Majestic Performance of Dylan Song By Patti Smith at Nobel Prize Awards

[+ WilliamM]

 

It's A Hard Rain....... Stockholm: December 10, 2016

 

While most of the attention will be on Smith forgetting some words early on. She recovers and sings the song brilliantly, especially at the end.

[+ nycman]

Wow....she really does pull it off in the end.

 

Btw...when the FUCK did Patti Smith get OLD?......grin

 

And now to tie two threads together....who can name the man in this picture with Patti?

 

http://thefilmexperience.net/storage/1970s/justkids-famousportrait.jpg?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1439328078417

[+ purplekow]

Its a hard, its a hard, its a hard song to sing.

[+ Keith30309]

Robert M... at the Chelsea hotel before he became really famous. Check out "Just Kids" - an excellent read.

And she is a living legend.

[+ Charlie]

I used to see them hanging around 14th Street in the 1960s, when I lived in the neighborhood. Of course, I didn't know who they were then, just an interesting-looking couple.

[Jim Corrigan]

Wow! Chilling considering the current state of the union

Even more chilling than when he wrote it over 50 yrs ago

[+ WilliamM]

Btw...when the FUCK did Patti Smith get OLD?......grin

 

Patti Smith turns 70-years old this month. I believe her first album (Horses) dropped in 1975. I saw her perform for the first time a few days after Christmas that year at The Bottom Line in NYC. LOL I was born a few days before Mick Jagger in July, 1943, so I do not think of Smith as "old."

[sydneyboy]

I played a number of you tube clips of this song most of course by Dylan himself but this rendition beats them all. Bravo!

[sydneyboy]

Further to my previous post. I have played this clip over and over again this afternoon (Sydney time). Rarely have I been so moved by a contemporary song. Her conviction, emotion, obvious feeling for words is remarkable. I suspect her stumble was due more to emotion than nerves. I was unashamedly in tears on each hearing. Again, Bravo!

[+ WilliamM]

THE NEW YORKER

 

"How Does It Feel" by Patti Smith

 

"And then suddenly it was time. The orchestra was arranged on the balcony overlooking the stage, where the King, the royal family, and the laureates were seated. I sat next to the conductor. The evening’s proceedings went as planned. As I sat there, I imagined laureates of the past walking toward the King to accept their medals. Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus. Then Bob Dylan was announced as the Nobel Laureate in Literature, and I felt my heart pounding. After a moving speech dedicated to him was read, I heard my name spoken and I rose. As if in a fairy tale, I stood before the Swedish King and Queen and some of the great minds of the world, armed with a song in which every line encoded the experience and resilience of the poet who penned them.

 

The opening chords of the song were introduced, and I heard myself singing. The first verse was passable, a bit shaky, but I was certain I would settle. But instead I was struck with a plethora of emotions, avalanching with such intensity that I was unable to negotiate them. From the corner of my eye, I could see the the huge boom stand of the television camera, and all the dignitaries upon the stage and the people beyond. Unaccustomed to such an overwhelming case of nerves, I was unable to continue. I hadn’t forgotten the words that were now a part of me. I was simply unable to draw them out.

 

This strange phenomenon did not diminish or pass but stayed cruelly with me. I was obliged to stop and ask pardon and then attempt again while in this state and sang with all my being, yet still stumbling. It was not lost on me that the narrative of the song begins with the words “I stumbled alongside of twelve misty mountains..........'

[AdamSmith]

One can forget how insistent, and inexorable, this song is.

 

One of our monuments.

 

As is she.

[AdamSmith]

Listening to this over and over, it struck me I can't think of anyone but Smith who could perform this song with her authority. Of every kind.

 

Anyone else but Dylan himself would just do a cover, a tribute.

 

Patti's aesthetic and emotional and intellectual presentation of the song are equal to the song itself. Just can't think of anybody else who could rise to it.

 

Her being overwhelmed there in the middle is the proof, very visibly so. The live audience got that right away. I like them greatly for that, and credence them a lot more than I would have from the stuffy static optics alone.

