I didn't think about November 22, 1963 much yesterday, as I usually do on one of the worst anniversaries of my and maybe your lifetime, because I was busy with all kinds of other things, including doing a little virtual concert at Philcon (a science fiction convention) of songs from my new album, Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time, my first new album in almost 50 years.
But I was on my son Simon's Tumblr page today, scrolling back through his posts, and came upon this one from back in March. The world has been so crazy since then and now, with Covid and the election, and I've been so immersed teaching online classes, writing, doing podcasts, and the like, that I didn't get a chance to listen to Dylan's "Murder Most Foul" until today.
It's the best Dylan lyric -- as in emotive power, tear up the street and rip up your soul, but maybe you can put it back together -- since, I don't know, "Hurricane"? -- and, no, actually, "Murder Most Foul" is a lot more than that. Because of its subject. The story of our lives, or everyone's who was alive and cognizant in 1963 and all these years since. The song is almost a couplet with Dylan's 2012 Roll On John, about another unfathomably unacceptable assassination, but a much shorter song, and almost a warm-up for "Murder Most Foul," which joins Phil Ochs' masterwork, The Crucifixion, as an extraordinarily insightful song about the event which in a single moment changed the course of history, inextricably and unalterably, for the worst. But "The Crucifixion" was at the moment, written back then. And "Murder Most Foul" is about then, and now, and all time time in between. About the end of the joy and innocence and optimism for the future that surged through the early 1960s, an extinction that the world has manifestly still not recovered from.
I know I haven't. I think about it often. Even write about it in my science fiction. It's reassuring that Dylan hasn't either. "Murder Most Foul" captures all of this and more with a lyric which, if you want to know where I'd place it, it would be among the best lyrics Dylan, the greatest lyricist of the 20th century, ever wrote. Plays upon words about playing songs and playing parts. I may teach a course about this song someday. It even has a recondite reference to Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon," one of my all-time favorite science fiction stories. But the killing of John F. Kennedy was too terrible to be fiction. And Dylan caught it all. In a gruff, plaintiff voice that floats halfway between speech and song, over a piano played by Fiona Apple that will pierce your heart. And here in the 21st century, with a fifth of it almost gone, this song could well be one of the greatest of this century, too.
On a lesser but still significant note -- at least to me -- Dylan's song also scratches an itch I have had about songs about DJs that also goes back to the 1960s. I even wrote a short story about that -- Sam's Requests -- and just a month or two ago created a Spotify songs-about-DJs playlist with that theme. Dylan's song eminently belongs there, containing a series of requests, that in some arcane, nearly endearingly inscrutable way reflect Dylan's commentary on the times, to Wolfman Jack, whom I actually worked with. I just added Dylan's song to the playlist. Yeah it belongs there, and in a permanent place in the thoughts of those of us who lived through that era-shattering day.
No, we never made it to the New Frontier, but we'll never stop trying.
a happier time
Further reading:
- Here are the lyrics -- or here with the song -- more insights than you'll find in a dozen of the best books on the subject
- ‘Murder Most Foul’ Is the Bob Dylan Song We Need Right Now Simon Vozick-Levinson, Rolling Stone, March 27, 2020
2 comments:
Paul, the lyrics are truly compelling. I don't think it got its due. Rolling Stone, maybe. Yes, the event was earth-shattering. On that day I was a teenage girl on the Canadian prairies sitting in math class. Like yesterday. It's like my brain took a Polaroid of the instant we heard the school principal announce the news over the loudspeaker. A girl burst into tears. For my generation it was a loss of innocence from which we never recovered.
-Carol Arcus, Toronto
Great to have your comment, Carol. Believe it or not, I was in a math class, too, when I first heard the awful news. I was a 16-year old freshman, at the City College of New York, in the most boring math class (boring even for math) I ever had to take. A calculus class. I heard students talking loudly on the campus below our classroom. I knew that something was going on. And a few minutes later, a student, out of breath, clearly upset, came into the class and talked into the professor's ear. The professor then told us what had happened - but rather than dismissing the class, he insisted on completing the class! An excruciating 20 minutes! When I got out of my class, I walked, stunned, to the subway, with a high school friend. "I'm a Goldwater Republican," he told me, "but I didn't want this to happen." I could feel the whole world changing, shifting, at that very instant.
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