Bob Dylan's Life Work Being Scrutinized

Bob Dylan’s Life Work Being Scrutinized 

For the last five and a half decades Bob Dylan has been touted as a cultural phenomenon unparalleled to anyone. Within English speaking countries the word culture has long been synonymous with the name Bob Dylan.

There are many interpretations of the definition of the word culture. One definition describes culture as “the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.”

When referencing this definition with regard to the public’s perception of Bob Dylan, we learn that Bob Dylan is the most revered celebrity on the planet by the intellectual community. Dylan is the most quoted and chronicled celebrity of our time. It is that chronicling that establishes him as the most revered.
Hailed as a prophet by the mainstream media and praised by the Beatles as being an idol Dylan secures the top spot in the genre of respect.

No other celebrity has been afforded the amount of adoration. College professors, actors, playwrights, editors, critics, reporters, producers and columnist all hail Bob Dylan as the pinnacle of intellectualism.

When examining the reasons Dylan is so revered one must consider his position. Being a songwriter positions Dylan as a creator of original thought.
It is this position that affords Dylan the great mantel of respect.

Throughout Dylan’s fifty year cultivation of his mysterious subliminal persona there have been many secrets. Some of these secrets were and still are covered up by the mainstream media. One of the most damning secret is that Bob Dylan does not write music. While being interviewed by Robert Hilburn of the L.A. Times Dylan stated:

“Well you have to understand that I’m not a melodist. My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or Carter Family songs. What happens is, I’LL take a song and simply start playing it in my head.

That’s the way I meditate.” “I wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ in 10 minutes, just put words to an old spiritual, probably something I learned from Carter Family records. ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’ is probably from an old Scottish folk Song.” “I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly, while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.”…….Bob Dylan

At first glance it appears that Dylan is being forthright by appearing to be honest about his song writing process which is actually a major form of plagiarism.

A second glance tells us that the date of the interview was Aug. 4, 2004.
After a study of Bob Dylan’s melodies it was learned that a great percentage of Dylan’s melodies were actually from preexisting melodies in which no credit had been given to the original author of the melody. 

We know this by reviewing the actual label on the record that states written by Bob Dylan. For example it is uncontested common knowledge now that the melody line to “Like A Rolling Stone” was actually the melody line to an old anti slavery song titled “No More Auction Block”. 

Dylan simply discarded the words to the old song and replaced them with his own words. The label to the record states that the song was written by Bob Dylan. There is no mention of the original author anywhere on the label or the album covers liner notes.

Dylan would have gotten away with this nefariousness had it not been for the internet. When the internet hit people started scrutinizing the origins of his songs. Feeling betrayed his fans started posting the similarities one by one until an avalanche of damning evidence was common knowledge.

After forty five years of profiting from royalties on stolen melodies it was this phenomena that persuaded Dylan to come out and admit the truth. After careful crafting a statement he scheduled an interview and released his statement which included the statement that he is not a melodist.

Rolling Stone magazine actually published an article “Dylan’s Greatest Thefts”
For decades Dylan simply credited himself on the entire song and mislead the public to believe that he had written the entire song including the music which he had not written. In some instances Dylan stole music and lyrics verbatim.
For decades Dylan’s song writing process was a nice big fat cash cow bringing in an enormous amount of money. All in all he had been accused of plagiarism in more than two hundred incidences.

When Dylan’s music plagiarism issue started getting a substantial amount of publicity he released a series of paintings in which he blatantly plagiarized another authors work as a diversion to the plagiarism issue. The painting plagiarism issue would fill the Google searches. He apparently thought it would look better to his fans to be accused of plagiarizing paintings instead of songs.

Rolling Stone magazine stated:

The paintings in Bob Dylan‘s “The Asia Series,” which are currently on display at the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan, have come under fire for their resemblance to widely available pre-existing photographs. The series of paintings, which are said to part of a “visual journal” made by the singer during his travels through Japan, China, Vietnam and Korea, have been compared to famous photos by well-known photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Léon Busy.

