Full Text of Bob Dylan’s Lengthy, Career-Spanning, Critic-Bashing MusiCares Speech Revealed

The MusiCares Foundation is an arm of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (who put on the annual Grammy awards) that provides medical care for musicians in need. As previously reported, over the weekend, they held a benefit honoring Bob Dylan as their Person of the Year, with performances from Jack White, Beck, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Willie Nelson, and others. Dylan also gave a lengthy speech in which he took aim at various critics.

Now, Rolling Stone has published the full transcript of the speech. Read it here.

At the beginning, Dylan spent several minutes talking about artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, the Staples Singers, and Johnny Cash, who helped him out at the start of his career. Specifically, he mentioned artists like the Byrds, the Turtles, and Sonny & Cher, who recorded some of his early songs as pop hits. “I wasn’t a pop songwriter and I really didn’t want to be that, but it was good that it happened,” he said. “Their versions of my songs were like commercials, but I didn’t really mind that, because 50 years later, my songs were being used in the commercials.”

He also talked about how much he owed Joan Baez, with whom he was romantically involved at the start of his career. In particular, he said she supported his music when people tried to tell her otherwise. “Joan Baez is as tough-minded as they come. Loyal, free minded, and fiercely independent,” he said. “Nobody can tell her what to do if she doesn’t want to do it. I learned a lot of things from her. A woman of devastating honesty. And for her kind of love and devotion, I could never pay that back.”

Dylan also spent a bit of time quoting from songs he’s written and the songs they were inspired by, drawing explicit connections between the folk standards he played as a young artist and the original lyrics he ended up writing. “There’s nothing secret about it,” he said. “You just do it subliminally and unconsciously, because that’s all enough, and that’s all you know. That was all that was dear to me. They were the only kinds of songs that made sense.”

He also addressed critics who have remarked over the years that he can’t sing, saying that artists like Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen never run into those criticisms. “Sam Cooke said this when told he had a beautiful voice: He said, ‘Well that’s very kind of you, but voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are. Instead they matter only if they convince you that they are telling the truth,’” Dylan said. “Think about that the next time you are listening to a singer.”

Finally, he ended on a characteristically abstract point: “I’m going to put an egg in my shoe and beat it. I probably left out a lot of people and said too much about some. But that’s OK.”

Read the whole thing here. 

Here’s the Byrds’ version of Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man”:

Comments are closed.