"My Back Pages": The Bob Dylan Song That Can Guide a Generation Lost in Protest

Whatever intent lay behind his words, the award speech is generally seen as the first signs of Dylan’s disillusionment with the 1960s folk protest movement. The following year, in a wide-ranging interview with Nat Hentoff published in The New Yorker, Dylan explained that he was done with “finger-pointing” songs.

The Foundation for Economic Education

"Fifteen years before publication of Solzhenitsyn’s most famous work, a 22-year-old Bob Dylan gleaned a startling truth about good and evil."

"Ah, but I was so much older then I'm younger than that now"

 . . “ 'I'm proud that I'm young. And I only wish that all you people who are sitting out here today or tonight weren't here,” said Dylan. “Because you people should be at the beach. You should be out there and you should be swimming and you should be just relaxing in the time you have to relax.”

"Many have written about Dylan’s speech that night—including Dylan himself, who days later penned a poetic explanation attempting to explain his thought process and the tumult of feelings he was experiencing.

"Whatever intent lay behind his words, the award speech is generally seen as the first signs of Dylan’s disillusionment with the 1960s folk protest movement. The following year, in a wide-ranging interview with Nat Hentoff published in The New Yorker, Dylan explained that he was done with “finger-pointing” songs.

“ 'Those records I’ve already made, I’ll stand behind them, but some of that was jumping into the scene to be heard and a lot of it was because I didn’t see anybody else doing that kind of thing,” Dylan told Hentoff. “Now a lot of people are doing finger-pointing songs. You know—pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know—be a spokesman.' ” . . .

. . . The danger is that in our righteous zeal we might come to believe we possess the knowledge and ability to shape the world in our own image, never realizing that each of us carries the potential to do evil as well as good.
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart,” Solzhenitsyn wrote in his masterpiece The Gulag Archipelago. “And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil.” . . .