MANDAWA, Rajastan (AP) — A former Bob Dylan groupie has brought a lawsuit against him in the Lok Adalat court here, alleging he was a very bad dude in a previous life.
Lok Adalat is one of the few jurisdictions in India that will accept damages claims from prior incarnations. Its chief judge once granted a 30-room palace and 500 servants to a seven-year-old boy who claimed to have owned it in his immediately prior incarnation, as he found some baubles hidden under a floor tile without any other way of knowing they would be there.
The Dylan groupie, who has not been named, said she was a fan of the folk music icon when he served briefly as court jester to King Henry the 2nd of England in 1160.
“He wasn’t really that funny, but I kind of liked him” said the groupie. “He always had good absinthe. The king had his head chopped off. I don’t blame His Majesty, as Dylan once offended him by calling him a joker and a thief.”
Then, according to the ghost of Jackie Stallone, who was being channeled by a tarot card reader in Mumbai back in December 2020, Dylan reincarnated and joined the Third Crusade in 1190, and he was a real douche.
“What a jerk,” said fellow crusader Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, who claims to have seen him slay 38 Roman Catholic warriors and 17 innocent bystanders in a little over 45 minutes.
“Even during a crusade, that kind of behavior is totally uncalled for. ¡Cuidado!”
Dylan’s attorneys said that the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter was actually doing a stint in the Andromeda Galaxy in 1190 and could not have possibly taken part in the inquisition that year.
“Bob is a real crusader, but not in the late 12th century. He was out of the galaxy at that time,” a spokesman said. “And today, Andromeda has a thriving folk music scene.”
The lawsuit also alleges that Dylan, sometimes known as Zimmy, was a pickpocket between 1294 and 1300, a professional plagiarist working for William Shakespeare in 1601 or so, a cattle rustler in the Northwest Territory in 1810, and an African slave named Barbury who invented blues music in 1899 without ever receiving proper credit. Barbury’s songs make up half of the Led Zeppelin catalog, according to insiders on the Astral Plane.
A spokesperson for Zeppelin assured everyone that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant wrote all of their own songs “right out of their own heads” and could not have possibly stolen them from Barbury. They recently filed a copyright infringement case against him in Lok Adalat, which is still pending.
Dylan also served as a spirit guide to both James Joyce and T.S. Eliot prior to incarnating the most recent time in 1941 with the intent of being a professional football player.