Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar), John Jackson (guitar), Cesar Diaz (guitar), Tony Garnier (bass), Ian Wallace (drums).
In 1991, Bob Dylan was presented with another Grammy. This time it was a Lifetime Achievement Award. The ceremony took place at Radio City Music Hall in New York, on February 20.
It was presented by Jack Nicholson, who also introduced Dylan at Live Aid. The results were just as controversial.
First, Dylan sang an almost unrecognizable version of "Masters Of War." Then after Nicholson presented him with a Lifetime Achievement award, Dylan gave an awkward, perplexing speech. You can see the entire presentation above.
Most people did not understand what Dylan said, or what he sang. Once again, he was ridiculed, and was dismissed as a has-been, or worse. However, some people did pick up on what Dylan was singing, what he was saying, and where it came from. Seth Rogovoy wrote about this incident in his book, Bob Dylan : Prophet, Mystic, Poet. It is reprinted here with his kind permission:
(Scribner)
On February 20, 1991, at one of the low points of his career as a recording artist, Dylan was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences at the thirty-third Grammy Awards ceremony, held at Radio City Music Hall in New York. After an introductory tribute by his number-one fan, actor Jack Nicholson, Dylan and band performed a nearly unrecognizable, unintelligible version of “Masters of War” – presumably a reference to the U.S. attack on Iraqi forces, “Operation Desert Storm,” which began just a few weeks earlier, in response to the Iraqi army’s occupation of Kuwait the previous fall.
After the song, Nicholson gave a visibly awkward Dylan his Grammy plaque, and left Dylan at the microphone to say a few words. After stumbling a bit, Dylan launched into a speech that, although nearly as unintelligible and mystifying as was his delivery on “Masters of War,” he seemed to have prepared and even memorized beforehand. Dylan mystified a worldwide TV audience of many millions by saying:
Well, my daddy, he didn’t leave me much – you know he was a very simple man, and he didn’t leave me a lot – but what he did tell me was this. He did say, son, he said…he said so many things, you know…. He say, you know it’s possible to become so defiled in this world that your own mother and father will abandon you, and if that happens, G-d will always believe in your own ability to mend your own ways.
While this undoubtedly left most people scratching their heads, a few watching that night, however, recognized these words as a paraphrase of a key verse in Psalm 27 – a psalm recited every day for the month leading up to and the weeks following the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The psalm, according to the Metsudah Siddur, “voices our prayer that God will be our light on Rosh Hashanah, enabling us to repel the darkness of sin through true repentance, and that He will be our salvation on Yom Kippur, through His compassionate atonement of our sins.”
Dylan apparently was familiar with the translation of Psalm 27 contained in the Metsudah Siddur – a modern prayerbook with English translation favored by baalei teshuvot, or returnees to Judaism, for its clarity of arrangement, its explanations of the prayers, and its linear, Hebrew-English translation. The passage to which Dylan referred in his speech – “When my father and mother abandon me, G-d will gather me up” [Psalms 27:10] – is appended in the Metsudah Siddur by an elaboration of Rabbi Shimshon Rafael Hirsch, the spiritual leader of traditional German Jewry in the mid-nineteenth century, rendered here as:
Even if I were so depraved that my own mother and father would abandon me to my own devices, God would still gather me up and believe in my ability to mend my ways.
Dylan clearly based his words on Hirsch’s elaboration of the verse in question, strongly suggesting that he was familiar with and in possession of this Orthodox Jewish prayerbook, perhaps recommended to him by a Chabad rabbi or by his Orthodox Jewish son-in-law, Peter Himmelman.
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