Aside from The Beatles, Bob Dylan is probably the only musician from the classic period whose venerated status is unquestionable. It was he who kicked off the songwriting boom of the 1960s, and without his efforts, it’s safe to say that The Beatles wouldn’t have made Rubber Soul, and then changed the world with everything that followed. Whether it be in his music or lyrics, Dylan was a game-changer in every sense, repackaging the spirit of his hero Woody Guthrie to sharply capture the breakneck developments, be it cultural or political, of his era.
It says everything about Dylan’s impact that his most significant peers all celebrate the consequence of his work. Fellow folkie, Joni Mitchell, once explained that 1965’s ‘Positively 4th Street’ – released between the elemental Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde – was the song that inspired her to start writing her own material. It’s hard to imagine modern music without her influence.
She once said: “When I heard ‘Positively 4th Street,’ I realised that this was a whole new ballgame; now you could make your songs literature. The potential for the song had never occurred to me — I loved ‘Tutti Frutti,’ you know. But it occurred to Dylan. I said ‘Oh God, look at this.’ And I began to write. So Dylan sparked me.”
Despite this connection, and the fact that Mitchell has worked with Dylan numerous times over the years, the spiky Canadian has been surprisingly damning about The Bard. Considering they’re said to be old friends, she’s been immensely damning about his work and personality.
The ‘Help Me’ songwriter once threw down the gauntlet when speaking to the LA Times in 2010, when she brutally described Dylan as “a plagiarist”.
In response to the interviewer comparing both folk legends, Mitchell lashed out: “We are like night and day, [Dylan] and I,” she said. “Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.”
Three years later, Mitchell resumed her controversial diatribe and said in another interview: “Musically, Dylan’s not very gifted; he’s borrowed his voice from old hillbillies. He’s got a lot of borrowed things. He’s not a great guitar player. He’s invented a character to deliver his songs; it’s a mask of sorts”.
Mitchell’s vitriolic take on the man who allegedly inspired her to become a musician has long been the source of puzzlement. However, in Brian Hinton’s 1996 work, Both Sides Now, it is claimed that Dylan’s arrogant treatment of Mitchell led to her having such a bee in her bonnet about him.
The story goes that one night in 1973 at Dylan’s Malibu mansion, record label exec David Geffen and Mitchell played him a preview of what was to become her finest moment, the following year’s, Court and Spark. However, instead of intently listening to the record and perhaps offering words of encouragement, according to Hinton, Dylan pretended to fall asleep while the pair played it for him.
According to legend, this was beyond the pale for Mitchell, who felt greatly offended by someone who was supposed to be her friend, let alone hero. In Hinton’s words, she has “neither forgotten nor forgiven” Dylan for the sleight, and this, in tandem with describing her as “kind of like a man”, has led to her constantly firing off about him in the media.
Fair enough.
