Bob Dylan calls plagiarism accusers "wussies"

Bob Dylan performs on at Les Vieilles Charrues Festival in Carhaix, France.

/ AP

(CBS News) Bob Dylan is taking aim at critics who have accused the veteran singer-songwriter of plagiarizing some of his song lyrics.

In a new Rolling Stone interview, the 71-year-old Dylan fires back, calling his critics "wussies and pussies."

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Journalist Mikal Gilmore asked Dylan what he thinks of the "controversy" over quotations in his songs, stemming from the works of other writers, including Japanese author Junichi Saga and poet Henry Timrod.

And Dylan had a lot to say. The singer, who just released his 35th studio album, chimed in on drawing from the other writers' material.

"Oh, yeah, in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition," he responded. "That certainly is true. It's true for everybody, but me. There are different rules for me. And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? Who's been reading him lately? And who's pushed him to the forefront?... And if you think it's so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get. Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. It's an old thing - it's part of the tradition. It goes way back."

Reuters points out that in 2003, the Wall Street Journal noted that lyrics from Dylan's 2001 release, "Love and Theft," included phrases that were similar to those found in a 1995 biography of a Japanese mobster. The line from the book, "I'm not as cool or forgiving as I might have sounded," was pitted about against Dylan's lyric: "I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound."

Later in the interview, Dylan told Gilmore, "I'm working within my art form. It's that simple. I work within the rules and limitations of it. There are authoritarian figures that can explain that kind of art form better to you than I can. It's called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it."

The topic of Dylan and plagiarism has come up many times through the years. In 2010, Joni Mitchell blasted her contemporary in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

"Bob [Dylan] is not authentic at all," she said. "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."

Meanwhile, Dylan, himself has been caught up in lawsuit involving use of his name. In 1994, he filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against Apple, asking for a court order to keep the computer giant from using his name. There are also reports that Dylan reached an out-of-court settlement in 1995 with Hootie & the Blowfish over the band's hit song "Only Wanna Be With You." Dylan reportedly claimed frontman Darius Rucker borrowed some of his lyrics in the track.

The complete Dylan interview will appear in the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone, which hits newsstands Friday. See more of it here.

Tell us: What do you think about Dylan's take?

[PhweeKinout]

Read Positively Fourth Street by David Hajdu. I think it is the single best biographic book on Dylan, and covers his early, formative years. The narrative more or less confirmed what I felt for many years, which is that Bob Dylan is a work of performance art, unmatched except by the greatest stage and movie actors and politicians of all time. I think Joni is essentially correct, Bob Dylan is a calculated put-on. But he is an essential American picaro, a most entertaining character and among the important filters through which we get to experience some good music and folklore.

[Valhalla0907]

There is a short sci-fi story called Melancholy Elephants, where music is copyrighted throughout history. There are only so many notes. There are only so many notes a human ear can hear. There are only so many combinations of those notes that are recognizable as music. With endless memory and ownership, we lose the ability to forget, creating a mathematical end of music!

[Omistares]

When a senior in high school in the mid 1960s, I participated in a speech contest in another city. A girl I'd never met and I gave almost exactly the same speech, and it was clear we had never been in contact with one another. The creative landscape has its own nerve center, and connections are made, sometimes knowingly, frequently from the subconscious or intuition or was it something someone said.... It's all a form of clay. And, there are more things in heaven and earth....

[Sue_Miller]

Bob Dylan is the best. I wouldn't worry about any of this. Like Bob told you, he works within the rules and limitations of the songwriter art form. He is not writing academic papers.

[Redoran17]

Agree 100%. These critics are simply jealous of Bob's successes. I suppose his many, many, classics, as "Mr. Tambourine Man", is also a ripoff from some wannabe writer. Let's hear from Joni on this.