Time Out of Mind: The Lives of Bob Dylan (72 page)

An old-fashioned husband behaving like a feudal lord: there’s a novel idea. If this was the best that could be managed to catch out Dylan, it was trivial stuff. Interestingly, those who seized on a handful of words also failed to mention their original use in Saga’s text. The words appear on the first page of a chapter entitled ‘Oyoshi’ and have nothing important to do with the verse in Dylan’s song.

My old man would sit there like a feudal lord, with his back to some fancy flower arrangement. The staff would be sitting in front of him, red-faced from bowing down till their foreheads touched the floor.
¹⁴

In his September 2012 interview with
Rolling Stone
, Dylan would explain and complain. ‘In folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition,’ he would say (while failing to deny the accusation of borrowing). ‘It’s true for everybody but me. There are different rules for me.’ The
Confessions of a Yakuza
controversy would blow over soon enough – Dr Saga enjoyed
‘Love and Theft’
and had no intention of suing – but Dylan was not yet off the hook.

*

When the
Modern Times
album appeared at the end of August 2006, any lingering doubts that he had restored his reputation and his career would be eradicated. Album number 32 would become his first since
Desire
30 years before to top the charts and his first in any era to go directly to the summit of
Billboard
’s rankings. A fortnight later, a story would appear in the
New York Times
.
¹⁵

‘Perhaps you’ve never heard of Henry Timrod, sometimes known as the poet laureate of the Confederacy,’ the article began. ‘But maybe you’ve heard his words, if you’re one of the 320,000 people so far who have bought Bob Dylan’s latest album,
Modern Times
.’ Under the headline ‘Who’s This Guy Dylan Who’s Borrowing Lines From Henry Timrod?’, the reporter, Motoko Rich, would then describe what seemed to be copious borrowing by Dylan from the works of a poet of whom, it was possible to guarantee, very few Americans had heard.

Walter Brian Cisco, a biographer of Timrod, would be brought in to pronounce that beyond doubt ‘there has been some borrowing going on’. Verses would be contrasted and compared; a brief account of Timrod’s life would be given. Born in 1828; private tutor on plantations before the Civil War; medically discharged by the Confederate Army because of tuberculosis; too frail to last as a war correspondent; editor of a South Carolina newspaper; occasional poet who took as his themes the war between the states and its effect on the South; dead at 39. Timrod managed only a single volume of posthumously published verse. The
New York Times
article would mention his ‘Ode Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, South Carolina 1866’ on the apparent grounds that it was one of only a couple of anthologised Timrod poems liable to be even half-familiar to a non-scholarly American reader. No cribbing by Dylan from those couple of works would be detected, however. Nevertheless, the contrast-and-compare exercise between his
Modern Times
songs and the versifier’s works would leave little doubt: Dylan had built parts of some songs with recycled masonry. For the benefit of those who knew no better, meanwhile, the
Times
would further explain that because Timrod was long dead and his works out of copyright, there was ‘no legal claim that could be made against Mr Dylan’.

In an undistinguished poem entitled ‘A Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night’, Timrod had written:

In his ‘Vision of Poesy’, meanwhile, the luckless Confederate bard had offered this:

Among other examples of borrowings from Timrod, part of Dylan’s
Modern Times
song ‘When the Deal Goes Down’ runs as follows:

The matter had come to the attention of the
Times
thanks to Scott Warmuth, described as ‘a disc jockey in Albuquerque and a former music director for WUSB, a public radio station in Stony Brook, on Long Island’. In the months and years to come, this keen student of the artist and his methods was to cause no small commotion among Dylan’s most dedicated fans and critics. In September 2006, after what the
Times
called his ‘judicious Google searches’, Warmuth agreed he had not been surprised by the fact that the singer had ‘leaned on a strong influence’. Quoted directly, Warmuth said: ‘I think that’s the way Bob Dylan has always written songs. It’s part of the folk process, even if you look from his first album until now.’ He had found ten echoes of Timrod in
Modern Times
, but did not question Dylan’s originality. In fact, Warmuth made an excellent point: ‘You could give the collected works of Henry Timrod to a bunch of people, but none of them are going to come up with Bob Dylan songs.’