“The most striking thing is that Dylan has not merely used a photograph to inspire a painting: he has taken the photographer’s shot composition and copied it exactly,” wrote Dylan critic Michael Gray in a post on his blog, Bob Dylan Encyclopedia. “He’s replicated everything as closely as possible. That may be a (very self-enriching) game he’s playing with his followers, but it’s not a very imaginative approach to painting. 

Critics Started Taking Notice of Dylan’s Plagiarisms “Bob Dylan appears to have crossed a line and has resorted to plagiarism.” …..Alexander T. Deley

To Catch a Master Thief by Alexander T. Deley / December 12th, 2013 

A tired adage states that: “talent borrows but genius steals.” This has certainly been true of the folk tradition in which homage and the borrowing of ideas has always been an integral part. Folk musicians – most notably Bob Dylan, have always sprinkled their work takings from the tradition, giving their work added depth and imbuing it with a sense of timelessness. 

Dylan’s work has varied in quality and in subject matter over-time, but has remained firmly rooted within this folk tradition, borrowing the odd-melody here or phrase there, but often creating new work, within new contexts that has often amounted to more than the sum of its parts. Somewhere along the line, and most evident in his album Modern Times and his memoir Chronicles Vol. 1, Bob Dylan appears to have crossed a line and has resorted to plagiarism.
It can be said that the work of a great artist should be beyond seemingly petty nit-picking, however, when the work of a great artist is no longer truly his own, does that person ceases to be a great artist? It can be argued that what Dylan is now doing – namely the naked theft of the work of others – has reduced him in stature.

Intellectual and artistic honesty remain some of the most important features within a free society. It is taken as natural that someone should be recognized for the excellence of their work and reap whatever benefits producing said work rewards. Similarly, the naked theft of the work of others, in whole or in part, is to be scorned. It is dishonest in that it represents not only intellectual dishonesty, but also intellectual laziness.

Genuine insight and especially the sort of word-craft that alight the senses are difficult to produce with regularity and require not only-talent, but continual work and refinement of craft. It, in the end, plagiarism is so immoral because it is a form of cheating – hence the vitriol and anger normally directed towards plagiarists upon the discovery of their malfeasance. We all like to think that when someone produces a piece of work, it is their ideas – or at least their perceptions or spin on ideas – that are being represented. Plagiarism’s vulgarity stems from the idea that, in accepting work falsely passed off as one’s own, it challenges our collective integrity.

The brilliance of much of Dylan’s early work is beyond dispute – here was someone who was able to make-up for his utter lack of musicianship through brilliance as a word-smith and managed to root his lyrics deeply in a tradition that added delicious context to his work. Albums such as Bringing It All Back Home and later, Blood on the Tracks featured brilliant manipulation of folk traditions to produce songs of strong social and personal resonance. He was also a sharp social critic, pointing towards the ills of society in the finest folk tradition with songs such as “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol” and “Hurricane”. His mastery of word-play was absolute and hinted towards numerous literary and poetic traditions more so than towards musical ones. His songs spoke to both the spirit of the times and Dylan (and the artistic persona he created for himself).

Dylan’s tendency towards self-mythology further strengthened his work by casting him as all the more part of a grand tradition. He became a voice of the ages, not simply of a generation. This bred obsessive, often humorless followers who hung upon Dylan’s every word.

Despite this, his muse burned bright, and even his self-consciously ‘bad’ albums, notably – to throw the obsessive’s off the scent – including the much reviled Self-Portrait brimmed with ideas and intelligence. 

Sometime in the late 70s or early 80s – while Dylan was at the height of a drunken depression that eventually saw him ‘save’ himself by becoming a ‘born-again’ Christian, and eventual seeming acquiescent return to Judaism, his muse seems to have dried up. Throughout the 80s and early 90s, Dylan produced a series of poorly received records bearing little resemblance to his old work.

The music he produced on albums such as Infidels and Saved included everything from inane Zionist propaganda (“Neighborhood Bully”) to simplistic retellings of Biblical creation stories (“God Gave Names To All The Animals”). 

While this period saw the odd splash of the old genius (notably the moving “Dark Eyes” on the not so moving Empire Burlesque and the funny though admittedly 80s sounding “Brownsville Girl” on Knocked Out Loaded –considered by many to be Dylan’s worst record) something appeared to be missing.

