[Leica] Plagarism

[manolito at videotron.ca (EPL)]

Re: All Along the Watchtower, Dylan has said that he finds Hendrix's version
of the song superior even to his own original.

Hendrix was well-known to be a huge Dylan fan. In the 1973 film called "A
Film About Jimi Hendrix," Jimi's Harlem girlfriend Lithofayne Pridgeon talks
about the day when he came home with a Dylan album and made her listen to it
with him, over and over again, he obviously enthralled by it.

At his break-out American solo performance at Monterey, Jimi famously
covered Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone, a version I prefer to Dylan's
original. During that show, Hendrix introduced his bass player, Noel
Redding, to the audience as "Bob Dylan's grandmother."

Interestingly, while Joni Mitchell (and others) have periodically accused
Dylan of plagiarism, Mitchell also has said that Hendrix was the sweetest
guy around. 

I'm not sure that Dylan is really a musical genius -- his music is very much
rooted in tradition, while Hendrix really charted new sound territory-- but
I do feel he is a superb writer, a poet. Listen to the words to something
like "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." It's, in some ways, amazingly
faithful in structure and purpose to the form of medieval ballad, yet revved
up with language choices and syntax that I find breathtaking.

But if Dylan is a plagiarist, so was Shakespeare. I understand that perhaps
just one of his plays -- The Tempest -- has no antecedent for its plot. The
other stories were lifted from various well-known works by other writers.

(Trying desperately to keep this on-topic, Jim Marshall photographed Hendrix
at Monterey using his Leica M4. A Nikon SP appears on the cover of Dylan's
LP "Highway 61 Revisited.")

Emanuel