Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell: Forty Years Later

I read somewhere that everyone, or at least every Jewish male, goes through a Dylan phase at some point in their lives.   We saw him in concert a couple of weeks ago, and since then my phase appears to have begun: either buying the CDs I somehow missed or getting them from the library; reading the Robert Shelton biography; trying to play Simple Twist of Fate on the living room piano (the shift from B to B flat, each time he realizes he's not going to get her back, is apparently the key).    I'm still a long way from a meta-theory, but herewith a few observations:

1.   With the perspective of time, I think Dylan's influence is actually bigger than it seemed 40 or 50 years ago.   BD (before Dylan), the words to popular songs were more or less interchangeable.    Today, with the advent of rap, one could argue that they're pretty much everything.   This isn't all Dylan, of course: as Shelton points out, the technique of half singing/half speaking was originated by Black bluesmen, many of whom couldn't sing any better than he can, and it's been taken in directions he probably never imagined.    But his influence is unmistakable.

2.   There's a growth and change in Dylan that is absent from all but a bare handful of other artists (I'm thinking of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and maybe Paul Simon as examples).   The most obvious case in point is Blood On The Tracks (1975), which I think is actually better, or at least more nuanced, than his earlier, more famous albums (I'm not alone in this opinion).   But even his recent stuff--if not quite at the same level--is totally different from what he was doing before, not to mention what other people are doing now.    I remember a New York bar, back in the 1980s, that had a Dylan imitation contest with separate prizes for each category (early troubadour Dylan, post-motorcycle accident voice change Dylan, born again Dylan, and so forth).   It's hard to imagine this for any other rock artist, or that anyone would go if they held it.

3.  Even Dylan's obnoxious traits seem to make him more human in a way that (say) Mick Jagger's or Paul McCartney's don't.    Who hasn't had difficulty in relationships, feuded with co-workers, or had their mother complain that he doesn't come home often enough?   For that matter, who--with the possible exception of Jagger and McCartney--looks the same way they did in 1967, and who really even wants to?

The comparison with Joni Mitchell, with whom he has at times feuded, is a fascinating one.    Both wrote intensely autobiographical, moody, and (at times) self-pitying songs; both dabbled in art, Mitchell with rather more success; both changed styles in ways that frequently left their fans behind, and neither seemed much to care.   Blood on the Tracks and Court and Spark, two of my favorite albums, came out within a few months of each other and have remarkable similarities in structure and content.  I read recently that, when they appeared on the same bill in the 1990s, someone interrupted Mitchell's set shouting, "We want Bobby!"   Mitchell put her guitar down, stared at the heckler, and shouted "I'm just as good as he is!"   In this sense, at least, she is.