Free Bob Dylan by Andy Gill Page A

invited to accept the ECLC’s Tom Paine Award at a gala dinner at the Americana Hotel in New York. It was a great honor, the kind he couldn’t really refuse—the previous year’s recipient had been Bertrand Russell, the philosopher and anti-nuclear campaigner—but Dylan’s discomfiture was apparent from the start. “I looked down from the platform and saw a bunch of people who had nothing to do with my kind of politics,” he told Nat Hentoff later. “They were supposed to be on my side but I didn’t feel any connection with them.” The audience was substantially made up of older liberals, balding veterans of the Thirties left-wing struggles and victims of the McCarthyite communist witch-hunts of the Forties andFifties, but for the occasion, they had dressed up to the nines in furs and jewels. Dylan drank heavily and, when the time came for him to accept his award, he had to be collected from the men’s room, somewhat the worse for wear.
    His acceptance speech was disastrous, a nightmarish ramble which managed to offend just about everybody. He thanked them for the award on behalf of “everybody that went down to Cuba” because they were, like him, young people. “I only wish that all you people who are sitting out here tonight weren’t here and I could see all kind of faces with hair on their head and everything like that,” he burbled, “because you people should be at the beach.” That drew a few laughs, so he warmed to his theme of hair, or lack of it: “Old people, when their hair grows out, they should go out. And I look down to see the people that are governing me and making my rules, and they haven’t got any hair on their head. I get very uptight about it.”
    From there, he drifted on to the subject of race—“There’s no black and white, left and right to me anymore; there’s only up and down, and down is very close to the ground. And I’m trying to go up without thinking of anything trivial such as politics”—and his Negro friends, and then back to Cuba and then, in a classic faux pas , arrived by a roundabout route at the subject of Kennedy’s assassination. “I have to be honest, I just have to be,” he assured his audience, “as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly… what he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I, too, I saw some of myself in him… I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt in me. Not to go that far and shoot…” By this time, the appalled silence had turned to a chorus of boos and hisses, which Dylan tried to counter by garbled recourse to the Bill Of Rights and free speech, before he was hustled off the stage and out of the place.
    The audience was outraged. Was this youth really saying that he sympathized with the assassin? Why had he, of all people, been given the prestigious Tom Paine Award? Was this what the ECLC had sunk to? After the speech, the customary donations for the organization were taken from the audience. The depth of the crowd’s anger can be gauged by the $6,000 drop on the previous year’s donations.
    When he sobered up, Dylan was torn between remorse and a desire to explain, and so composed a poem, entitled A Message , which he sent to the ECLC. In it, he outlined the circumstances surrounding the speech, and offered to make up to the organization any losses it may havesustained. His reference to Lee Harvey Oswald, he implied, was as a metaphor for the times, not a direct reference to the assassination: “…if there’s violence in the times then/there must be violence in me/I am not a perfect mute/I hear the thunder an I can’t avoid hearin’ it…” It was some way short of an apology, and left intact his unflattering comparisons of the complacent old liberal audience with his young activist friends. A benefit concert was