Three days later, the
Times
invited the singer Suzanne Vega to cast an eye over the case. She argued, first, that it is ‘modern to use history as a kind of closet in which we can rummage around, pull influences from different eras, and make them into collages or pastiches. People are doing this with music all the time.’ Vega wondered, however, whether it was truly part of the ‘folk process’ to lift ‘a few specific metaphors or phrases whole from someone else’s work’. That was a proposition she couldn’t accept. Graciously, she doubted that Dylan had raided Timrod on purpose, speculating that the artist might be in possession of an eidetic memory – he doesn’t think so – or that he had immersed himself so completely in Civil War literature – a better bet – as to render the absorption of Timrod’s work unconscious. In any event, by one definition of the offence, Dylan seemed to be guilty as charged. One essential question remained to be answered. What of it?

In an article for the Poetry Foundation’s website published on 6 October, the poet Robert Polito, director of creative writing at the New School in New York, would respond almost despairingly to the ‘controversy’.
¹⁶
In his view, to reduce the connection between Dylan and Timrod to a ‘story of possible plagiarism is to confuse, well, art with a term paper’. After mentioning the advent of sampling in pop music, Polito pointed out that
Modern Times
also ‘taps into the Bible’ while revisiting the music and words of ‘Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Kokomo Arnold, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Stanley Brothers, Merle Haggard, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and standards popularised by Jeanette MacDonald, Bing Crosby, and Frank Sinatra …’ Polito also noted, as dedicated fans had noted, the shadows laid across the album by old folk songs such as ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’, ‘Frankie and Albert’ and ‘Gentle Nettie Moore’.

The writer intended to vindicate Dylan as an artist who was ‘rearranging the entire American musical and literary landscape of the past 150 years’ with
Time Out of Mind
,
‘Love and Theft’
and
Modern Times
. Reading Polito’s lists of the great and gone, however, a reader was liable to wonder if the case for the defence might not hang the accused in the end. The abundance of ‘sources’ was daunting. Here they were, like a celestial greatest-hits package or the perfected version of what Dylan had attempted back in 1970 with his
Self Portrait
: ‘Crosby, Sinatra, Charlie Patton, Woody Guthrie, Blind Willie McTell, Doc Boggs, Leroy Carr, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, Blind Willie Johnson, Big Joe Turner, Wilbert Harrison, the Carter Family, and Gene Austin alongside anonymous traditional tunes and nursery rhymes.’

Polito wasn’t done. He had noticed a range of reference in the so-called Dylan trilogy that had already been spotted, as a collective effort, by other avid fans, but the writer called Dylan’s use of ‘fragments’ a revelation, not plagiarism. So here were more famous names and famous titles: ‘W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, assorted film noirs,
As You Like It
,
Othello
, Robert Burns, Lewis Carroll, Timrod, Ovid, T.D. Rice’s blackface
Otello
,
Huckleberry Finn
,
The Aeneid
,
The Great Gatsby
, the Japanese true crime paperback
Confessions of a Yakuza
by Junichi Saga, Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, and [Flannery O’Connor’s novel]
Wise Blood.
’

Polito also talked about ‘folk process’, but accepted that the term was inadequate as a description of Dylan’s methods. T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound were therefore recruited once again to the artist’s cause. The three albums were thereby defined as ‘Modernist collages’, as ‘verbal echo chambers of harmonizing and clashing reverberations’. Within this elaborate verbal machinery, in Polito’s account, Timrod’s presence ‘works as a citation we’re ultimately intended to notice, though no song depends on that notice’. For Polito, none of this ‘conjuring’ counted as plagiarism.

