Speechifyin’ — Bob Dylan Meets Tom Paine at the ECLC Civil Rights Dinner

Myth has it that in 1963 a drunk Bob Dylan ad-libbed a speech at the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC) “Bill of Rights” fund-raising dinner that didn’t mean much of anything except maybe as one of Dylan’s first steps in distancing himself from the progressive Left and finger-pointin’ songs. Even then, insulting his audience for their age, baldness, and patronization of “Negroes” would probably have been forgotten as a minor pothole on the road of Bob Dylan’s journey through life if not for Lee Harvey Oswald.

Dylan’s sentiment that he… “saw some of myself in [Oswald]” just a few weeks after the assassination elicited boos from the crowd and consternation in the ranks of the ECLC. The outcry was loud enough to compel the ECLC Board of Directors to justify their selection of the callow youth for the Tom Paine Award, including with their letter a New York Times review of Dylan’s Carnegie Hall concert, as well as a somewhat apology from Dylan himself.

As with Shakespeare, Bob Dylan’s works are for the ages. But sometimes it’s hard to fully understand why either Shakespeare or Dylan are talking about what they’re talking about without knowing how their thoughts were framed by the world they lived in; worlds both similar to and wildly different from ours. In Willy the Shake’s case, his world was torn apart by disagreements over the proper method of observing Christianity; a conflict reflected in almost all Shakespeare’s plays. In our boy Bobby’s case, we’re…