“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.” — Joni Mitchell, Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2010 

Caterwauling Canuck “folk singer” Joni Mitchell got just about everybody riled up with that sweet morsel of self-serving insight, but the real shock is not that Mitchell is absolutely correct but that someone finally came out and said it. After decades of carefully manicured deification by Columbia Records, brain-dead rock critics and the slimy elite institution that elevated such barely able snake-oil salesmen as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger to celestial heights, it’s high time to flout indoctrination and examine Dylan’s track record as a Grade-A phony. 

Most Dylan fans would be stunned to realize that his vocal style (for lack of a better term) was high-jacked, in its entirety, from long-dead bluegrass-country singer Carter Stanley. We’re not talking about an influence, like Lefty Frizzell for Merle Haggard, but a total appropriation of  Stanley’s highly idiosyncratic approach. A counterfeit from the get-go, once Dylan realized what an advantage his audience’s innate ignorance was, he’s exploited it ever since. 

Just type “Bob Dylan plagiarism” into your friendly search engine, and a plethora of questionable circumstances pop up, enrobing the singer almost as completely as his years of reflexive media fawning have. Documented from his teenage start, when he submitted a hand written, thinly revised version of country star Hank Snow’s “Little Buddy” for publication as an original poem, to his 1963 pilferage of Irish poet Dominic Behan’s “Patriot Game”’s melody for the similarly slanted Dylan tune “With God on Our Side” to songwriter James Damiano’s ongoing multimillion dollar copyright infringement suit (alleging Dylan’s Grammy-nominated “Dignity” is nothing but an altered version of Damiano’s “Steel Guitars”) to the naked “Red Sails in the Sunset” melody heist for the song “Beyond The Horizon” on his Modern Times album, up through the recent Confessions of a Yakuza-Love & Theft plagiarism charges (Love & Theft? Calling Dr. Freud!), the Timrod controversy, even the numerous passages of Proust and Jack London that (re) appear in the text of Dylan’s autobiography, it’s a deep, dark thicket of thoroughly damning and apparently chronic bootlegging. Naturally, Dylan has said nothing publicly about any of these, but he already spent over three million dollars defending himself against one-time affiliate Damiano–the classic delay-to-destroy court room technique.  (more…)

Somewhere over the last 25 years, the idea of what constitutes a “celebrity” changed from a person with some kind of history of achievement to pretty much anyone with a pulse who manages to get his, her or its mug splashed across a TV screen.  Actually, as the wailing and gnashing of teeth surrounding the death of Michael Jackson demonstrated last year, the pulse is now optional.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the ridiculous, cynical remake of “We are the World,” an exercise that according to news accounts seemed less focused on assisting the people of Haiti than on stroking the egos of the pseudo-stars and future nobodies who did the yodeling.

The tiresome video (directed by the tiresome Paul Haggis) raises an important question – who the hell are these people?  I think one of them – the dude with the expensive clothes and dull stare – was Puff Diddley or P. Daddy or whatever idiotic moniker he’s using this week.  You know, there was a time when grown men used their given names instead of childish nicknames that are just emblems of the eternal adolescence that modern pop culture worships. 

Now, the original “We are the World” was itself nearly unlistenable, but that’s a matter of taste and reasonable people can disagree (I thought the British supergroup Band-Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was a much better song, though it shared “World’s” inexcusable refusal to confront the reason the Ethiopian drought turned into the Ethiopian famine – the cruelty and stupidity of its left wing government ).  However, at least most of the participants were people with track records of success.  You had Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Diana Ross, Bob Dylan, Dionne Warwick and a bunch of others.  Now, not all of them might have been your cup of tea – I’d rather pass a kidney stone made of broken glass than listen to the Boss – but you had at least heard of them. (more…)

So anyway, last week I was asked to review the accompanying CD for tonight’s upcoming The People Speak documentary. Mindful of my journalistic duty, I immediately emailed the good folks at Verve Music Group asking for a review copy. Alas, they never got back to me. Thus as I certainly wasn’t going to spend any of my own ca$h on something that featured knuckle-headed dullard Eddie Vedder (the Sean Penn of the rock music world) covering Dylan, I was forced to review the 25 second previews on Amazon instead. So here goes:

Track 1: Do Re Mi by Bob Dylan: I used to have the Woody Guthrie version of this song on my iPod. After about three years I noticed I had played it twice, so I swiftly deleted it along with the rest of the incredibly tedious ‘Pastures of Plenty’ CD. From the brief snatch I heard of Dylan’s version he’s rasping away as usual, but it still sounds better than the original, which is rotten.

