Expecting Rain

I agree.

.. i agree so wholeheartedly i threw my post away. ..
- i was going to PM MMD to tell him how much i admire
his ability to put sense, reason, and reality into words,
but the heck with it - i'll say it right here. ... Salute!

Well, that is praise from exalted company. I thank you.

grumpy, you into southern culture on the skids? they hit me on the head with a chicken bone right on top of my head.
thank you Lebron for the 14 rebounds.

Has Christopher Ricks written anything about Bob's appropriations?

Given how you operate, how you much you read and listen to, I assume you've seen this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epHxpdS5bKM

It's the "Inventions of Bob Dylan" with Ricks and Wilentz. In the context of this discussion, maybe I will listen again for some of our questions.

I should say, the deeper, more interesting question is the one you keep bringing up in one way or another, and that is Dylan as an American artist. It seems that America is his project. Part of it is his encyclopedic (but also closet of curios) knowledge of American culture. But there are massive themes at work. A real vision of America. Wilentz is clearly approaching that. Putting Ricks and Wilentz together, i think you get the crucial book: Dylan's Vision of America or maybe: Dylan's Vision of American Sin). That's where I'm turning my attention now. I will be following you for clues, Giada.

I go to bed , wake up and find 4 pages have been added . It is a fascinating debate.
However having known about this from early days as a fan I have grown up aware of some of the borrowings etc , however he has made all these things his own and it has never ever been an issue for me.

Haha, you've been bringing up the idea of Dylan & America as much as anyone, MMD.
Thanks for reminding me about that video, it's been a while since I last watched it and shall have to go over it again to see if anyone brings up appropriation.
I read somewhere that Greil Marcus was supposed to be at the symposium but cancelled at the last minute.
It would've been lovely to hear the three of them discussing Dylan together, can you imagine what Marcus would've said after hearing Ricks & Wilentz call Self-Portrait a lovely album?

Here's another clue for you via Ron Rosenbaum:
I'd argued that Dylan and his impact had been misconstrued by most Dylanologists; that he should not be situated with rustic pastorals or popular-front folkies, but with the urban, mostly Jewish, mostly literary "black humor" movement of the 60s, which ranged across genres, from Lenny Bruce to Bruce Jay Friedman, Joseph Heller to Stanley Kubrick. A movement whose absurdist nihilism—which reaches a viciously eloquent peak in Yossarian's denunciation of God in Catch-22—was a response to two holocausts: Hitler's, still only 15 years past, and the nuclear holocaust that seemed—especially after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis—just a shot away.
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Naked- ... rd/131428/

I hope the book he's writing is good, I don't think anyone's ever tied Dylan to Lenny Bruce and Joseph Heller before. And Dylan and the Holocaust? dang

Lots of hope for the Ron Rosenbaum project. Some years ago he wrote a book called "Explaining Hitler: The Search For the Origins of His Evil" that consisted of Rosenbaum's interviews with numerous 'experts' on Hitler. A tremendous book on many levels. His choice of interviewees was outstanding and he was very deft at getting people to state and support their hypotheses on Hitler's character and then allow them to muck themselves up. The interview with the great film maker Claude Lanzmann becomes appalling when the reader realizes that Lanzmann cannot tolerate any difference of opinion in his arrogant presumed ownership of the Holocaust. Others interviewed included battling Hitler biographers Hugh Trevor Roper (Hitler: delusional and deeply believing his demonic rhetoric) and Alan J. Bullock (Hitler: shrewd, cynical politician who knew which buttons to push), loathsome Hitler apologist David Irving, melodramatic critic/novelist George Steiner, and more. Rosenbaum's technique leaves the reader astonished at how many different "Hitlers" exist in the minds of the scholars. Can't possibly all be the same guy! Rumor is that Rosenbaum conceived the book in response to Don Delillo's riff on the "Department of Hitler Studies" in his novel White Noise. A very entertaining book proving that trying to "define" Hitler often brings out the worst in people.

I can't imagine what Rosenbaum will do with Dylan but if it's as fascinating as "Explaining Hitler", that will really be something.

There are as many different Dylans as there are fans!

Who is lambchop?

A great late Dylan fan from the UK who used to give loud and enthusiastic shout-outs to Bob between songs.... Bob acknowledged him a few times.

From the ER Bob Dylan Who's Who:

Who is Lambchop and how does he/she get all his/her Dylan Tickets?

If you own Staying Here With You or Critic's Choice vols 1+2, you'll hear
someone in the audience shouting "They don't deserve it! They don't x
deserve it! Anything you want, Bob! Play it Bobby!" (Quoted from memory,
but pretty accurate.) Lambchop has, I've read, attended every Dylan UK show
and most European shows since 1978.

He usually sits in the middle of the front row, using any means he can to
get the ticket. A few years ago, Sony reserved the first few rows for
"entertainment" purposes and Lambchop was in danger of not getting his
usual seat. However, frantic phoning around got him the names of some of
the ticket holders and he managed to exchange tickets. Therefore, we had
Lambchop sitting amidst a few rows of Sony executives and guests. The
lights go down and everybody rises to applaude as Dylan takes the stage.
Everyone, that is, except the Sony execs. A careful listen to Critics
Choice will reveal Lambchop's unforgettable bellowing: "Stand up! Stand up!
You stand up in church; you stand up for Bob!"

Lambchop once observed (again quoted from memory, but it's working well
this morning): "Bob would probably be very scared to be in the same room as
me, and I don't blame him. Actually, though, I'm quite harmless."

He was found dead in his flat, June 13, 2007.