Dylan appears to have briefly experimented with writing ‘list songs’, where a theme is repeated down a list (i.e. “Everything’s Broken” and “Most of the Time”) to some affect on 1989’s Oh Mercy, which received positive reviews and was heralded as something of a come-back, but this gimmick had already begun to wear thin on 1990’s Under the Red Sky, which was critically savaged. Dylan then defied many of his critics by recording two solo albums in rapid succession of old folk and blues standards.

Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong were remarkable in that they seemed to show Dylan both re-immersing himself in the material that had inspired him in the early 60s, but also in that his musicianship on the albums appeared to be far more impressive than anything he had previously, or would thereafter, produce. 

This was followed-up by 1997’s intelligent, though slightly morbid – especially in light of Dylan’s subsequent near-fatal heart infection that he was treated for around the time the album came out – Time Out of Mind.

Dylan remained inactive until 2001 when he released “Love and Theft”- considered by many to be the best album Dylan had produced in decades and receiving a Five-Star review in Rolling Stone, the first of which the magazine had awarded in over a decade. The album’s September 11th release date further cemented the importance of the album as many of Dylan’s lyrics on the record– largely about loss and renewal – seemed to speak to the immediacy of the tragedy.

“Love and Theft” was also notable as being the first of Dylan’s albums in some time where clear literary-lifting was identified. The New York Times1 and San Francisco Chronicle identified several lines that Dylan had taken verbatim from the English language translation of Dr. Junichi Saga’s 1991 Japanese gangster memoir, Confessions of a Yakuza. These lines included: “my old man was like some kind of feudal lord”, “why don’t you shove off if it bothers you so much”, “my uncle did a lot of nice things for me and I won’t forget him”, and “What’s the use if you can’t stand up to some old businessman?”. 

While the New York Times article argued that what Dylan did was closer to “cultural collage” than to plagiarism the publication asked more questions with the release of 2006’s Modern Times.

Modern Times was notable in that it saw Dylan make considerable use of the poems of Confederate Poet Henry Timrod as lyrical fodder. Many of Dylan’s lyrical constructions and exact phrasings were shown to be direct borrows from Timrod, as well as from other sources including the Ovid. Further, the songs seemed to lack focus and felt as though they were simply assembled from snippets of various sources rather than carrying the crisper narratives that characterized Dylan’s earlier work.

The liner notes carried no notation or footnotes on sources. Indeed, the songs were credited as “Words and music by Bob Dylan” a point that was particularly glaring as almost every single song on the album was a reworking of an old blues, jazz or R & B number. For example, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” was little more than the addendum of some new lyrics to the Muddy Waters’ arrangement of the blues standard of the same name, “Beyond the Horizon” was identical musically and similar lyrically to “Red Sails In The Sunset”, “When the Deal Goes Down” was musically identical to the Bing Crosby hit “Where The Blue of the Night (Meets The Gold Of The Day)”, “Thunder on the Mountain” and “When the Levee Breaks” were borrowed Memphis Minnie numbers, “Ain’t Talkin’” a remake of the Stanley Brothers song “River of Regret” and so on.

While some of this can be thought of Dylan’s use of the folk tradition, the decision to credit the songs both lyrically and musically to himself is telling. In light of Dylan’s satellite radio program, it is strange that Dylan would not opt to credit this music to its writers, some of whom are still alive if not living in obscurity and likely could stand to earn royalties from their work following it’s reuse.

More telling however, is Dylan’s outright theft of material in writing his memoir Chronicles. The book appears to be a cleverly written account of various points in Dylan’s life, including his initial arrival on the Greenwich Village folk circuit circa 1961, where he would go on to become a fixture and shortly thereafter make his name to his time in New Orleans in the late 80s when he recorded Oh Mercy.

Critics were unanimous in praising Dylan for his recapturing much of the feel of the era as well as his clever turns of phrase. The problem was, many of these turns of phrase were pilfered from sources as diverse as the March 31, 1961 issue of Time magazine to novels by Jack London, Sax Roehmer and R.L. Stevenson among others.

