BOB DYLAN DISGUISED AS HENRY ROLLINS

Henry Rollins, c/o www.streetteaminterviews.com

I've followed with keen interest the indefatigable research by Scott Warmuth and Ed Cook, tracing what 21st Century work by Bob Dylan is, er, not necessarily by Bob Dylan. We've had the archeology of Henry Timrod; we've had the plethora of works by Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson and others smuggled into Chronicles Volume One (I commend Warmuth's excellent New Haven Review essay about this). And now most recently there's this discussion of what Dylan might be said to have mined from the prose works of HenryRollins: see Scott Warmuth's blog  -  not least as it affects that tremendous "Love and Theft" song/recording, 'Mississippi'.

But the thing surely is: these lines read better, and sound better, and manage to be so Dylanesque, coming from Dylan. Which is what he's so often achieved when he's reprocessed lines and phrases from old blues songs (as I've long been saying in my own work). This isn't meant as an adequate argument against all notions of plagiarism on Dylan's part: just as an observation about the Rollins-Dylan case.