Bob Dylan, Curator

We already introduced Dish readers to David Kinney’s new book, The Dylanologists. Chris Francescani highlights the incredible sleuthing of one superfan, a New Mexico DJ named Scott Warmuth, who has shown that Dylan’s 2004 memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, is “full of fabrication, allusion, and widespread appropriation of material from a vast and surprising spectrum of sources” – and so are many of his songs:

Dylan’s Chronicles, one of five finalists for the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for biography or autobiography, appears to sample everything from Ovid and Virgil to Twain, Hemingway, H.G. Wells, a March 31, 1961 issue of Time magazine, and scores of other far-flung source material—even self-help books.

Since 2003, when a Minnesota schoolteacher came across lines from Dylan’s 2001 album Love and Theft in an obscure biography of a Japanese mobster, the legendary songwriter has faced accusations of plagiarism. His subsequent album Modern Times also borrowed liberally from the work of Henry Timrod, a Civil War-era poet from Charleston, South Carolina.

But Kinney, following Warmuth, doesn’t view this as a straightforward act of plagiarism. Ian Crouch explains:

Warmuth’s reading of Dylan’s memoir has revealed that Dylan’s “appropriations were not random. They were deliberate. When Scott delved into them, he found cleverness, wordplay, jokes, and subtexts.” The thefts that Dylan made were part of the story—he had, as Kinney writes, “hidden another book between the lines.”

Kinney remarks on an especially intriguing section of “Chronicles,” in which Dylan seems to be explaining the method behind his guitar playing. Dylan writes, mysteriously, “You gain power with the least amount of effort, trust the listeners to make their own connections, and it’s very seldom that they don’t.” If this sounds inscrutable as musical technique, that’s because it is lifted from a self-help book about gaining influence over others called “The 48 Laws of Power,” by Robert Greene. This, then, is a cunning bit of dark humor: Dylan purports to explain the magic behind his music, but he’s really just revealing how susceptible devoted fans are to this kind of florid nonsense.

This unpacking of Dylan’s memoir, and the increased scrutiny given to his recent albums, is a reminder that Dylan’s work has always been spurred on by his own fannish, idiosyncratic obsessions. Michael Gray, who has written extensively about Dylan’s songwriting, tells Kinney, “You want him to be this lone genius who came from another planet. He never pretended to be. He’s created something out of something else.” Dylan’s earliest songs borrowed chords and lyrics from traditional folk songs; he has lifted lines and licks from the blues; he has repurposed and reassembled the Bible, press clippings, English poetry, the American songbook, and a half century of cultural comings and goings to create a kind of ongoing, evolving musical collage. Dylan is an archivist and a librarian in addition to being an artist.

For more, check out Popova’s selection from a 1991 interview with Dylan about songwriting here.