[AdamSmith]

This might be an apposite place to remember Dylan's White House performance in front of Obama & co. As if foreseeing the Trump bonfire to come.

 

 

It occurs just now that this was, in one of its aspects, Dylan cannily rehearing and performing The Times They Are A'Changing in the voice and mode of Obama himself.

[AdamSmith]

Wonderful appreciation by (astoundingly) a WSJ reporter: https://www.google.com/amp/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/my-seat-at-the-nobel-prize-award-ceremony-1481911050?client=safari

"I thought back to when the Dylan song was new. Then, I interpreted its central image as a prophecy of cleansing rain; today, its surreal, dystopian panorama seems ominously well matched to the news."

[AdamSmith]

Dylan's incredibly great acceptance 'speech.'

 

Read this very deeply.

 

Speaking personally, this is the best ever in my 57 years.

 

Over and out.

 

https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/dylan-speech.html

[+ nycman]

Dylan's incredibly great acceptance 'speech.'

 

Too bad he wasn't there to deliver it in person.

 

You're a song writer...who won the Nobel Prize in Literature...and you couldn't be bothered to show up?

 

Sorry, I was never a fan...now?...less so.

[AdamSmith]

Too bad he wasn't there to deliver it in person.

 

You're a song writer...who won the Nobel Prize in Literature...and you couldn't be bothered to show up?

 

Sorry, I was never a fan...now?...less so.

An artist whom the Nobel people themselves acclaimed as possessing Homeric attributes is required to pay obeisance to these poetasters distributing the largesse of the inventor of dynamite?

 

It is indeed a profound modesty, if you can see it, to stand in deep background, and let Patti bring your art to life for you, and for them, as your contribution to what genuineness such after all pretty hollow ceremony can reach toward.

[AdamSmith]

Dylan one time slyly remarked to Jagger, "You know, I could have written 'Sympathy for the Devil,' but you couldn't have written 'Tambourine Man.'"

 

[AdamSmith]

And his insight that if he himself showed up to sing it, great risk of being too easily received as Performing Seal.

 

But if he asked Patti...

 

...she (being a Force of Nature herself) might conceivably deliver them the song as the Force of Nature that it is.

[+ Keith30309]

I recall hearing a high school teacher play a tape of Subterrannean Homesick Blues to a media class and being completely baffled. We though we were very clever, listening over and over again decyphering the lyrics with occasional, gentle nudges from our teacher. This went on for a few days and he chuckled every time a bit of slang or reference became clear to us.

[+ nycman]

And his insight that if he himself showed up to sing it.....

 

I call shenanigans.

 

Show up and be grateful you've received one of the highest honors mankind can bestow....

 

or...don't...and look like an ass.

 

He choose poorly....despite the fact that Patti was almost amazing.

[+ WilliamM]

 

How about a break from the discussion for a Dylan Christmas song, sort of.

[AdamSmith]

I call shenanigans.

 

Show up and be grateful you've received one of the highest honors mankind can bestow....

 

or...don't...and look like an ass.

 

He choose poorly....despite the fact that Patti was almost amazing.

Well, we must agree to disagree on this.

 

There is a long catalog of serious critique of the Nobel Academy's aesthetic and political scleroses of vision across the years in their arts awards. (Those exist too in their science awards, but that's a different line of analysis.) Which they magnificently overcame here, but big whoop in the grand scheme. I think you genuflect to them too much.

 

Of course everyone must make his own judgment.

[AdamSmith]

Patti was almost amazing.

And to add: that is unimaginably condescending.

 

These artists summon themselves out of themselves to scale heights you and I would never have known existed.

[AdamSmith]

And to add: that is unimaginably condescending.

 

These artists summon themselves out of themselves to scale heights you and I would never have known existed.

To put it another way.

 

These aesthetic achievements are as physicist Eugene Wigner's 'Cave of the Hot Winds' computational group within the Manhattan Project, up on the Los Alamos mesa, where other project workers could go with questions, and in real time, just computing in their heads, Wigner and his group would give them answers to far worse than, to quote one source, "those equations that lurk dragon-like in the last chapters of advanced calculus texts."