Bob Dylan's Apocalyptic Carousel

It's a moment when billions on the planet are locked inside their homes, fearful of a virus that condemns only a portion of those who fall ill to die without their families, choking for breath in their own fluids. Nations fall silent. Global commerce is slowed to a trickle. For not the first time in history, the structures of government, business, entertainment and religion, insulated for so long in their own technology and assumptions about the world, lie helpless before a silent, microscopic killer. The citizens of the world are reminded once again that they are mortal, that they can be held prisoner by forces that seem impersonal and uncaring to their individual stories. Whatever their plans were weeks ago, the only reality now for billions is the steady accumulation of time, of living day to day, hoping that this moment will pass and they will still be alive. It's a moment that calls to mind prophecy, fable, stories going back before recorded time.

And into the middle of that comes the longest song in Bob Dylan's nearly 60-year catalog. At midnight Friday, Dylan released "Murder Most Foul," a rolling, kaliedoscopic meditation which begins with the 1963 Kennedy Assassination and veers off into the collective unconsciousness; it is a work at home in Dylan's oeuvre, timely and timeless, playful and tragic. It also illustrates the weird alchemy that recorded music has with moments in time. "Murder Most Foul" would seem to have nothing to do with the moment it bursts into, yet, because of Dylan's place in the history of popular music, and the character of his work, it seems to have everything to do with the moment.

Bear with me while I restate a few details to set up a point. Bob Dylan began recording in 1961, obviously, during the Kennedy Administration. He came clothed in the garb of a folk singer, but Dylan did not just record murder ballads, old spirituals, songs of war and romance, handed down. Dylan wrote his own fresh material, but what  he called "finger pointing songs," their details borrowed from newspaper accounts, and anthems of the time with their images pulled from Scripture. It was after the Kennedy Assassination that Dylan began drifting away from the traditional platform and migrated to electric rock and roll. The long, playful, abstract tracks on his early albums morphed into long, free-association meandering parables, where jokes sit side-by-side with bits of philosophy, apocalyptic humor and seeming pseudo-poetic nonsense. "Murder Most Foul," at first listen, would seem to call back to that beginning, and tempt one to see it as a summation of Dylan's career and the sixties era that he, among others, represents in the public consciousness.

Through that prism, "Murder Most Foul" would seem to be at home with those early murder ballads. But what one hears isn't that. A murder ballad usually adheres to almost reportorial recounting of the basic facts of whatever story is being recounted. Think, for example, of Dylan's version of the classic "Stack-o-Lee"

Hawlin Alley on a dark and drizzly night,
Billy Lyons and Stack-a-Lee had one terrible fight.
All about that John B. Stetson hat.

Though it is unnecessary, as the facts are more or less engrained in the American imagination, it might be worthwhile to look at the lead story on the front page of The New York Times, Nov. 23, 1963, dictated by a weeping Tom Wicker from Dallas:

 DALLAS, Nov. 22 - President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot and killed by an assassin today. He died of a bullet wound in the brain caused by a rifle bullet that was fired at him as he was riding through downtown Dallas in a motorcade. Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was riding in the third car behind Mr. Kennedy's, was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States 99 minutes after Mr. Kennedy's death. Mr. Johnson is 55 years old. Mr. Kennedy was 46. 
Shortly after the assassination, Lee H. Oswald, described as a onetime defector to the Soviet Union, active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, was arrested by the Dallas police. Tonight he was accused of the killing. Oswald, 24 years old, was also accused of slaying a policeman who had approached him on the street. Oswald was subdued after a scuffle with a second police officer in a nearby theater.

"Murder Most Foul" begins with the scene setting, "It was a dark day in Dallas, November '63," and then meanders back and forth in time, Dylan scatting in and out of the moment, at least through the end of the first stanza (?), ruminating on the moment of the killing with observations (Greatest magic trick ever under the sun, Perfectly executed, skillfully done) and the thoughts of a faceless "we" either responsible for the crime, or responsible for the quick disposal of fate (We've already got someone here to take your place).
 By the second stanza, though, we're onto the Beatles, who released their second British album on Nov. 22 but wouldn't burst into the American scene until three months later. Then a few verses later Woodstock and Altamont, another six years down the road. Another few verses and we veer back, with mentions of the Grassy Knoll and "Don't say Dallas doesn't love you, Mr. President" - the last words JFK probably heard in his life, uttered by Nellie Connally in the Lincoln limousine just before the first shot was fired. 