Much of this information was turned up by posters on Bob Dylan fan forums rather than through mainstream media sources. The discovery of the below quoted passages from Time should all be attributed to Scott Warmuth posting as ‘scottw’ on the Expecting Rain forum, who was able to find them through the use of Google books.

While Warmuth turned up a multitude of passages in Time that were re-used, with minor changes in Chronicles. Warmuth has written himself about many of these uncovered passages and Dylan’s method of work, noting in his piece “Bob Charlatan: Deconstructing Dylan’s Chronicles Volume 1” published in the New Haven Review. Sometimes what Dylan has done with material from other sources is witty, crafty, and sly. Other times it’s just sloppy. For instance, he works in some delicate touches where he recalls his meeting with the poet Archibald MacLeish, incorporating phrases from MacLeish’s poem “Conquistador.” In the same passage, though, many remarks that Dylan claims MacLeish made in conversation are lifted from MacLeish’s introduction to The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, where Sandburg’s own “Notes for a Preface” also appears.

Dylan seems to have conflated the two, perhaps flipping pages and not realizing that MacLeish’s words have ended and Sandburg’s have begun, with the result that the “conversation” with MacLeish becomes a bizarre mix of the voices of both MacLeish and Sandburg. In identifying Dylan’s tendency throughout the book and then rewrite these stories as anecdotes about himself he further notes:

Of Johnny Cash, for example, Dylan writes, “Johnny didn’t have a piercing yell, but ten thousand years of culture fell from him. He could have been a cave dweller. He sounds like he’s at the edge of the fire, or in the deep snow, or in a ghostly forest, the coolness of conscious obvious strength, full tilt and vibrant with danger.” Almost every word there comes from London’s story “The Son of the Wolf,” cut, pasted, recast.

Warmuth eventually concludes that what is interesting about Chronicles is the huge volume of code seemingly within the book – the ‘invisible second book beneath its surface and how Dylan uses this multitude of pilfered influences to create a new persona for himself, and has come to view Dylan’s borrowings as enriching to the overall work.

While Dylan is a trickster and much of his persona is quite contrived from external sources, this use of material appears to go well beyond the norms of borrowing or trickery. 

Indeed, there is a notion of fair-use, however, many of the contexts used by Dylan are identical to those in the original use for which Dylan has borrowed and he goes further in failing to provide any footnotes, notation or any reference to the borrowed materials anywhere in Chronicles.

This then, is a quite sophisticated form of plagiarism in which Dylan actively relied most heavily on obscure materials most likely to avoid being caught. This leads credence to Warmuth’s cryptography theory. 

With the hundreds of passages already noted as lifted, it is hard to say how much of the book Dylan actually wrote. Dylan’s self mythology has always involved the appropriation of the mythologies of others, however, in this case, he appears to have done so with minimal refinement, simply taking the printed anecdotes and passages of others and applying them to himself. While this is, in many ways brilliant in some way, it fails to answer the question as to whether it is ethical. 

Many will argue that as a product of the folk tradition, these distinctions should not trouble Dylan. Of the folk tradition, half the reason it works the way it does, with musicians actively borrowing from one another is because everyone, within the context of a folk scene, is familiar with the same body of work, and thus would be able to recognize ‘borrowed’ material is done so with a nod and a wink. Secondly, social change, rather than commercial remuneration was clearly the reason for many folk songs and thus copyright becomes immaterial.

With the Dylan of present, neither of these are the case. Dylan’s audience is overwhelmingly composed of baby-boomers, reared on rock music and who are unlikely to know many of the songs that Dylan is pilfering. This can be taken even farther with the memoir, in which very few people are capable of remembering the passages borrowed, and no one is expected to remember the contents of antiquated issues of Time magazines. Bob Dylan also does not simply represent ‘Bob Dylan’ rather he represents a multimillion-dollar empire. The economics of each new release are likely closely considered and Dylan has not been politically active for decades. Thus, his plagiarism involves him profiting enormously from the work of others.

Further, the argument that Dylan does not comprehend copyright, intellectual property or is somehow beyond that is also specious. Dylan has himself been ruthless in pursuing his own copyright claims.

