In April 2015, I wrote a piece about Bob Dylan’s famous (and notorious) speech at MusiCares. By the time the press date came around, though, we agreed the article would no longer be timely for a print edition. I looked at this yesterday for something else I’ve been working on and thought that though it’s long past the event, it might be suitable nonetheless for this page that Elaine has set up:
Minutes after Bob Dylan delivered a speech in early February, accepting a person of the year honor from MusiCares (a Grammys-related musicians’ charity), his words were already historic. That’s because Dylan has been famously reticent when it comes to talking about the sources or motivations of his work. “I did that accidentally,” he told me in 1986, discussing his early years of songwriting. “That was all accidental…. You’re doing something, you don’t know what it is, you’re just doing it. And later on you’ll look at it and …” His words trailed off, then he began again. “To me, I don’t have a ’career.’ A career is something you can look back on, and I’m not ready to look back
At MusiCares, Dylan showed up ready to look back. Following a night of tribute performances by other artists—including Beck, Willie Nelson, Sheryl Crow, Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young—and an introduction by former President Jimmy Carter, Dylan held forth for over thirty minutes before an audience of 3000, at the Los Angeles Convention Center. The soliloquy was part autobiography, part revelation, as well as comic monologue and, at moments, scathing, but every turn offered some bold epiphany or another. “I'm glad for my songs to be honored like this,” Dylan began. “But you know, they didn't get here by themselves. It's been a long road and it's taken a lot of doing. These songs of mine, they're like mystery stories, the kind that Shakespeare saw when he was growing up. I think you could trace what I do back that far. They were on the fringes then, and I think they're on the fringes now. And they sound like they've been on the hard ground.”
Dylan staked claims that evening: to an ethereal but hardscrabble lineage, something passed along through ages and minds and voices—a heritage he expanded and transfigured. He owed to some helping hands along the way, he admitted: Columbia Records producer and talent scout John Hammond (“He signed me to that label when I was nobody. It took a lot of faith....); folk singer Joan Baez (“She'd tell everybody in no uncertain terms, ‘Now you better be quiet and listen to the songs’"); Peter, Paul and Mary (“They took [‘Blowin’ in the Wind’] and turned it into a hit song…they straightened it out”); and the Byrds, the Turtles and Sonny & Cher (“Their versions of [my] songs were like commercials, but I didn't really mind”). However, when it came to talking about country singer Johnny Cash, who recorded some Dylan songs in 1963, Dylan turned a corner and revealed a deeper kind of debt: “Johnny Cash was a giant of a man…. I heard many of his songs growing up. I knew them better than I knew my own. ‘Big River,’ ‘I Walk the Line.’ ‘How high's the water, Mama?’ I wrote ‘It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)’ with that song reverberating inside my head. I still ask, ‘How high is the water, mama?’
That form of influence—absorbing earlier words and voices, the history they carried, the promises they implied—was crucial to Dylan’s work and its effects. Over the years we’ve often thought—understandably—of his songs as a rupture, without real precedent in popular music. But with his late-1960s albums, John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait, Dylan made plain that he had never intended to renounce all that had preceded him. He was, if anything, a legatee or alchemist rather than an insurgent, and he possessed an ineradicable love for his inheritance. “These songs,” he said at MusiCares, talking about the music that made his name, “didn't come out of thin air. I didn't just make them up out of whole cloth….there was a precedent. It all came out of traditional music: traditional folk music, traditional rock 'n' roll and traditional big-band swing orchestra music. I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs…, and they gave me the code for everything that's fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.…. If you sang ‘John Henry’ as many times as me—‘John Henry said a man ain't nothin' but a man/Before I let that steam drill drive me down/I'll die with that hammer in my hand.’ If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you'd have written ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too.”
Dylan hit his stride in these minutes. Speaking in a cadence that resembled the inflection of his singing, he ran through instances of folk songs and blues lyrics and artists, illustrating how the language and reveries in these timeworn antecedents sometimes rubbed off on his own poetry. Big Bill Broonzy’s “Key to the Highway,” he said, planted seeds for “Highway 61.” He also cited lines from traditional songs—ballads, blues, spirituals, work songs—that worked as precursors to “Boots of Spanish Leather” and “Maggie’s Farm,” and he noted the cumulative effect of singing what he called “come all of you” songs that guided him to write some early lines that changed the world: “Come gather 'round people/Wherever you roam/Admit that the waters around you have grown.” These examples added up to a litany: a grateful tracing of the subterranean creative process that took root and helped Dylan find his own songs. “You'd have written them too,” he said. “There's nothing secret about it. You just do it subliminally and unconsciously, because that's all enough, and that's all I sang. That was all that was dear to me. They were the only kinds of songs that made sense.”
