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
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Story and video from WBRC Fox6 here.
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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.
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