After filing and winning a plagiarism suit against Rod Stewart over Forever Young he famously sued the group Hootie and the Blowfish for their use of the phrase “Tangled up in Blue” and some lines from the song “Idiot Wind” in their song “Only Want To Be With You” – despite the Blowfish song being clearly written as a tribute to Dylan, stating: “Put on a little Dylan” immediately before delivering the offending lines. The eventual settlement was said to run to several million dollars in Dylan’s favor. These lawsuits may have been Dylan’s attempt to cover up his massive and still current law suit with songwriter James Damiano.

Dylan is also no stranger to controversy regarding his work. An 11-year, still-unresolved lawsuit filed against him by songwriter James Damiano is particularly telling.

Damiano alleges and for the most part has proven through depositions that Dylan, quite ironically given the title, plagiarized the song “Dignity” from Damiano. Damiano had repeatedly met Dylan and submitted songs to Dylan’s parent label CBS. This is especially telling as “Dignity” was Dylan’s only ‘hit’ record of the 1990s and seems quite different from much of Dylan’s earlier work or other work that he was producing during that period. 

The direct song lyric comparisons given in the case appear to hold to Damiano’s version of events. Perhaps a strong precedent is the case of disgraced historian Stephen Ambrose. Ambrose was found to have placed quotation marks in his book about World War II airmen, The Wild Blue, identically to passages in Thomas Childers Wings of Morning. The misuse of quotations was repeated throughout the work. While in this case, Ambrose’s citation was correct, it was his failure to acknowledge the second hand source from which he had gleaned the material that led to allegations, (arguably rightfully) of plagiarism. 

With Bob Dylan, this is not even the case. Dylan does not acknowledge any of the multitudes of materials. This is also similar to the recent case of (then) Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan who in 2006 had been found to plagiarize several passages in her debut novel with only minor variations. In both cases, the accused writer was publicly disgraced and in the case of Ambrose, questions were posed about much of his previous work (which unearthed that he had falsified most of the first hand sources that composed his Eisenhower biography).

Whether one feels that Dylan is guilty of plagiarism or of some sort of clever game of literary cryptography, it remains difficult to let his work stand sans correct citation or notation. Moreover, Dylan’s willingness to enforce his copyright in cases where he feels his work has been infringed upon, and his attempts to conceal his use of external passages indicates that he is well aware of what he is doing.

While crafting a literary memoir rarely requires accuracy of memory; Robert Graves, Vladimir Nabokov, Salvador Dali and others have all crafted memoirs that are clearly as literary as factual, the distinction has been that they all did so using words and imaginings that are firmly their own. One is left to wonder, with Dylan, not only whether what he has done is fair, but whether it is worthy of his own legacy.

“Plagiarism in Dylan, Or a Cultural Collage?”. Jon Pareles, New York Times, July 12, 2003. “Who’s This Guy Dylan Who’s Borrowing Lines From Henry Timrod?”. Motoko Rich, New York Times, September 12, 2006. 

“Many Lines in Chronicles are from Time Magazine”. Scott Warmuth, Expecting Rain, March 11, 2005. “More Dylan Thefts”. Edward Cook, Ralph, The Sacred River, September 27th, 2006. “Bob Charlatan: Deconstructing Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One”. Scott Warmuth, New Haven Review, January, 2008, pp. 70-83.

This article was posted on Thursday, December 12th, 2013 at 6:30am and is filed under General, Music. More damning evidence of plagiarism surfaced when a hand written Bob Dylan poem was being auctioned off at Christies and someone realized that the poem had been written by someone else. The article reads below; Dylan “poem” on sale was actually Hank Snow song.

Daniel Trotta

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A “poem” purportedly written by a teenage Bob Dylan and up for auction at Christie’s is actually a song written by the late Canadian country singer Hank Snow, the auction house said on Wednesday. A hand-written poem believed at the time to be by a teenaged Bob Dylan and signed Bobby Zimmerman is seen in this undated handout photo from Christie’s Auction House May 19, 2009. REUTERS

Christie’s announced on Tuesday the sale of the hand-written poem believed to have been written in 1957 when Dylan was 16 and away at Jewish camp.
Christie’s failed to detect that the words, with a few minor variations, matched those of a song previously recorded by Snow, who died in 1999 at age 85. Reuters discovered the lyrics matched the Snow song when alerted by a reader. Reuters then informed the auction house.