In a sense, the song is a cousin to "Tempest," Dylan's almost 14-minute song about the sinking of the Titanic, released in 2012. But that song was a more traditional folk ballad, which told the story of the ship and the passengers fighting for survival, with a few images from the James Cameron movie tucked in beside. But we see, on closer inspection, "Murder Most Foul" is not really a song about the Kennedy Assassination as an actual event. It might be more accurately described as a song about the Kennedy Assassination as a cultural event, with all of its funhouse of bizarre characters, conspiracy theories, memorable phrases, macabre imagery and pathos - tragedy as an moment of entertainment, sitting side-by-side with the movies, pop, soul and country music. What can one say about a lyric such as, "I'm just a patsy like Patsy Cline" - an absurd, ridiculous phrase, so typical of Dylan's humor, that mixes Oswald's statement to reporters in the Dallas Police Headquarters with the doomed siren of country music.

It has become a lazy, shorthand explanation to say that the killing of John F. Kennedy was "the moment America lost its innocence." Some say the Sixties "began" with the killing, with all of the chaos and tragedy and societal change spiraling out of Oswald's Mannlicher Carcano rifle. Even Bobby Kennedy, the day Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, was heard saying to one of his aides that he believed Oswald had unleashed something awful in the country. But a year before, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the world stood under the very real possibility of global nuclear annihilation for almost two weeks. Two months before Dallas, the U.S. was horrified at the 16th St. Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala. Whatever innocence is mourned in retrospect did not disappear in the spray on Zapruder's film. 

Instead, almost 60 years in the past, the assassination is merely the tee upon which Dylan places his imagination, vaulting the president's motorcade into the ether so it can dwell in a kind of folk afterlife where Stack-a-Lee is always at Billy Lyon's throat, where Frankie and Johnny are poised for combat, where John Henry still swings his hammer and Tom Dooley waits for the noose. The song's final stanza has Dylan calling out from his own remembered list of great songs and memorable films, old movie stars and personalities, Houdini taking a place with Jelly Roll Morton, all toward a restatement of the title. 

"Murder Most Foul" is what the ghost of Hamlet's father, the slain Danish monarch, calls his own death in urging his son to avenge him. "Adieu, adieu, remember me," he says, before leaving his son to his dread purpose. In the film "JFK," the character of Jim Garrison likens Kennedy's killing to the murder of King Hamlet, that the country longs for a slain father figure. "Do not forget your dying king," he urges the jury, charged with wading into a conspiracy. By evoking Shakespeare, Dylan wraps his tale(?) in the words of the Bard. But it is his own, utterly unique vision, cranky and creaky and cryptic, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as viewed through a peep-hole in a tent at the county fair, when the viewer has just taken a puff from an exotic cigarette. Where Jacqueline Kennedy is the bearded lady, Oswald runs the target shooting booth, and Jack Ruby is the guy dickering with you over how big a stuffed animal you can ride home with. 

Home. At the moment, we are all trapped in our homes. Instead of the daily trickle of news, earthquakes, celebrity divorces, mass shootings, sexual scandals, we are witness to daily numbers, escalating exponentially, and the collective witness of mass spectacle. Celebrities and public officials urging people to stay indoors, to staunch the spread of COVID-19, give a phrase that calls back to war - "We're all in this together," even though we are all apart as never before. But in a strange way, that is what makes "Murder Most Foul" appropriate to the moment. Most people alive today did not live through the Kennedy Assassination, but they have experienced it in much the same way as the globe did in 1963 - through media. Most people who contract COVID-19 won't need hospitalization, or a ventilator. But those who don't get sick will long remember the television shots of corpses being loaded onto trucks, Twitter photos of exhausted doctors and nurses, and the long hours and shared terrors with friends and loved ones in their homes, waiting for it all to be over. 

I previously wrote about Bob Dylan here.
I wrote about the 50th anniversary of CBS's coverage of the Kennedy Assassination here. 

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here. 

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here. 

Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 

Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

The Hamlet Project: Richard Burton (1964)

Richard Burton’s Hamlet stands out amongst the “Hamlet” films as it is a filmed play – it was created during Burton’s 1964 run on Broadway, directed by John Gielgud. As such, it’s unique since it allows the audience to see the work as Shakespeare intended, on a stage, and with a great actor in command.

