoccupied
with plans for the tour, but mostly they talked about obscure rock
'n roll songs. Stoner was a connoisseur of old rockabilly
standards. He owns a priceless collection of R&B 78s,
including the entire Sun Records catalogue and hundreds of
southern "race" records, and as the two men walked they tried to
stump each other with a list of their favorite titles and
corresponding singles. Bob was no slouch when it came to
rockabilly. "He knew almost everything I threw at him," Stoner
remembers. "Not just the titles but the entire lyric, too. He'd go
into a verse like he was singing it only a couple hours before.
The extent of his knowledge was mind-boggling."
Very cautiously, Stoner broached
a subject that had been nagging him for some time. "Ever hear a
tune called 'Bertha Lou'?" he asked Bob.
Bob nodded confidently. "Sure.
Johnny Burnette and his trio. 19 ... 57."
"Fifty-six," Stoner corrected
him, "but that's pretty good, man." They walked another hundred
feet or so in silence. "The reason I asked is that it's really
similar to one of your songs." In fact, it was almost a
note-for-note duplication of "Rita Mae," from the Desire
sessions. The melodies were exactly the same, and Bob's scansion
followed Burnette's pattern to a rhyme.
"Oh, yeah?" Bob remarked, but it
was a closing statement if Stoner had ever heard one.
"He never even asked which song
of his I was referring to," Stoner says nonplussed. "He didn't
care, and at that moment I realized that the line between
plagiarism and adaption was so blurred that it wasn't even an
issue for him."
A quick search of BobDylan.com
turns up a song from 1975 called "Rita
May," written by Dylan and
Jacques Levy, that has apparently never been released. But Stoner's
recollection neatly ties in with a piece in Saturday's New York
Times by Jon
Pareles on the Japanese
connection, who notes that Dylan has always operated as someone who
blends together lyrics and music from a variety of sources. Writes
Pereles:
The absolutely original
artist is an extremely rare and possibly imaginary creature,
living in some isolated habitat where no previous works or
traditions have left any impression. Like virtually every artist,
Mr. Dylan carries on a continuing conversation with the past. He's
reacting to all that culture and history offer, not pretending
they don't exist. Admiration and iconoclasm, argument and
extension, emulation and mockery -- that's how individual
artists and the arts themselves evolve. It's a process that is
neatly summed up in Mr. Dylan's album title "Love and
Theft," which itself is a quotation from a book on minstrelsy
by Eric Lott.
The extent to which Dylan, er,
lovingly stole lines from a little-known Japanese book, Junichi
Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza, is nevertheless a surprise.
The details were reported last Tuesday in the Wall Street
Journal by Jonathan
Eig and Sebastian Moffett.
Even Dylanologist Christopher Ricks of Boston University, who never
has a bad word to say about Zimmy, comes off in the Journal piece as a tad disappointed.
A big deal? Not really. Dylan has
always been pretty transparent about the way he works, even if -- on
this particular occasion -- he borrowed from a source so obscure that
it's a wonder it was ever discovered. Still, Dylan plays it both ways
to an uncomfortable extent: he pieces together bits of found culture,
sticks his copyright on it, and collects the royalties.
At the very least, as Pareles notes
in the Times, Dylan should be generous the next time a rap
musician asks permission to sample one of his songs.
posted at 8:27 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
