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The other music event of the weekend was a banquet held by MusiCares, the charity organization that aids musicians in need. The banquet honored Bob Dylan for his career and his support, and he gave this astounding 30-minute acceptance speech.
He spends too much time complaining about the critical ink spilled over him — after all, it's better to provoke a 3,000-word twisted review than 40 words of praise. But the heart of it just connects hundreds of dots throughout his career. The forbears who inspired him, the contemporaries who excited him (and boosted him by covering his songs), the successors he's excited about. He lines up plenty that didn't earn his respect either, and shoots 'em down by name. He also tags the specific folk songs that triggered all his most legendary hits.
Johnny Cash recorded some of my songs early on, too, up in about '63, when he was all skin and bones. He traveled long, he traveled hard, but he was a hero of mine. 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?" Johnny was an intense character. And he saw that people were putting me down playing electric music, and he posted letters to magazines scolding people, telling them to shut up and let him sing.
In Johnny Cash's world -- hardcore Southern drama -- that kind of thing didn't exist. Nobody told anybody what to sing or what not to sing. They just didn't do that kind of thing. I'm always going to thank him for that. Johnny Cash was a giant of a man, the man in black. And I'll always cherish the friendship we had until the day there is no more days. |
It's poetic, it's as revealing as it is enigmatic, it's alternately warm and bitter. It's like a Dylan show in prose.
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