Turn Me On, Dead Man

Just as with Led Zeppelin, charges of plagiarism have dogged Bob Dylan throughout his career. Recently Joni Mitchell said in an interview in the Los Angeles Times, “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.” The interview went off in a different direction and the interviewer did not follow up on this statement. On the blog Big Hollywood, however, Jonny Whiteside took up the topic and ran with it, calling Dylan a "Grade-A phony." According to Whiteside, "Let's face it: as a lyricist, Dylan is crap." While I have little patience for this sort of polemical writing, the allegations of plagiarism are worth thinking about.

Information about Dylan borrowing heavily from his influences abounds on the internet, such as The Roots of Bob Dylan and Matthew Zuckerman's analysis of Dylan’s influences in 33 songs. Dylan's album Modern Times has come under particular scrutiny for lifting other artists' work. In fact, most of the tracks on Modern Times have been shown to have identifiable uncredited sources. In "The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism," Jonathan Lethem offers this insight:

Dylan's art offers a paradox: while it famously urges us not to look back, it also encodes a knowledge of past sources that might otherwise have little home in contemporary culture, like the Civil War poetry of the Confederate bard Henry Timrod, resuscitated in lyrics on Dylan's newest record, Modern Times. Dylan's originality and his appropriations are as one.

In an article called "Who's This Guy Dylan Who's Borrowing Lines From Henry Timrod?" the New York Times presented side-by-side comparisons of lines from Timrod's poetry with Dylan's lyrics. They demonstrated how Dylan had incorporated Timrod's words into "When the Deal Goes Down," "Spirit on the Water" and "Workingman's Blues #2" from the album Modern Times.  Suzanne Vega defends Dylan--sort of, anyway--in this opinion piece, also from the New York Times. She acknowledges that he is a "thieving little swine" but she's passionate about him anyway and she wouldn't expect Dylan to provide footnotes and asterisks in his releases. On the website Poetry Foundation, Robert Polito found at least ten instances in which Bob Dylan lifted phrases from Timrod's poetry. Even so, Polito argues that to turn this into a "story of possible plagiarism is to confuse, well, art with a term paper."

On Modern Times, as in all of his work, Dylan draws from all sorts of sources to produce his art. And this isn't the sort of situation where one artist has denied someone else the fruits of their labor, as was the case in the story Newsweek ran in 1963 that Bob Dylan had stolen "Blowin' in the Wind" from a new Jersey high school student. The story was later proven to be completely false. On Modern Times, Dylan drew on a rich folk tradition and produced a work that ranks among his best. Dylan was operating in the folk tradition, whether borrowing from a Civil War poet or Scottish sources.

Still, I have to admit that I'd like a few footnotes and asterisks from the artists I enjoy. I've discovered a lot of great work by investigating charges of plagiarism. I can't help but think that a mention of Timrod in some liner notes might have been worth Dylan's while. It just seems like it would be the right thing to do. But he's Bob Dylan so he can do whatever he likes.

Bob Dylan has released a lot of albums. Not sure how to listen to Dylan? Maybe you should check out How to Listen to Dylan for a step-by-step approach. Or maybe you would find A Contrarian's Guide to Dylan's Discography more useful. Or perhaps you are already familiar with Dylan's catalog and you're looking for more obscure recordings. Try Searching for a Gem, which lists "Bob Dylan's officially released rarities and obscurities." Also useful is My Back Pages.

Or maybe you'd like something a little more interactive. Not sure which one you would call your favorite? Well, the website The Morning News has constructed "Your Best Bob Dylan Album Calculator." Answer a few questions and this online app will tell you which of Bob Dylan's albums (not counting compilations or live albums, and of course, bootlegs) you should call your favorite. Or maybe you'd like to know "Which Bob Dylan Song Are You?" My results were definitely interesting. According to "Your Best Bob Dylan Album Calculator" my Dylan album is The Times They Are A-Changin'. What Dylan song am I? "The Times They Are A-Changin'." I see a pattern here.

The coolest Dylan-related site on the internet is Dylan - Everything Except Compromise, where you have Bob Dylan send someone a message on the cue cards he held in "Subterranean Homesick Blues."

"Ballad of a Thin Man" is the last song on side 1 of Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, released in 1965. In the song, Dylan taunts "Mr. Jones" for not understanding what's going on around him, summarized in the refrain,

Because something is happening here
But you don't know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?

Since the release of Highway 61 Revisited, many people have speculated about the identity of Mr. Jones.  A number of theories have been put forth.

Mr. Jones as Specific Individual

• Max Jones, jazz critic for Melody Maker magazine who "didn't get" Dylan's music.
• Jeffrey Owen Jones,who conducted an embarrassing interview with Dylan for Time magazine in 1965 and later became a film professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
• Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones (or at least Brian worried the song was about him)
• Bobby Jones, security officer at Bard College
• Bob Dylan himself

Mr. Jones as Character Borrowed from Another Work

• The Thin Man (1934)
• "Mr. Bones" from the poem "Dream Song #4" by John Berryman, particularly from the borrowed line "There ought to be a law against..."

Mr. Jones as Archetype

• Keeping Up with the Joneses
• The unhip - in a 1981 interview Jerry Garcia put it this way, "'Ballad of a Thin Man' tells that person who's lame that they're lame, why they're lame, which is a very satisfying thing to do. Certainly something everybody knows about."
• Drug reference
• Racial Conflict - Huey P. Newton became obsessed with the song and thought that it expressed the conflict between blacks and whites and the changing social climate of the 1960s.  "[Huey P. Newton and the Black] Panthers found in Dylan's art a locus for their own rage, and an analysis of white exploitation of black experience." [Mike Marqusee, Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s, p. 225]

A number of opinions are offered on the page "Ballad of a Thin Man" on the compiled threads section of edlis.org and on Expecting Rain under the "Jones, Mr" link.  So who is Mr. Jones really?  In a 1965 interview with Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston, Dylan offered this explanation,

Q: Who is Mr. Jones in "Ballad of a Thin Man?"
A: He's a real person. You know him, but not by that name.
Q: Like Mr. Charlie?
A: No. He's more than Mr. Charlie. He's actually a person. Like I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, "That's Mr. Jones." Then I asked this cat, "Doesn't he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?" And he told me, "He puts his nose on the ground." It's all there, it's a true story.

Gene Weingarten notes that Nora Ephron went on to the next prepared question, missing that "Dylan was mocking her, mocking the question, mocking the interview, mocking (in a sense) all interviews. Which means, in a way, that Dylan was giving a dead-on answer to the question about who Mr. Jones is."  Weingarten went on to say, "Who is Mr. Jones? My serious answer is that Mr. Jones is everyone who doesn't understand the song."  Momus has expressed a similar outlook in the song "Who Is Mr. Jones?" concluding the song with the line,"Mr. Jones is a man who doesn't know who Mr.Jones is."

Each one of these theories probably has something to it.  Dylan's art was so rich that a number of interpretations can be supported.  This song is clearly a put-down of someone who can't comprehend what's going on around him, but given the carnival atmosphere that Dylan describes, it's not all that surprising.  Or does that make me Mr. Jones?