“Additional information has come to our attention about the handwritten poem submitted by Bob Dylan to his camp newspaper, written when he was 16, entitled ‘Little Buddy.’ The words are in fact a revised version of lyrics of a Hank Snow song,” Christie’s said in a statement.

“This still remains among the earliest known handwritten lyrics of Bob Dylan and Christie’s is pleased to offer them in our Pop Culture auction on June 23.”
The manuscript had been expected to fetch $10,000 to $15,000.

Christie’s said Dylan, still using his given name Robert Zimmerman, signed the piece Bobby Zimmerman and submitted it to the Herzl Camp newspaper. The editor of the paper kept it for more than 50 years and recently donated it to Herzl Camp, a Jewish camp in Wisconsin, Christie’s said.

In a whole separate lawsuit Dylan took a stay (leave of court) of court during the Damiano litigation to fight the production of a recording of an interview he gave to associated press reporter Katheryn Baker where he stated that “He did not have enough songs that he wanted to put on an album”.

Julie Levine wrote ” Lo and Behold” DOES TOLERATED USE GIVE AN INCENTIVE TO PLAGIARIZE? AN EXAMPLE THROUGH THE MUSIC OF BOB DYLAN. The Cardozo Entertainment Law Review

Additionally, ruling that a qualified reporter’s privilege existed regarding an interview Dylan gave where he claimed he had writer’s block demonstrates the willingness of courts to protect the big name musician instead of the original composer, thereby endorsing a minor form of plagiarism.

However, protecting Bob Dylan in this one instance may differ in a case where the musician is not well known or does not have a reputation of borrowing from other musicians since the beginning of his career. Indeed, Bob Dylan disclaiming he has writer’s block can give rise to an inference for a reasonable jury to believe that it is more likely that he copied Damiano’s song if the jury heard that he had writer’s block, as compared to the jury not hearing that he had writer’s block. 

Therefore, by deeming the requested evidence in the motion to compel irrelevant, it is not clear whether or not Bob Dylan did in fact plagiarize James Damiano’s song or was merely influenced by his music.

Hence, if Damiano’s musicologist’s theory had been presented to the court and was believed as true, it is very possible that Bob Dylan plagiarized James Damiano’s song.

On the other hand, if a contrary theory was presented, one that does not involve the Schenker analysis, it is possible that Bob Dylan was only influenced by Damiano’s song and used that influence to write Dignity, not to copy Steel Guitars as his own.

Nevertheless, it is still unclear whether the court endorsed Bob Dylan’s potential plagiarism because of whom he was or if the court was willing to turn a blind eye to the alleged plagiarism.

This court’s behavior further demonstrates how a court tolerating the use of another’s song may give an incentive to plagiarize. If a court is willing to dismiss a motion to compel discovery that could prove plagiarism, a court may very well do the same for another musician, even if he or she is not as well known as Bob Dylan.

The Motive

It was revealed in a Bob Dylan interview with Kathryn Baker In the late 80′s that Dylan was experiencing writer’s block when Ms. Baker published in her article the following statement “he (Bob Dylan) didn’t have enough material of his own for an album” During this exact same period a songwriter named James Damiano had been working on material with Dylan’s producer’s and publishers at CBS in New York. At the time it was a seven year association that actually continued for a total of eleven years. The association started in the later part of the 70′s. When deposed Ms.Baker testified:

Damiano’s attorney Mr. Kramer: Did you tape the conversation?

Ms. Baker: Yes there was a tape recorder and microphone on the table which he was aware of. 

Mr. Kramer: You then continue without quotes: “The other reason for the others is inevitable: He didn’t” that’s d-i-d-n-’t, as in did not “He didn’t have enough material of his own for an album.” Did Mr. Dylan say those words?

Ms. Baker “I went back in the transcript and I was paraphrasing him and that’s not entirely accurate. He said he didn’t have enough songs that he wanted to put on an album.”

This interview was given to Ms.Baker on August 5th 1988.

