Did Dylan Do Wrong?

[bambooneedle]

In this case the guy happened to be happy that Dylan stole some lines from his book, but what if it was you and you hadn't been? On the other hand, did he really steal anything too creative? He didn't copy a STORY or anything, just somes lines...

THEY AIN'T HIS, BABE
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=s ... c_eo/12129
By Joel Ryan

Just how freewheeling is Bob Dylan?

Just maybe freewheelin' enough to liberally lift at least a dozen phrases from a Japanese oral history book for his Grammy-winning album Love and Theft.

Where Dylan and Confessions of a Yakuza: A Life in Japan's Underworld are concerned, none of the concerned parties has used the "P" word (for plagiarism). Perhaps that's because the most concerned party--the book's author--is thrilled to think the living music legend may be a devoted reader.

"Please say hello to Bob Dylan (news) for me because I am very flattered and very happy to hear this news," Junichi Saga, a 62-year-old Japanese physician who has authored several non-fiction titles, told Tuesday's Wall Street Journal.

Saga's book, based on his conversations with a dying patient who had lived as a yakuza, or gangster, was published in English in 1991. Released in 2001, Dylan's Love and Theft took its very title, as the Los Angeles Times points out, from Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, a book published in the U.S. in 1995.

The similarities between Confessions of a Yakuza and Love and Theft were first noted on the Web site Bob Dylan: Chords and Lyrics (http://www.dylanchords.com), and broken wide in the Journal.

An eagle-eyed English teacher living abroad in Japan gets credit for starting the stone rolling. Minnesota-born Chris Johnson, a Dylan fan who'd stumbled upon Saga's work, noticed a line on the book's very first page ("My old man would sit there like a feudal lord...") was near identical to a line from the Dylan song "Floater" ("My old man, he's like some feudal lord...")

"I've probably listened to that album at least a hundred times, so the matching phrases just jumped right out at me," Johnson said in the Journal. "They may as well have been printed in red ink."

On a mission, Johnson told the paper he went through the book looking for more signs that Dylan's eyes might have been there first. By the time he was done, the newspaper reported, he had a dozen pages dogeared.

Among the passages, as detailed by Johnson in a message sent to the Dylan song site in May:


Confessions of a Yakuza: "My mother...was the daughter of a wealth farmer...[she] died when I was 11...My father was a traveling salesman...I never met him."
Dylan's "Po' Boy": "My mother was a daughter of a wealthy farmer/My father was a travelin' salesman, I never met him."

Confessions of a Yakuza: "I'm not as cool or forgiving as I might have sounded."
Dylan's "Floater": "I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound..."

Confessions of a Yakuza: "There was nothing sentimental about him--it didn't bother him at all that some of his pals had been killed."
Dylan's "Lonesome Day Blues": "He's not sentimental, didn't bother him at all how many of his pals have been killed."


"I guess we should print the next edition with Bob Dylan's picture on the cover," Stephen Shaw, who edited Saga's book, told the Journal.

But, like Saga, Shaw is far from suing mad.

"We're flattered as hell, let's face it," Shaw said in the newspaper.

Saga's publisher, Kodansha International, is also grateful for a bump in sales. Saga told the Journal he'd made a modest $8,500 off the book--through Tuesday, anyway.

When Johnson's report was first posted, the book's Amazon.com sales ranking jumped from 65,000th to 45,000th place, the newspaper said. Since the Journal article was published, Confessions of a Yakuza has zoomed into the Top 100--at 68th place by Wednesday afternoon.

So far, there's been no comment on the Saga saga from Dylan. In the Journal, the mumbling one's manager, Jeff Rosen, said that, as far as he knew, the work was "original."

But as far back as his days as a teenage troubadour in New York's Greenwich Village, Dylan was known as a musician who borrowed early and often. It's a common trick, the difference was Dylan was able to use it to great effect.

"He listened to everybody, and he had an incredible ability to take things in and absorb them and turn around and put them right back out there like they had always been a part of him," folk and blues artist "Spider" John Koerner said in the 2001 book Positively 4th Street, a collective biography of Dylan, Joan Baez, her sister, Mimi, and her brother-in-law, Richard Fariña.

