things twice

Dylan dazzles | The San Diego Union-Tribune

From the article:
When questioned how Dylan could take credit for a song first recorded in the late 1920s, Dylan’s publicist responded that “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” is in the public domain. While this may be true, for Dylan to not give just due here is spurious.
How true.

I’ve mentioned it before: I don’t mind Dylan lifting lines from Timrod. I do mind his uncredited appropriations of entire pieces of music, but little snippets of text here and there — that’s a completely different matter.

In all the many discussions and opinions about this matter, two areas have been mentioned with some frequency, either in order to emphasise the offense, or to diminish it. In each their way, they add some interesting twists to the case, although they don’t change my verdict concerning the musical theft.
Academic borrowing
One of the references is to the academic world. The argument goes that if something like this had happened there, Dylan would have been sent home with an F and a relegation.

I would argue against this, although in some cases he comes close.

The question is not so much: “Is this a good Dylan album?” – which it is – as “Is this a Dylan album?” – which it isn’t.

First the lyrics: as Scott Warmuth has discovered, through an ingenious google investigation, several lines of lyrics are lifted from the works of the “Poet Laureate of the Confederacy” Henry Timrod in much the same way as Yunichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza unwittingly contributed to “Love and Theft”. This has caused considerable reactions, in far wider circles than usual.

So, is Dylan a thieving scoundrel and a plagiarist, or a genius who transforms what he reads into new gems?

I’ve been living abroad since I was 20 — the very term ‘abroad’ doesn’t even make much sense anymore; I consider myself a Swede from Norway, being truly at home in Denmark (and spending most of my days in an international world of the Internet, TV, and music). Without going into detail, there may be reasons other than the practical and circumstantial (and, as some Swedes will doubtlessly say: the obvious) why I’ve left Norway and have no immediate plans of returning.

When I watch Norwegian TV, most of the names don’t mean anything to me, some of the faces are apparently world-famous celebrities. So they say. It’s mostly a channel I flip past on the way to BBC …

For various reasons, I’ve put my Dylan-oriented writings together to a book. It is available for download at http://www.dylanchords.com/tt.pdf (2 Mb).
The main reason I have done this has nothing to do with Dylan, but more with Seal: it’s an experiment in LaTeX, inspired by the wonders of this typesetting environment, gradually revealed to me through Seal, which gave me the urge to try it out myself.
Another reason is the long period of inactivity here. I guess I felt that something needed to happen.
The third reason, and the most direct one, is the Lonnie series, which I thought I had brought to a conclusion. As it happened, I still had more to say. I have extended it with a practical …

… and it wasn’t even a dead-end street.
Happy anniversary!

I just heard some of the Theme Time radio shows. Damn, this is almost better than Chronicles! I’m delighted to see that he’s actually doing what I suggested a few posts back – play the stuff that he likes…
Theme Time is exactly that: a selection of favorite songs, interspersed with hilarious, deadpan comments, interesting insights, floating in and out of quotation and commentary, the way he does it on the sleeve notes to World Gone Wrong and, in a different way, all through `Love and Theft’. Way to go, Bobby!
I explicitly suggested Charles Aznavour, and, well… here’s what Dylan says about Charles: “He’s written over a thousand songs. I only know half of them.”

[This post concludes the series about Dylan's idea of "mathematical music" in Chronicles]

When Dylan talks freely, he can be very eloquent, and one feels one is snapping at the heels of pure genius. But once he starts giving examples, it all sounds quote mundane, and very banal, and one is left thinking “Was that it?!”
And of course it wasn’t — one realizes that some people are better poets than teachers.

Let this be the introduction to this last installment in the Lonnie-series, where the shroud of doubt is lifted and everything is explained:

* * *

Today’s lesson is from I Chronicles, Ch. 4

In a diatonic scale there are eight …

As I mention on the front page, whatever efforts I have made to make a deal with someone in the position to do so, and to find a legitimate and permanent solution to the copyright issues surrounding a tab site like this, have failed, and dylanchords has now gone officially and openly underground.
As I also say, that doesn’t mean that all is over – on the contrary: this is where it begins, sort of. dylanchords.nfshost.com and dylanchords.brokenbricks.com are now available, as officially approved underground-mirror sites. They are not mirrors in the technical sense, and may thus not be completely identical, but we will try our best to keep them both updated. My sincerest thanks to the …