On November 22, 1963,
when the world and I could not seem to stop crying, my mother gave me a copy of
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan that she
had bought for me as a Christmas present. (I have written of this before; you
can find a link below.) Last night, as our fresh tears only began to flow while a
plague settled further upon us, that day and Dylan both returned to me in a
great rush.
Shock and gratitude
simultaneously flooded every cell in my body as I listened for the first time
to “Murder Most Foul,” a new and totally unexpected Dylan song that was sent
along late Thursday evening by his publicity representative.
As this hushed,
torrential thing unspooled over the course of 17 surprising minutes, I first
was stricken by my recollection of the first time I ever heard Dylan’s voice, on
the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated; the murder is the subject of the new
work. Then, over the course of five or six more auditions, in the deepening
darkness of my bedroom as night fully settled, the personal echoes receded, and
I began to take a new measure of the musician’s considerable art.
If you are looking for a
compelling melody to draw you in, you will search in vain here. “Murder Most
Foul” seesaws on three lapping chords that repeat predictably over the full
length of the song; the accompanists (so far unnamed) – piano, two or maybe
three strings, the brushed drums we’ve grown accustomed to – do their best to obscure even that slight form by playing
slightly out of synch with one another.
Dylan himself does not
so much sing as chant; he sounds less rough than on his releases of the last
five years. He is in bardic voice (and more will be said about that other Bard
here anon), and it feels ancient. One expects a lyre in the mix. Given the epic
form, I found myself thinking of the passages in “The Iliad” in which Homer
enumerates the fates of his dying warriors on the Trojan battlefield.
Anyone who was young and
engaged by the Kennedy mythos in 1963 will experience something primal while
listening to this song. The killing has plainly remained vivid for Dylan, who
was 22 years old at the time. The event is depicted in harsh, graphic terms;
there is even a reference mid-song to the autopsy (which leaves the fate of the
president’s soul a mystery). Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby are mentioned in
passing, but old-school conspiracy theorists will likely embrace Dylan’s not terribly veiled
suggestion that the assassination was a mob hit. A couple of gangland
references – most especially the line “it is what it is,” a coded reference to
violence from Martin Scorsese’s The
Irishman – lead one to believe that all these years later Bob does not
embrace the Warren Report’s conclusions.
More than one
Dylanologist will draw comparisons with such lengthy tracks as “Highlands,”
from Time Out of Mind, or “Tempest,”
the title track from the most recent collection of original material, released
eight years ago before a turn to the Great American Songbook. Though in its
form it more closely resembles the latter number, which served as a modern
rewrite of/comment on the many antique ballads devoted to the sinking of the Titanic, “Murder Most Foul” does not
play out as a tombstone blues like “He Was a Friend of Mine,” which was
frequently essayed by American folkies (and folk-rock acts like the Byrds) in
the wake of Kennedy’s death, and which Dylan himself recorded in 1961.
The new song’s title is
drawn from a phrase first heard in Hamlet,
and Dylan is going for something of Shakespearean breadth and density in the
song. At one point, he tears himself away from the Kennedy narrative and leaps
forward in time – to the comforting arrival of the Beatles (and Gerry and the Pacemakers!)
on U.S. shores in the months following the assassination, and then on to the
false Eden of Woodstock and the mud of Altamont. Nearing the 10-minute mark,
with a tip of his hat to Tom Jones and Ray Charles, he arrives at the crux of
the song:
What’s new pussycat, what’d i say?
I said the soul of a nation been torn away
And it’s beginning to go into a slow decay
And that it’s 36 hours past judgment day
And then, suddenly, we are in the back of an ambulance
delivering the mortally wounded president to Parkland Memorial Hospital in
Dallas. Behind the wheel, the driver is listening to Wolfman Jack, the raving,
howling disc jockey who in 1963 was the star attraction at XERF, a “border blaster”
station that blanketed America with its 250,000 watts of radio power. And, as
Jack “speaks in tongues,” from that radio suddenly courses the history of
American music…
Nina Simone, the Eagles, the Beach Boys, Bob Wills, Junior
Parker (and Elvis), Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz, the Allman Brothers, Monk and
Bird, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, Nat King Cole, Billy Joe Royal
(serenading Marlon Brando), Smiley Lewis, Randy Newman, Jelly Roll Morton,
Little Richard, Little Walter, Bud Powell…
…and Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, and Bugsy Siegel and
Pretty Boy Floyd, and Shylock and Lady Macbeth…
Until finally, as
Wolfman Jack plays “the bloodstained banner…murder most foul,” nearly 250 years
of American political and cultural history dissipate in the last evanescent
chords of Dylan’s historical magnum opus.
Though he has written other things of
comparable length, I don’t believe he has displayed this sort of creative reach
since he unleashed “Desolation Row” upon his unsuspecting public in 1965. As a friend
aptly commented last night after hearing it for the first time, “That’s quite a
big song.” Indeed, it contains multitudes not even touched on here that I will be parsing in the
days to come.
It is either a feat of
extraordinary prescience or an accident of fate that “Murder Most Foul,” about
the loss of a president who to many represented a beacon of hope for America,
was created and then released as our citizens are bunkered in their homes, as
another president’s every horrific, soulless action pushes the country closer to the abyss,
as the national clock ticks closer to midnight. Dylan’s song is about the
death of something in this nation, where it may have begun and how it
proceeded, but it also reminds us of many of the things that make life in this
nation worth living.
One of those things for
me is the music of Bob Dylan, and today and forever I am grateful for it.