In the Journal, Chris Johnson said he can picture Dylan sitting in a hotel room in Japan, leafing through Confessions of a Yakuza, zeroing in on lines that caught his eye.

"I kind of wondered if he had done a lot of that before on other albums," Johnson said in the paper.

But, as Johnson pointed out, the "P" word hasn't exactly followed Dylan around during his five-decade career.

In a bit of interesting timing, Dylan is the second rock 'n' roll Hall of Famer this week to have his source material questioned.

A British music expert says the Beatles' standard "Yesterday," penned by Paul McCartney (news), was influenced by the Nat King Cole (news) standard, "Answer Me (My Love)," a tune occasionally covered by Dylan in concert.

The musicologist, Spencer Leigh, stops short of accusing McCartney of the "P" word, telling the BBC that McCartney, who long ago claimed to have awoken with the melody for "Yesterday" in his head, perhaps was led to his song by Cole's hit.

A spokesman for McCartney is having none of that talk. "To me the two songs are about as similar as 'Get Back' and 'God Save the Queen,' " the rep told BBC News Online.

[A rope leash]

From my reading of this, Bob lifted the lines, and did not change them enough to avoid the "p" charge. It's a bit surprising, especially if the Yakuza book was not credited at all on the CD.

Elvis would never do that, nor would I, for that matter.

As far as the McCartney-Cole issue, I don't think the songs sound exactly alike, but then again, I didn't think My Sweet Lord sounded all that much like He's So Fine, either.

It is true that artists steal from each other, though, especially artists that need to continue making bank.

[bambooneedle]

No, I wouldn't do it either. It's weird. I also thought that it may have been a secret between Bob and the writer, maybe even just implicitly, to generate more publicity this way than if he had simply credited the source in small print on his CD.

[noiseradio]

It makes me sad. Not shocked and dismayed, just sad. A line here and there could even be considered an homage. But all over the album is just weird. Or if he had just said in the liner notes, "I read this great book, and there are lines on this record lifted from it. You should read the book." No one would have cared.

They Might Be Giants began a song of theirs called "I SHould Be Allowed to Think with the first few lines from "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg. They cited this in the liner notes, and the song in no other way rips off the poem. (It does contain a great parody of the same opening line, though. "I saw the worst bands of my generation applied by magic marker to drywall...")

[BlueChair]

It doesn't bother me too much. Take a song like "Girl From The North Country"... that's basically a rewrite of the traditional song "Scarborough Fair." Quoting a book in a song should be allowed, though Dylan should have given the guy proper credit.

[noiseradio]

Quoting a book in a song should be allowed, though Dylan should have given the guy proper credit.

That's what I'm trying to say as well.

[bobster]

It's almost mandatory here to note that T.S. Eliot quote (or whoever it was): "Minor artists plagerize. Great artists steal."

Of course, however, he should have given credit. Still, never ignore the possibility of subconscious theft, though the sheer number makes it unlikely in this case.

I don't know about you guys, but it's happened many times to me that I've with some great idea, apparently all on my own, only to have someone later point out that I stole it from someplace. (Sort of like shoplifting by accident and getting away with it, which has happened to me several times.)

Still, none of this comes close to probably the single most blatant example of plagerism, conscious or unconscious, in popular song -- when Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown quickly wrote "Make 'em Laugh" for "Singin' in the Rain" (the rest of the songs in the score had been hits decades before). It was probably only a year or two after Cole Porter had written "Be a Clown" for "The Pirate" (also starring Gene Kelly and produced by Freed.)

The way Kelly told the story, no one had the guts to tell Freed -- who was the boss of the MGM unit that produced both movies -- that he and Brown had written an almost note-for-note/word-for-word rip-off.

[LessThanZero]

I heard "It's Too Soon To Know" by The Orioles yesterday.

it seemed very familiar to me.

[Mike Boom]

No - Dylan CAN do no wrong.

God knows enough people have ripped him off in his time.

Would it be wrong to mention Pump it Up and Subterranean Homesick Blues in the same breath?