The interesting arguments here have not convinced me that Dylan is doing the right thing.

(I did ask for example of T.S. Eliot quoting whole lines from contemporary poets, and I was instead given examples of Edmund Spencer and Dante... not exactly Eliot's contemporaries.)

I also take issue with the example that old guys like Leadbelly didn't give all their sources for songs or borrowed ideas. I mean, are we really going to compare 50-minute recording of laborers in Mississippi in the 1940s with a rich, wealthy, rock star on Columbia records having the Internet and the world's best lawyers at his fingertips in 2012? Not quite the same thing.

Back in the 1930s (and even up to Dylan in the early 1960s), I would suggest that there was little capital value on copyright of songs, and very little knowledge of what song royalties and publishing was. I mean, even the world's biggest act in the 1960s (The Beatles) had no idea what publishing was until after they'd been fleeced. Folk artists laying down their live set on a reel-to-reel in someone's basement in 1937 can hardly have been expected to demand detailed lists of their sources, or to have expected that anyone would care more than a few weeks later.

Then, some of you concede that borrowing a few lines here or there is okay, but borrowing the arrangement of an entire song is not. Okay, but that means there is certainly a grey area between what is "okay" and what isn't. And who gets to decide?

To re-iterate: I am not arsed about the money aspect or the legalities of it, which are certainly trivial (and I agree that originality is over-rated). But Dylan is in a privileged position from which to choose if he mentions his sources or not, and he consistently is choosing not to, despite "borrowing" far more than most people are comfortable with.

I don't think he deserves the electric chair, but I do think he's doing the wrong thing.

In your previous post you wrote:

Can you give an example of Eliot (note the one 'l') citing another poet, or a contemporary poet, in one of his poems, word-for-word?

And people gave you exactly what you asked for. Examples of Eliot citing other poets.

Re the copyright thing and the folk industry, I think you miss a few points about how the industry worked in the 1920s and beyond.
Copyrighting songs was a huge asset, ideally the only source of income artists and executives had. Singers were usually paid per track, or per record side, and they did not get any royalties out of the recordings. They could earn publishing royalties and so there was usually a rush to copyright the song even though (and even when) it was a traditional, or they had learnt it from another source. For many people, income came from sheet music.
The issue of copyright was so central that collectors and performers went on collecting trips just to learn songs they would later copyright, which cause a stir in the folk movement because this practice lasted until the 1950s (Moses Asch did it practically all the time). Other - notorious - examples were the Lomaxes and AP Carter of the Carter Family.
The recording of old-time music (hillbilly, country blues, appalachian ballads, etc) was a full fledged industry characterized by high professionalism and market practices, as most histories of the folk movement in America clearly show (Cantwell, Filene, and Cohen, among others). My late friend Richard Peterson wrote an illuminating book on these practices in the country music field, and much of the same things were going on all the time in the folk scene.

@panther
I think the problem with naming sources on the releases, be it albums or books or whatever, is that once the information is public, the money aspect comes in automatically. Not everything he uses is out of copyright. People on here have objected to anyone having to pay royalties, fees etc to copyright holders who aren't the writers / composers etc of the works in question. If he took a Buddy Holly line, he'd be paying Paul McCartney, if he took a Beatles line, he'd be paying the Michael Jackson estate. Maybe he's not into that, but that's speculation.

Well, okay, but if Dylan were singing lines only from Shakespeare or Robert Herrick, I highly doubt any of these plagiarism threads would have started. At the same time, if Joan Baez's new album had her self-penned songs, and even one of them dared lift a Dylan line (without songwriting credit), you can bet there'd be an orgy of bitch-slapping on ER.

I have no idea how the industry worked in the 20s, and I'm sure you know more about it than I do. However, that wasn't my point. I was asked why Dylan gets pegged as a plagiarist and people like Leadbelly don't, and I gave my opinion.

Copyrighting songs was no doubt a lucrative endeavour for people in Tin Pan Alley and with offices in New York City in the 20s -- that doesn't mean field hands in Mississippi knew about this.

Not sure how I contribute with this
but anyway

I am thinking now about simultaneous inventions. It is not a coincidence that something that waited so long for being invented is suddenly "discovered" in several different isolated-between parts of the world around the same time.

ah I've just found it has a name: Multiple discovery

The concept of multiple discovery is the hypothesis that most scientific discoveries and inventions are made independently and more or less simultaneously by multiple scientists and inventors. The concept of multiple discovery opposes a traditional view—the "heroic theory" of invention and discovery.



Maybe labelling it as plagiarism is a reaction against those who call Bob a genius - "heroic individual"

back then it was ALL about the publishing.
you ever heard of song pluggers.
ralph peer kept all the copyrights.

you dont have to go as far back. how about the brill building? how about american idol? dont think the peeps at the american idol write their material, its probably written for them a priori.

there was nowhere to pegg leadbelly. no blogs, no computer. no rolling stone.
i dont know what does it matter if the field hands knew or not. if bob issues songs with no copyright, then sony keeps the mechanicals, and bmi will not pay anyone theyll get free money.

I'm not going to waste my own or anyone else's time by paraphrasing the Forum Terms of Use here.

I will assume everyone is aware of them and will bear them in mind when posting.

bob annihilated tin pan alley.

Your musicians that made commercial race records and things back then were usually just paid a flat fee, on the spot, like 30 bucks a side (song.) Over and done, wasn't any more minding about it.

I have just read about a character called Damiano who claims Dylan has his catalogue and has been usning this to write songs for the last 30 years. Any truth in this?