But his own work didn’t always sit right with others. “Right from the start, my songs were divisive for some reason…,” Dylan said. “Last thing I thought of was who cared about what song I was writing…. I didn't think I was doing anything different. I thought I was just extending the line. Maybe a little bit unruly…, but so what?” The “so what,” though, was a feint. Dylan had in fact taken stock of several slights over the years from songwriters, producers and singers—affronts hardly anybody else knew about—and he unloaded a few that night. “I didn't really care what Lieber and Stoller thought of my songs,” he said, referring to Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, the team that wrote “Hound Dog” for Elvis Presley as well as several hits for the Drifters and the Coasters. “They didn't like 'em…. That was all right that they didn't like 'em, because I never liked their songs either. ‘Yakety yak, don't talk back.’ ‘Charlie Brown is a clown…’ Novelty songs. They weren't saying anything serious.” Dylan also rebuked others. “Merle Haggard didn't even think much of my songs…. He didn't say that to me, but I know. Buck Owens did, and he recorded some of my early songs…. If you have to have somebody's blessing—you figure it out.” Dylan was in effect measuring the worth—or lack—of others by their estimation of his own work.
He saved his most out-of-the-blue—and hilarious—scorn for country music artist Tom T. Hall. (Hall, now 78, composed 1968’s “Harper Valley PTA” for Jeannie C. Riley.) “Tom and a few other writers,” said Dylan, “had the whole Nashville scene sewed up in a box”—until Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down”: a number one country hit for Johnny Cash in 1970, about a stoned and lonely man. “That one song ruined Tom T. Hall's poker parties,” Dylan said. “It might have sent him to the crazy house. God forbid he ever heard any of my songs”—then Dylan quoted the well-known lines from “Ballad of a Thin Man”: “You know something is happening here/But you don’t know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?” Dylan went on: “If ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ rattled Tom's cage, sent him into the looney bin, my song surely would have made him blow his brains out, right there in the minivan. Hopefully he didn't hear it.” Dylan’s invective about Haggard and Hall left some puzzled. Hall in fact has great for Kristofferson; Haggard, who once planned a tribute album to Dylan, and recently recorded a duet of “Don’t Think Twice” with Willie Nelson, responded on Twitter: “Bob Dylan I've admired your songs since 1964.” Dylan later clarified his remarks on Haggard: “I wasn’t dissing Merle, not the Merle I know. What I was talking about happened a long time ago, maybe in the late sixties. Merle had that song out called ‘Fighting Side of Me’ and I’d seen an interview with him where he was going on about hippies and Dylan and the counterculture, and it kind of stuck in my mind and hurt, lumping me in with everything he didn't like. But of course times have changed and he’s changed too. If hippies were around today, he’d be on their side and he himself is part of the counterculture…. I wasn’t dissing Merle at all, we were different people back then. Those were difficult times. It was more intense back then and things hit harder and hurt more.”
Hurt—that makes sense. We sometimes lash back at people and memories that hurt us. It’s hardly out of character for Dylan. It was his unsparing tongue, after all, that helped secure his reputation. One of his first popular singles, “Positively 4th Street,” was a spiteful putdown of former colleagues from the Greenwich Village music scene (“You know as well as me/You’d rather see me paralyzed/Why don’t you just come out once/And scream it?”). Later, in Blood on the Tracks and Time Out of Mind, Dylan tore through lovers and landscapes in the same sneering breath. That angry world-weariness was no doubt something else Dylan grasped from folk and blues sensibilities, but his resentments also served larger purposes. In songs like “With God on Our Side,” “When the Ship Comes In,” “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Early Roman Kings” from 2013’s Tempest, Dylan aimed his derision at mortal folly, at the problem of what it means to seek meaning in morally centerless times. You look at that specter long enough and you might write songs about it too.
The greater puzzle is that, after all these years, Bob Dylan still feels he’s the subject of some sort of critical misjudgment. It was refreshing when he tore into those who have attacked his vocals—“Critics say I can't carry a tune and I talk my way through a song”—because in truth Dylan’s singing is nonpareil, like Billie Holiday’s or Frank Sinatra’s. Nevertheless, Dylan three times in the speech used a phrase perhaps borrowed from Kris Kristofferson: “Why me, Lord?” He was milking the line for comic timing—hearing the speech has a different impact than reading it—but he wasn’t insincere. “Critics have made a career out of accusing me of having a career of confounding expectations,” he said. “Really? Because that's all I do…. Confounding expectations. What does that mean? Why me, Lord?”
The answer to that question is also the answer to why Dylan received the honor that night: because of his work, because of what he’s done, because of his mysteries, his revelations, his restless pilgrimage—because of the new territories and possibilities he opened up in twentieth-century music, that still resound in the twenty-first. It’s good, of course, that he’s never relied on our praise, and that he doesn’t abide by our occasional snide carping. Still, Bob Dylan received the MusiCares distinction—and other accolades in recent years— because in the life he’s lived, and in the times he’s lived it, he has stayed constant to the calling that he both inherited and chose, the vocation that he honored in his unrivaled speech: namely, uncovering truths from the past—desolate, fearless, sublime—then deepening and extending them until they reveal startling new divulgences that we never heard before.
Mikal Gilmore
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