Patti Smith reveals why she fluffed a Bob Dylan lyric at the Nobel Prize Ceremony
The 'godmother of punk' was asked to perform at the ceremony in Stockholm, with Dylan unable to attend due to previous commitments
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Your support makes all the difference.Bob Dylan's relative casual attitude to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature is already a little infamous in academic and artistic circles.
The legendary musician went MIA on the Nobel Prize panel after his win, finally then responding to say he was left "speechless" by the award, which hails him as "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition".
He then, however, announced that he would not be travelling to Sweden to collect the prize due to prior commitments; instead sending Patti Smith to perform 'A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall' at the ceremony in Stockholm on the 10 December.
An honour Smith certainly didn't take lightly; the musician notably stumbling over her words but quickly, and graciously, apologising for the minor slip-up. "I’m sorry. Could we start that section, I apologise. Sorry, I’m so nervous," she said, prompting a round of applause from the crowd.
The "godmother of punk" has now taken to the New Yorker to write a candid essay on her experience, and to clarify that she didn't forget the words, but was merely overwhelmed by the scale and significance of the occasion.
She writes that she has loved 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall' since she was a teenager; rehearsing it so obsessively in the run-up to the ceremony that the words "were now a part of me", but that she was "simply unable to draw them out". On the morning of the ceremony, "I thought of my mother, who bought me my first Dylan album when I was barely sixteen."
"It occurred to me then that, although I did not live in the time of Arthur Rimbaud, I existed in the time of Bob Dylan," she concludes. "I also thought of my husband and remembered performing the song together, picturing his hands forming the chords." She reiterates that she was given a warm welcome at the ceremony, saying that the experience made her "come to terms with the truer nature of my duty".
"Why do we commit our work? Why do we perform?" she writes. "It is above all for the entertainment and transformation of the people. It is all for them. The song asked for nothing. The creator of the song asked for nothing. So why should I ask for anything?"
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