by Bell, Ian
*
Almost two years after the release of ‘Love and Theft’ in September 2001, a curious tale had appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.11 It involved a 62-year-old Japanese writer and doctor and the then 62-year-old Dylan. Junichi Saga had only a slight knowledge of the American singer – ‘I’m not familiar with these things,’ he told the paper – but the American, it was suggested, had clearly come to know something about Saga’s oral history of a Japanese mobster and former patient, a book translated into English in 1991 as Confessions of a Yakuza: A Life in Japan’s Underworld. In fact, as the article proceeded to explain, there were some striking similarities between passages in certain songs on Dylan’s ‘Love and Theft’ album and the dying gangster’s story of the loves and life of a thief. The resemblances did not seem accidental.
It had been noticed back in 2001 that the artist had set the title of his album in quotation marks. The gesture had been treated as an acknowledgement, playful or rueful, that Dylan had borrowed a phrase from Eric Lott’s 1993 book Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. That study had attempted to untangle the complicated, century-long story of white responses to black culture, as represented by the white ‘minstrels’ who had once performed in preposterous ‘negro’ costumes with banjos on their knees and burnt cork on their faces. It was incidental to Lott’s main point, but the salience to Dylan and all the other young white men who took up – or stole away – the blues in the 1950s and 1960s was obvious. As the author had mentioned in passing, ‘Every time you hear an expansive white man drop into his version of black English, you are in the presence of blackface’s unconscious return.’12
If it did not amount to an acceptance of the charge, Dylan’s use of Lott’s title – itself a theft, obviously enough – had been a tacit admission that the accusation had force. He didn’t feel guilty about it, necessarily – he venerated the blues and blues musicians – but Dylan had raided black culture at every step of his career. Who had not? Like a lot of his contemporaries, from Elvis to the Rolling Stones, oblivious to every contradiction, he had seen no problem with that. In 2003, however, the Wall Street Journal seemed to be saying that contemporary issues of love and theft might be at once more straightforward and more troubling than the artist’s fans realised.
The Journal’s headline had gone to the point: ‘Did Bob Dylan lift lines from Dr Saga?’ If he had not, similarities between ‘Love and Theft’ songs and odd passages in the Japanese book (as translated) were near-impossible to explain. ‘My old man would sit there like a feudal lord …’ ran the book. ‘My old man, he’s like some feudal lord / Got more lives than a cat,’ went the song entitled ‘Floater (Too Much to Ask)’. ‘Actually, though, I’m not as cool or forgiving as I might have sounded,’ a sentence in Confessions of a Yakuza began. ‘I’m not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound / I’ve seen enough heartaches and strife,’ Dylan sang in ‘Floater’.
There were other examples in the Journal story, some rather less convincing as examples of alleged plagiarism. The book: ‘If it bothers you so much,’ she’d say, ‘why don’t you just shove off?’ ‘Floater’: ‘Juliet said back to Romeo, “Why don’t you just shove off / If it bothers you so much?”’ Confessions: ‘“Break the roof in!” he yelled. [He] splashed kerosene over the floor and led a fuse from it outside.’ Dylan’s ‘Summer Days’: ‘Yes, I’m leaving in the morning just as soon as the dark clouds lift / Gonna break the roof in – set fire to the place as a parting gift.’
In those cases, the worst that might have been said of the singer was that, consciously or unconsciously, he had adapted a few images and common phrases. One or two of the examples marshalled against him could even have been dismissed entirely as inevitable coincidences in the wide, busy world of literature. What’s a writer to do if he wants to describe trees without echoing someone else’s description of trees? Saga: ‘They were big, those trees – a good four feet across the trunk …’ Dylan’s ‘Floater’: ‘There’s a new grove of trees on the outskirts of town / The old one is long gone / Timber two-foot-six across / Burns with the bark still on.’
The affair had come to light when Chris Johnson, a young American teaching English in Japan – but originally from Dylan’s home state of Minnesota – had chanced upon a copy of Confessions of a Yakuza in a bookshop in the city of Fukuoka. The Japanese edition of Saga’s work was by then out of print; the English version had sold a reported 25,000 copies. It was the ‘feudal lord’ line on the first page of the gangster’s narrative that had caught Johnson’s eye. A Dylan fan, he had begun to search, so the Journal reported, for further examples of imitation, adaptation or theft. What struck him was that Dylan had not taken ‘the most poetic or most powerful lines from the book’. In fact, the borrowings appeared to the young teacher to have been almost random. Interviewed by the newspaper, Johnson had nevertheless offered up what must have sounded to the newsroom like the perfect disingenuous quote. ‘I kind of wondered if he had done a lot of that before on other albums,’ he had said. ‘But if he’d been doing this all along, somebody would have caught him a long time ago.’