Nevertheless, one remark made by the writer almost as a joke would intrigue Scott Warmuth. Of
‘Love and Theft’
, Polito wrote that he ‘wouldn’t be surprised if someday we learn that every bit of speech on the album – no matter how intimate or Dylanesque – can be tracked back to another song, poem, movie, or novel’. Warmuth returned to his listening, his reading and his Google searches.

For his part, Dylan would in due course tell
Rolling Stone
’s Mikal Gilmore that when it came to the appropriation of nineteenth-century texts, only ‘wussies and pussies complain about that stuff’. The artist would challenge the journalist, asking, ‘as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him?’

Who’s been reading him lately? And who’s pushed him to the forefront? Who’s been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it’s so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get … It’s an old thing – it’s part of the tradition.

After conflating those who laid plagiarism charges with those who had called him Judas for taking up the electric guitar in the mid-’60s – ‘All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell’ – Dylan stuck to a bold and simple claim. The most interesting thing about his defence, the most important thing, was the simple fact that in making use of Timrod or of anyone else he had known exactly what he was doing. Dylan was not taking refuge in the excuse that the habit was remotely ‘unconscious’.

I’m working within my art form. It’s that simple. I work within the rules and limitations of it. There are authoritarian figures that can explain that kind of art form better to you than I can. It’s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.
¹⁷

*

Cast your mind back to the young man who set out late in the 1950s to turn himself into Bob Dylan, folk singer. The word sponge, so often used, is probably inadequate, as is the word dedication. His intensity in the pursuit of musical knowledge more closely resembled an obsession. One of his college contemporaries would tell Robert Shelton in 1966, for example, that Dylan was ‘the purest of the pure’ where folk was concerned, that while living a version of the bohemian life in the Dinkytown area of Minneapolis he ‘had to get the oldest record and, if possible, the Library of Congress record, or go find the original people who knew the original song’.
¹⁸
It sounds less like fascination than a kind of need, less like a desire for knowledge a young singer could use than a desire to know everything there was to know. Dylan was greedy: he wanted it all.

He was in love with folk and blues music, of that there is no doubt. It has remained the one enduring, unquestioned affection in his existence for better than half a century. It is hard, nevertheless, to escape the feeling that Dylan’s desperate thirst for knowledge arose from an equally desperate need to complete himself, to give substance to the identity he was attempting to inhabit. Either there was more to it than just an instinct for art, or the instinct was central to the evolution of the figure called Bob Dylan. Even the fantastical tales the kid would tell about himself in his earliest days in Greenwich Village required documentation, background knowledge, as complete as he could make it or fake it. The stories of the musicians he would claim to have met and played with out on the road – to complicate matters, a few of the stories were true – needed a deep understanding of what they played and how they played. Above all, for Robert Zimmerman himself to believe in Bob Dylan called for the kind of knowledge only that unlikely character could possibly possess. Study, obsessive study, was a way of giving authority to the identity the young Dylan was trying to mould around himself.

But why would the ageing man wall himself behind quotations, allusions, borrowed texts and lifted phrases? It might be, for he has said so often enough, that he finds writing harder now than he found it when he was creating automatically and unselfconsciously in the ’60s. But as we have seen with a song like ‘Floater’, a big pile of verses only depends to a very limited degree – as best we know – on what has been borrowed. You can understand why he might want to add texture for poetic effect by drawing on a variety of sources. As Polito argued, it is a legitimate stratagem. As Vega described matters, it is also commonplace and acceptable within limits. It troubles a lot of Dylan’s fans, however. They wonder if he lards his song with the work of others as an artistic choice or because, these days, he lacks the resources to manage a Bob Dylan song unaided. His defence of the habit when talking to Mikal Gilmore – ‘You make everything yours’ – has an echo throughout literature. There remains the distinct possibility, nevertheless, that Dylan is still completing himself with the gleanings of his relentless studies, that it is a way of maintaining the edifice of his identity and the bigger, ever-present cultural edifice that bears his name.