Q: Didn’t Dylan explicitly distance himself from this whole protest thing in his memoir published a few years back?

A: Yes he did. (more…)

On October 13th, Bob Dylan released an album of Christmas standards entitled Christmas in the Heart. The reaction from critics, and much of the public, has been: Is this some kind of joke?

“Hearing Bob hack out the words ‘With angelic host proclaim/Christ is born in Bethlehem’ reminds one of grandpa clearing his throat after finishing a glass of eggnog,” wrote Joseph Brannigan Lynch at Entertainment Weekly.  It’s no joke, writes Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard; it’s worse than that – Christmas in the Heart is a deliberate “affront, a taunt,” to fans and downright “embarrassing.”

–

So, is it really that bad?  Not really.  Dylan’s work tends to inspire either over-praise or over-criticism, and this album is no exception (though receiving far more of the latter).

My reaction upon hearing the record lurch to life with “Here Comes Santa Claus ” in my ear buds was first to laugh; whether a joke or not, this shit is funny. Mostly because Dylan sounds so uncharacteristically jovial and (yes, I’ll say it) jolly, even.  My second reaction was relief – it’s nice to hear that from Dylan for a change. (more…)

-”I take a three-minute shower,” [Jennifer Aniston] told Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas Kostigen, authors of The Green Book. She even brushes her teeth while she’s in there.

-“Entourage” star Adrian Grenier has lived in an apartment insulated with old pants.

-Vegetarian and planetary crusader Tobey Maguire reportedly has banned all leather products from his house. He also “makes everyone take off their leather belts and shoes and leave them by the door!”

-Leonardo DiCaprio “stays green at home, too—with his $3,200 eco-friendly toilet!”

-Bob Dylan sells “renewable grocery bags” at his concerts. (more…)

So many big name stars, singers and sports legends have visited Washington over the years, the city is often referred to as “Hollywood on the Potomac.”  So, that’s the title of my new book (available now at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Borders) featuring over 200 photographs and stories that detail the fascination between Hollywood stars and Washington power-players — from Presidents Truman through Obama. 

Here’s an excerpt: (more…)

On a rainy day last week in Long Branch, NJ, Bob Dylan, wearing a hood, was peering into a for-sale home when a neighbor called the police fearing he might be a burglar. Two young officers arrived on the scene and neither of them knew who Bob Dylan was. They asked for I.D. – he had none but explained he was a musician on tour with John Mellencamp and they were set to play at a nearby stadium in Lakewood. Without fuss or anger, Mr. Dylan was escorted back to his tour bus where he produced I.D.

That was that. End of incident. (more…)

The new Bob Dylan CD Together Through Life comes in a bright, plastic jewel case, but it may as well be cuneiform scratched on a baked clay tablet.  Sure enough, though the shrink-wrap crackles and snaps at the unwrapping, the dust of a century and half of American music blows up into your face:

“Beyond Here Lies Nothing” shambles to life like a dusty corpse shuffling to a slow and sloppy rumba.  Dylan oversees the proceedings: part funeral director, part carnival barker, commanding ancient instruments and sentiments with a wink and a throaty growl.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, tonally, musically, lyrically, is “I Feel A Change Comin’ On”- imagine a sunny spring stroll down a country lane with your heart subsumed with thoughts of a new and tender love, and you have an idea of what this tune will do to you.

That Dylan can command these two diametrically opposite songs (on the same album, no less) is testimony to his expansive talent – he is large, he contains multitudes, and is frighteningly comfortable with all the sides of his protean and encompassing nature. (more…)

In all of the uproar about how the stinky porta-potty at Bob Dylan’s Malibu compound is making his neighbors ill, has no one stopped to think about the rank (pardon the pun) hypocrisy on the part of Dylan, who made his fortune singing songs about the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the haves versus the have-nots?

In this Red Pepper article reviewing the politics of Dylan’s music during the 1960s, we learn that… (more…)

Just in case you’ve never read my bio, I am a stand-up comedian and have been slinging jokes for over thirty years. I have had my ups and downs, worked the road for years, gigged in dumps and Vegas palaces, done TV and had a few shots at the big time. I have hurt my career by my personal behavior and I blame no one but myself for that.

I reinvented myself as a performer almost as many time as Dylan and I’m still standing. To quote my good friend, radio host Marc Germain, “I’m better than most and not as good as some.” (more…)