Why Joni Mitchell thinks Bob Dylan comments were “completely out of context”
Joni Mitchell was never someone who held back her opinions. That being said, for almost her entire career, she’s had to encounter journalists and interviewers with agendas. “[One reporter] laid on me questions like, ‘What do you think of so and so?’ and I deflected and deflected and deflected and finally said something,” Mitchell told MOJO Magazine in 1998. “And I thought, ‘If they cut that off and that off – and you know they will – he got the dirt. He got it.'” She pauses. “I’m getting a rep for that.”
One of the more notorious examples came in a 2010 interview with Los Angeles Times writer Matt Diehl. During their talk, the conversation wandered over to Bob Dylan, of whom Mitchell had some choice words. “Bob is not authentic at all,” Mitchell shared. “He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake.” With that, the writer got his dirt, and the quote began to circulate as Mitchell putting down Dylan.
In a 2013 interview with CBC host Jian Ghomeshi, Mitchell took aim at Diehl for his apparent hunt for drama and claimed that the quote wasn’t representative of her thoughts. “That remark is completely out of context, and that interviewer was an asshole,” Mitchell stated. “He accused me of being inauthentic. Now that’s just ignorance.”
“How do I explain to this moron, whose IQ is somewhere between his shoesize and his knees, and he’s misconstruing everything I say,” Mitchell says. “I hate doing interviews with stupid people: this guy’s a moron… Everything I said he’s calling into question. I can’t talk to a dolt like that without getting aggravated.”
When asked to clarify her opinion on Dylan, however, Mitchell wasn’t any kinder than her initial position. “I like a lot of Bob’s songs, though musically he’s not very gifted,” Mitchell explained. “He’s borrowed his voice from old hillbillies. He’s got a lot of borrowed things. He’s not a great guitar player. He’s invented a character to deliver his songs. Sometimes I wish that I could have that character — because you can do things with that character. It’s a mask of sorts.”
Check out Mitchell’s comments on Bob Dylan down below.
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