Tradition with a capital T: Dylan at 80
It’s December 1963, and a roomful of liberal luminaries are gathered at New York’s Americana Hotel. They are here for the presentation of the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee’s prestigious Tom Paine Award, an accolade which, a year earlier, had been accepted by esteemed philosopher and anti-nuclear campaigner Bertrand Russell. If any in the audience have reservations about this year’s recipient, a 22-year-old folk singer called Bob Dylan, their skepticism will soon be vindicated.
In what must rank as one of the most cack-handed acceptance speeches in history, an evidently drunk Dylan begins with a surreal digression about the attendees’ lack of hair, his way of saying that maybe it’s time they made room for some younger voices in politics. “You people should be at the beach,” he informs them, “just relaxing in the time you have to relax. It is not an old people’s world.” Not that it really matters anyway, since, as Dylan goes on to say, “There’s no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there’s only up and down… And I’m trying to go up without thinking of anything trivial such as politics.” Strange way to thank an organisation which barely survived the McCarthyite witch-hunts, but Dylan isn’t finished. To a mounting chorus of boos, he takes the opportunity to express sympathy for Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin who had shot president John F. Kennedy less than a…