A paramount irony included in this twist is that Dylan’s media relations handler Elliot Mintz who had been in consistent contact with James Damiano for over four years was the only other person present at the interview which was given over dinner at a restaurant in Beverly Hills.

Mr. Mintz’s responsibility as a media relation’s liason between Dylan and the media was to read the article and approve it for media publication which he did approve and release for publication.

Mr. Mintz testifed under oath and on video that he was submitting Mr. Damiano’s materials to Bob Dylan. An article written by Jonny Whiteside explains:

FOLK LIES: Joni Mitchell Outs Bob Dylan
by Jonny Whiteside

Big Hollywood April 28, 2010

“Bob [Dylan] 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, Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2010 

Caterwauling Canuck “folk singer” Joni Mitchell got just about everybody riled up with that sweet morsel of self-serving insight, but the real shock is not that Mitchell is absolutely correct but that someone finally came out and said it. After decades of carefully manicured deification by Columbia Records, brain-dead rock critics and the slimy elite institution that elevated such barely able snake-oil salesmen as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger to celestial heights, it’s high time to flout indoctrination and examine Dylan’s track record as a Grade-A phony.

Most Dylan fans would be stunned to realize that his vocal style (for lack of a better term) was high-jacked, in its entirety, from long-dead bluegrass-country singer Carter Stanley. 

We’re not talking about an influence, like Lefty Frizzell for Merle Haggard, but a total appropriation of Stanley’s highly idiosyncratic approach. A counterfeit from the get-go, once Dylan realized what an advantage his audience’s innate ignorance was, he’s exploited it ever since. Just type “Bob Dylan plagiarism” into your friendly search engine, and a plethora of questionable circumstances pop up, en robing the singer almost as completely as his years of reflexive media fawning have.

Documented from his teenage start, when he submitted a hand written, thinly revised version of country star Hank Snow’s “Little Buddy” for publication as an original poem, to his 1963 pilferage of Irish poet Dominic Behan’s “Patriot Game”‘s melody for the similarly slanted Dylan tune “With God on Our Side” to songwriter James Damiano’s ongoing half a billion dollar copyright infringement suit (alleging Dylan’s Grammy-nominated “Dignity” is nothing but an altered version of Damiano’s “Steel Guitars”) to the naked “Red Sails in the Sunset” melody heist for the song “Beyond The Horizon” on his Modern Times album, up through the recent Confessions of a Yakuza-Love & Theft plagiarism charges (Love & Theft? Calling Dr. Freud!), the Timrod controversy, even the numerous passages of Proust and Jack London that (re) appear in the text of Dylan’s autobiography, it’s a deep, dark thicket of thoroughly damning and apparently chronic bootlegging. Naturally, Dylan has said nothing publicly about any of these, but he already spent over three million dollars defending himself against one-time affiliate Damiano – the classic delay-to-destroy court room technique.

Defenders and apologist have an extraordinary array of excuses on Zim’s behalf, from use of “literary allusion” to his building a “cultural collage,” or that his “borrowing” is “homage,” to the more deliciously desperate “he obviously doesn’t NEED to do it” (strangely, though, he always has). This instamatic, Clinton-ian excuse making serves only to further polish up the shine on Dylan’s teflon hubris and to underscore the blind, Pavlovian worship which he has long enjoyed. 

Let’s face it: as a lyricist, Dylan is crap, inarguably unworthy beside, say, Hank Cochran, Chuck Berry, Mickey Newbury or Jimi Hendrix (“All Along the Watchtower” plays as a lead balloon even for Hendrix, nearly deflating his Electric Ladyland masterpiece). 

While we’re endlessly told that “The pump don’t work / cause the vandals took the handle” is vintage Dylan worthy of class room study, in truth it’s little more than the wordy spew of a peripatetic rhyming dictionary who’ll hang any phrase together as long as it fits. Metaphor is convenience, not expression for Dylan. 

His songs have also treated women quite badly: the entire attitude of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” is ugly; “Just Like a Woman” is nothing short of misogynistic, but, worst of all, Dylan’s sheer verbosity has ineradicably stained American pop music, and we’ve all had to suffer through the post-Dylan legacy of long-winded nonsense (“American Pie,” anyone?).