What had Dylan been doing exactly? ‘Floater’ is 16 verses and 64 lines long. It is set in the rural American South. It has nothing whatever to do, in tone or theme, with Japan or Japanese gangsters. A quotation from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby had already been spotted lurking within ‘Love and Theft’. Was that also an act of plagiarism, or precisely the sort of homage you would expect from one American writer to another, an invocation of shared experience, a deepening of the national literature? A piece of verse by the little-read Civil War poet Henry Timrod, the catchily titled ‘Vision of Poesy’, would also be linked with Dylan’s ‘Love and Theft’ track ‘Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum’. In the ’60s, the singer would have been lauded to the skies for the breadth of his literary knowledge. Journalists and academics would never have tired of quizzing the cultured pop poet about his book habits. By the twenty-first century, thanks to plagiarism scandals of its own involving thefts more flagrant than anything of which Dylan stood accused, thanks to the internet’s corrosive effects on copyright, thanks to corporate media’s increasingly hysterical efforts to defend intellectual property against any unlicensed use, fair or otherwise, all unacknowledged quotation was being treated by the press as theft. It became, as it remains, an obsession for America’s cultural arbiters. Yet this was in the era, ironically enough, of sampling, of the mash-up, the era born of the pop-art collage and Warhol’s Factory. Eliot’s The Waste Land would have been put to the sword – ‘Did Nobel Prize winner lift lines from St Augustine?’ – in such a fervid climate of opinion. Dylan stood no chance. He had not heard the last of it, either.
In the writing of ‘Floater’ stray pieces of Saga’s text had helped him to achieve rhymes. That detail had been overlooked: the good doctor had not attempted poetry. There is not much doubt, equally, that Dylan helped himself to a few words, but their true worth and weight, their real significance, is arguable, at best. One verse of his song, nothing special by his standards, goes:
My grandfather was a duck trapper
He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth
I don’t know if they had any dreams or hopes
You could call it American pastoral, an invocation of rural poverty in former times, a scene from a folk tale. You would have to call it culturally specific: tattooed Japanese gangsters are nowhere heard or seen. The Wall Street Journal made no mention in its front-page story of what ‘Floater’ might be about, or of Dylan’s possible artistic purpose in the song. An admirer might regret that he was careless enough to throw in a few images and phrases he had picked up, but the charge of plagiarism only sticks if it involves intentionally passing off substantial parts of another’s work as your own. Dylan seems to have come close – his Lyrics 1962–2001 (2004) makes no mention of sources – but not close enough for concl
usions to be drawn. You have to ignore the songs entirely to call the offence heinous.
Consider this comparative exercise. Confessions: ‘My mother … was the daughter of a wealthy farmer … [She] died when I was 11 … I heard that my father was a travelling salesman who called at the house regularly, but I never met him. [My uncle] was a nice man, I won’t forget him … After my mother died, I decided it’d be best to go and try my luck there.’ The frequent ellipses are interesting, let’s say. Now here’s Dylan’s ‘Po’ Boy’:
My mother was a daughter of a wealthy farmer
My father was a travelling salesman, I never met him
When my mother died, my uncle took me in – he ran a funeral parlor
He did a lot of nice things for me and I won’t forget him.
Mother dies, travelling salesman, nice man, ‘did a lot of nice things’: that’s the sum total of the evidence. Dylan had taken cues from stray passages in a book he had picked up and used them to make a distinct piece of art, yet he stood accused not of creativity but of plagiarism. Another very funny passage in ‘Po’ Boy’, especially when delivered in Dylan’s deadpan voice, goes as follows:
Othello told Desdemona, ‘I’m cold, cover me with a blanket
By the way, what happened to that poison wine?’
She says, ‘I gave it to you, you drank it’
Poor boy, layin’ ’em straight –
Pickin’ up the cherries fallin’ off the plate
Plagiarism from Shakespeare, then? That bard knew the game of beg, borrow or steal better than anyone. Given that Dylan’s po’ boy has a shaky knowledge of the Moor’s tragedy, or a sly appreciation of the comic potential of acting dumb, it would be silly to say that something underhand is going on in this part of the song. It would be no sillier, however, than a suggestion of theft that paid not the slightest attention to what the artist had done with the allegedly stolen goods. There are several clear examples of Dylan appropriating Saga’s translated words. Amid this small fuss, however, there were very few instances of the artist’s accusers mentioning what Dylan was attempting in the finished songs of ‘Love and Theft’. The bigger game, evident since Newsweek had printed the wholly false ‘rumor’ that he was not the author of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, was to prove that Dylan was, in some way, a fraud.13 Saga’s ‘feudal lord’ line, the one that would be quoted repeatedly as some sort of clincher, will serve as a final example. In isolation, the use of the phrase seems lethal to any defence of Dylan. But what happens to it in the context of the song?
My old man, he’s like some feudal lord
Got more lives than a cat
Never seen him quarrel with my mother even once
Things come alive or they fall flat
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:
These happy stars, and yonder setting moon,
Have seen me speed, unreckoned and untasked,
A round of precious hours.
Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked,
And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers,
To justify a life of sensuous rest,
A question dear as home or heaven was asked,
And without language answered. I was blest!
In his ‘Vision of Poesy’, meanwhile, the luckless Confederate bard had offered this:
… and at times
A strange far look would come into his eyes,
As if he saw a vision in the skies.
Among other examples of borrowings from Timrod, part of Dylan’s Modern Times song ‘When the Deal Goes Down’ runs as follows:
The moon gives light and it shines by night
Well, I scarcely feel the glow
We learn to live and then we forgive
O’er the road we’re bound to go
More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours
That keep us so tightly bound
You come to my eyes like a vision from the skies
And I’ll be with you when the deal goes down
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 Timro
d 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’.