[James Brancheau]

We're talking too much. One of my favorites, from No Direction Home (and how alive and vivid the video is, though unfortunately it's not the whole performance).

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=flGpGD0ePMM

[Julie Steiner]

Speaking of storytellers...Timothy Murphy was known to exaggerate a detail or two here and there, in order to make an anecdote more compelling. Just sayin'.

[Damian Balassone]

I hear ya Julie. I reckon Timothy might have been pulling our legs - mind you, I'd be saying the same thing if I grew up in the same town as Dylan. Interesting that Timothy says he considers Dylan the greatest artist of our times - high praise indeed.

That's a great clip James. The energy. He launches into a venomous version of 'Like A Rolling Stone' a bit later on in the film. I think the hecklers were starting to get to him.

[Tim McGrath]

Damien, according to Warmuth, he engaged in wholesale theft. But his aim, I think, was to mystify, not to steal. This is a guy who's read everything and remembers what he read. Then he called upon all of his resources when he slapped the book together. As you said, it was a big con, a joke. Dylan is the last guy who would write a legitimate autobiography.

And he just walked along the road
With his guilt so well concealed
And muttered underneath his breath
'Nothing is revealed.'

[Damian Balassone]

"Mystify" is a good way to phrase it, Tim. I was surpised that Warmuth came to the conclusion that it was "stealing". I think "intertextuality" is a better way to describe it - in some weird way Dylan's paying homage to a lot of the texts he loves in a rootin' tootin' way. I think with the title of "Love and Theft" he's even letting us in on the secret. A lot of the melodies from this point in time in Dylan's career are also borrowed - including almost the entire album Modern Times.
The funny thing about Chronicles is that all the "stolen" paragraphs hang together in such a freewheelin', Dylanlesque kind of way. I love rereading that book. Maybe Chronicles: Volume 2 is already in there within the layers of Chronicles: Volume 1 and that is part of the con.

[Tim McGrath]

No, Warmuth never uses the word "stealing" and never implies that Dylan was involved in plagiarism. Rather, he sees Dylan as a magician who created the illusion of a life story from dozens of other lives. Warmuth, as you say, is a brilliant investigator.

[Damian Balassone]

Sometimes, I wonder if all this hullabaloo about Dylan's "sourcing" is the real reason we haven't see Chronicles: Volume 2. Perhaps the book is indeed complete, but the editors, the lawyers and the powers-that-be at Simon and Schuster are going through it with a fine tooth comb, to make sure they are protected from any prospective legal claim for plagiarism.

They weren't aware of Dylan's "work habits" the first time around.

[Tim McGrath]

Yes, that's possible, but I don't think we'll see a second volume. I think he took a lot of raw notes for the first volume, expecting to convert them into his own sentences, but then just left them as they were, without attribution. Who knows why? Maybe, to quote William Logan's judgement of Robert Lowell, "He had the arrogance of a writer who carelessly seized whatever he needed." For a cut-and-paste job, it was very well done. Seamless.

[Jim Moonan]

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This seems to belong here. Iggy Pop’s recitation of Lou Reed’s We Are The People (Leron Thomas on trumpet)

https://youtu.be/Yd7Pughcb_4
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[Tim McGrath]

From New York in the '70s and '80s, I'd take The Ramones and The Jim Carroll Band.