The real tragedy is that none of these very well-documented and nigh irrefutable plagiarism charges will ever emerge from the shadows, as the Cult of Zimmerman’s hulking form casts a very, long one. Even when the Hank Snow rip-off stared the world in its face, the strongest reaction was a nervous giggle and murmurs of youthful indiscretion. 

To capitulate the carefully constructed myth of folk music and Dylan’s subsequent installation as rock & roll’s poet laureate is unthinkable, a hot, hit-the-panic-button nightmare for generations of quiescent “hipsters” never weaned from the million-selling Dylan teat. His socio-cultural mystique is also an industry-manufactured sham, one that very handily diverted attention away from genuine political stink-stirrers like the MC5 or the lysergic guerilla warfare of the 13th Floor Elevators. 

As a junta-backed counter-culture figurehead, Dylan is ideal: a harmless, unoriginal patsy, a cute insouciant whose relentlessly self-involved stance never threatened anyone, save for the hazard of the droning lip service endlessly paid him. We should all praise Joni Mitchell for this overdue call-out (just don’t ask us to listen to her records), but it’s unlikely that any in the Zim Cult will even consider the ramifications of her statement.

But when you pile it up with all the rest, there’s a single conclusion to be made: Bob Dylan is an artistic (and ethical) fraud, one whose own fear of creativity has long since given way to an apparently lifelong practice of emulating his superiors by vampirism, siphoning off their intellectual blood and using it to top off his own under-baked efforts. Weirdly, even then, the results have been scarcely palatable.

Damiano turned down a forty-five million dollar movie deal to be able to reserve the publishing rights to his lifes work. It’s an astonishing David and Golliath story that’s still in the making.

Uncontested By Bob Dylan 

As Per Court Documents It is publicly and judicially uncontested by Bob Dylan and or Bob Dylan’s law firm Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, Parcher Hayes & Snyder, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, Hecker Brown & Sherry including Mary Jo White, Steven Hayes, Jonathan Liebman, and Sony House counsel that Bob Dylan and people in Bob Dylan’s entourage have solicited songs and music writtem by James Damiano for a period of over ten years and eleven months.

After  many millions of dollars were spent on litigation the law suit produced thirty-five hours of video taped depositions incriminating to Dylan, blatant admissions of guilt by Dylan’s own witness’s, ten thousand pages of legal writings, eleven years of documents between Damiano and CBS Records, access of Plaintiff’s materials was accepted by and uncontested by defendants, and also established through Judge Simandle’s ruling, published newspaper articles, acknowledged by Dylan’s law firms, published law school articles and reviews acknowledged by Dylan’s law firms, no affidavit of denial by Bob Dylan as was the absence of a Bob Dylan deposition, one federal gag order and no counter, slander or libel claims James Damiano, who’s story “Bob Dylan’s Stealing of James Damiano’s Songs” has been published on the internet for over twenty two years, downloaded and produced to the court by Bob Dylan’s Lawyers and read by millions of people.

Few artists can lay claim to the controversy that has surrounded the career of songwriter James Damiano. Twenty-two years ago James Damiano began an odyssey that led him into a legal maelstrom with Bob Dylan that, to this day, fascinates the greatest of intellectual minds.

As the curtain rises on the stage of deceit we learn that CBS used songs and lyrics for international recording artist, Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan’s name is credited to the songs. One of those songs is nominated for a Grammy as best rock song of the year. Ironically the title of that song is Dignity. 

Since auditioning for the legendary CBS Record producer John Hammond, Sr., who influenced the careers of music industry icons Billy Holiday, Bob Dylan, Pete Seger, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Ray Vaughan, James has engaged in a half a billion dollar copyright infringement law-suit with Bob Dylan.

Damiano has recently complete a movie titled Eleven Years that cites side by side comparisons of many of Bob Dylan’s plagiarisms including Like A rolling Stone, Hard Rain, Shelter From The Storm, Bertha Lou, With God On Our Side and Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright.

To reiterate for the last five and a half decades Bob Dylan has been touted as a cultural phenomenon unparalleled to anyone the most revered “Celebrity” of out generation.
See Bob Dylan ‘s Stealing of James Damiano ‘s Songs 

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