Dylan and Joni: unexpected tension lasts
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I'll always have a soft spot for Roberta Joan Anderson, a.k.a. Joni Mitchell. I fell in love with a girl in college who floored me with casual a cappella versions of "Help Me" and "A Case of You" as we stood in her painting studio.
When Ms. Mitchell came to West Philadelphia in late August 1979 to play a concert at the Robin Hood Dell less than a mile from where I lived, I was already full of nostalgia and regret.
Her sidemen were a who's who of jazz fusion at the time -- guitarist Pat Metheny, bassist Jaco Pastorius, drummer Don Alias, saxophonist Michael Brecker and keyboardist Lyle Mays.
I wasn't there to see jazz royalty, though. I was there to hear Joni Mitchell make sense of the inchoate romantic longings that had become associated with her songs in my mind. In what was generally a summer of personal discontent, her music had become a refuge as I attempted to sort out my life's weird trajectory.
Although she was an unlikely muse to a kid from West Philly, Ms. Mitchell was the only woman outside my family I implicitly trusted. I made room in my heart for her because her songs resonated with such crystalline beauty and depth. Her music -- along with Bob Dylan's -- had become a dependable emotional bridge for me during the long stretches between girlfriends.
If Mr. Dylan's music provided the vocabulary of redemption and experience I sought at the time, Ms. Mitchell opened me up to the music of the heart. For a while, they were as important to me as my left and right hands.
So it was a surprise to come across an interview Ms. Mitchell gave to the Los Angeles Times recently where she said: "Bob [Dylan] is not authentic at all. He's a plagiarist and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I."
The only thing more stunning than the lack of a follow-up question by the interviewer is the hostility with which Ms. Mitchell dismissed someone she had previously cited as the artist who "sparked" a deepening of her interest in songwriting in the 1960s.
To be sure, Ms. Mitchell's putdown of Mr. Dylan could be interpreted as righteous payback for his rudeness when he "pretended" to nod off when she played an acetate of her then-recently completed "Court and Spark" album at a listening party. Someone snoring through what is arguably your greatest work could make a gal bitter thinking about it many decades later.
First Published April 30, 2010 12:00 am