The film ran for a week in theaters and made an astonishing $6 million in that limited time. It survives because Burton kept a copy for himself when others were destroyed. It is not a conventional film, though it has different camera angles, close-ups, full stage views, but preserves the immediacy and intimacy of the stage. As the film opens, one can hear the crowd chatting before the curtain rises at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York City. Some of them may be talking about Martin Luther King Jr. or President Johnson. The Beatles are in the midst of their first U.S. tour. And Burton is at the height of his fame, age 39, still basking in the aftermath of his affair with Elizabeth Taylor during the making of “Cleopatra.”Gielgud said Burton struggled not so much with the role as the suffocating nature of his fame as part of "Liz and Dick."

The play ran for 138 performances, the longest run the play had on Broadway, and could have gone much longer except that Burton tired of it. The staging was reportedly the result of a bargain between Burton and Peter O’Toole, conceived during the filming of “Becket.” Burton appeared as the prince under the direction of Gielgud, but the play was staged in modern dress because of Burton's distaste for tights. The idea was to depict a “rehearsal” of the play, though the actors reportedly went through several variations before arriving at their “costumes.” Burton plays Hamlet in casual black. Gielgud “appears” as the ghost of King Hamlet, though only in a shadow projected against the wall, with a recording of his voice. There is very little staging, few props, a theater largely of the mind. 

It was the last time Burton tackled the role, and the last time Gielgud was involved in a stage production of the play. Burton had previously played it to great acclaim in the UK, even for Winston Churchill at the Old Vic. He later said he could hear the old man's rumble from the seats, reciting the words with him syllable for syllable. "And I could not shake him off … in ‘To be or not to be’ he was with me to the death.” That was the same run where Gielgud supposedly came to Burton's dressing room to take him to dinner, but there were so many visitors that he begged off. "Shall I go ahead," Gielgud asked, "or wait until you're better - I mean, ready?" It was a story Burton loved to recount, a measure of respect for the actor. Unfortunately, his turn as the ghost is our only filmed performance of Gielgud in the play, aside from a cameo as Priam in Kenneth Branagh's 1996 version of "Hamlet." 

The film can only preserve so much. Cast member Alfred Drake, who played Claudius, said that Burton had a theory that Hamlet “could be played a hundred ways, and he tested every one of them. Within one scene, you might get Heathcliff, Sir Toby Belch, and Peck’s Bad Boy.” Knowing this, we must be aware that we are only getting this particular performance recorded. 

 

Burton was obviously influenced by his director, who he saw in 1944 in the role. Gielgud, reportedly, was aware of academic readings of "Hamlet," but he was wary of theory, contemptuous of Freudian shadings, confident enough in his own interpretations. The story among the cast is that Gielgud knew every line of the play, and could recite each character's speeches, and the replies. In rehearsals, Gielgud reportedly spotted where Burton stole some of his mannerisms from his earlier performances, then remarked that he was the only person who would have recognized this. According to Jonathan Croall's Gielgud biography, the director knew Burton's performance would be more vigorous and extroverted than his own. His challenge, then, was to rein him in. Burton, showing what he could do on a stage, is playing to wake up the people in the cheap seats.

Acting on the stage is obviously different than film. To begin with, there's the presentation of the body. The stage actor has to be conscious of the fact that the audience can take in the sight of their entire body - because of this, their body language becomes part of the performance in a way that does not always happen in film. The film of Burton's "Hamlet" makes this clear in several ways.

At the appearance of the ghost, he hunches over in fear. As the ghost describes his murder, Burton’s Hamlet clutches his ear as if to take out his father’s poison. He crosses himself repeating the ghost’s parting words, “Adieu, adieu.” At the moment he realizes what he must do – “Oh, cursed spite!” – his voice breaks in recognition of his inadequacy. Still, his presence in the play has some of the same problems as Olivier's – he is too old to convincingly play a student, his face too world-weary and weathered. When his knowing anger appears at the coming of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, it’s hard to imagine him pausing in carrying out his father’s revenge.

Burton’s greatest gift as an actor was his incomparable voice, and he uses it to great effect throughout the play. "My whole concentration was on trying to remember the prose which is much more difficult than remembering the verse," he said. "I could recall the monologues with no trouble." 

But his performance threatens at times to overwhelm the rest of the cast. When Robert Milli’s Horatio says the ghost “harrows me with fear and wonder,” he hardly seems convincing. While Burton luxuriates in the rhythms of the language, some of the cast seem uneasy with the verses. Their movements, in the early going, appear stiff and reserved. Of course, the point of the play is not “realism,” but performance. It’s heightened reality, manic reality, “a fiction, in a dream of passion.” Gielgud later said his only help for Burton was to "show him how the more relaxed scenes were played so he wouldn't have to tear himself to shreds in scenes..."

