The thing about name-changing is exactly what sparked off Joni Mitchell`s comment, so perhaps I`ll quote that bit of the interview, which shows how JM sees her situation as different from BD`s :
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L.A.Times: The folk scene you came out of had fun creating personas. You were born Roberta Joan Anderson, and someone named Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan.
JM: Bob 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.
As for my name, my parents wanted a boy, so they called me Robert John; when I came out a girl, they just added two letter A's to that. Then I married Chuck Mitchell; I wanted to keep my maiden name — I had a bit of a following as Joni Anderson — but he wouldn't let me.
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So Joni has pretty genuine reasons for changing her name and wasn`t really trying to build up a persona in the same way Dylan did.
Actually, it`s the plagarism criticism that I find more difficult to understand, given the way,(especially in folk music) almost every song that`s written borrows something from those who went before.
What I have heard, though, is that Dylan has always been quicker than others to change a few lyrics in a traditional song and then slap his own copyright on the material. Given the mega size of his own original songbook, it seems a strangly ungracious thing to do, but as
OccultHawk very neatly puts it:
Quote:
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Dylan has always been a chameleon and a thief. That`s part of his charm...
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