The difference in cast members becomes more evident with the entrance of Polonius, played wonderfully by the scene-stealing Hume Cronyn. He ambles about the stage in business suit, leaning on his cane, flicking down his reading glasses, and spouting nostrums with self-satisfaction. His scenes questioning the would-be madman Hamlet (How say you by that?) ring all the comedy out of the lines. Cronyn isn’t treating Shakespeare as a holy text – he’s an actor embodying a role, not singing a song.

But there are times when Burton is. As Hamlet degenerates into his feigned madness, he struts and frets about the stage, slurs his words, holds his pauses, dances about in his own pleasure, and blows through the soliloquies occasionally at a speed that does not speak of reflection. This was particularly true of his “To be or not to be,” which seemed to come and go with hardly a ripple. Some of this is normal for a play, as an actor has to pace himself and hit the right moments, conserving energy. Perhaps this night, there were different areas where he wanted to hit the high notes.

I was particularly annoyed early in the play with Claudius, played by Alfred Drake. His presence seemed barely there to me, and his performance hardly rose at all to meet Burton through the first part of the play. But this was clearly his strategy, because he came to absolute life in his confession scene, and the character emerged in all three dimensions in a few seconds. Suddenly he wasn’t reciting Shakespeare with a cliched gravity but was a genuinely guilty, grieving man, confronted with the result of his crime. One can quibble with this direction though. Anyone with a knowledge of “Hamlet” knows what Claudius is up to from his first appearance. He’s of course, hiding in plain sight. Playing him as a man hiding his crime within the ceremony of office is one way to put a fresh face on the part. But I still felt Drake played it a little too nondescript in the beginning. His performance going forward until the end, though, redeemed some of the colorlessness of the early acts.

And Burton kept finding ways to bring out the humanity in Hamlet as the play continued. His tearful scene with Gertrude (Eileen Herlie) showed the prince’s love for his mother with only a hint of the Freudian patina that mars so many mid-20^th century productions. He puckishly kisses Claudius on the cheek as he leaves for England. And for me, his best scene was “How all occasions,” as his performance brought out all the shading and implications of the speech as a companion piece with “To be or not to be.” His Hamlet is now resolved, and ready to meet his fate. 

This reminds me of what Peter Ackroyd wrote of "Hamlet," that it is not necessarily a play where Hamlet declares who he is, but rather, who he is becoming. Burton's later speeches occasionally show flashes that Hamlet has emotionally moved from where he was at the play's beginning.

There was one interesting bit of staging in the final scene. Claudius retreats to the throne as Hamlet rushes at him with the poisoned cup. Claudius gasps and dies with his body sprawled on the throne. Hamlet, in his last lines, casts Claudius’ remains to the floor, points at his enemy, laughs in victory, and dies on his feet, slumping into Horatio’s arms. Horatio then places Hamlet's body on the throne, at last, just as Fortinbras enters to seize the kingdom, the unhappy rule of the turbulent prince ending before it could even begin. According to Croall, when Gielgud saw the film, he was dismayed, as by this performance Burton had lapsed back into the flamboyance and tricks the director had tried to restrain.

Because of the film, we see an exhausted Burton, spent from his three-hour performance, noticeably heaving for breath on the throne when he’s supposed to be dead. The camera proves a more pitiless observer than the bored patron dragged to the theater by his wife for an evening on the town. 

Previously: Toshiro Mifune

Also: Laurence Olivier 

Also: Kenneth Branagh

The opening: The Play's the Thing... 

Set Your Fields on Fire

The award-winning novel by William Thornton

Available now

Read the first chapter here

Some of the coverage of "Set Your Fields on Fire"

 You can order "Set Your Fields on Fire"for $14.99 through Amazon here.

It's also available on Kindle at $3.99 through Amazon here.
Read an interview I did with AL.com on the book here.   
Here's my appearance on the Charisma Network's CPOP Podcast. 
Here's an interview I did with The Anniston Star on the book. 
Shattered Magazine wrote a story about the book here. 
The Alabama Baptist wrote about the book here.
This piece appeared in the Marietta (Ga.) Daily Journal.
Here's the write-up from The Birmingham Times.
Read a story for Village Living here.
This story appeared in The Trussville Tribune and this video.

Here's my appearance on East Alabama Today.
Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here. 
Here's the write-up in The Gadsden Times on the book.
Read a piece I wrote for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
A piece about some inspiring works for me.

This is another interview with the fleegan book blog here. 

Read a piece I did for WestBow Press about writing the book here.
Read another interview with the fleegan book blog here.