This is a brilliant trilogy of essays on Dylan and JFK. I was knocked out by the research, imagination and scholarly insight, which culminates in what is surely the best account of “Murder Most Foul” I have read. I was 16 in 1963 so have some vivid memories of that dark day in Dallas. In suburban Wembley where I grew up, there was an American family on the corner of our road and my mother insisted on visiting that evening to extend her condolences. Stunned would be the simplest word to sum up the days after 22 November.
I was impressed by the way you explored the twisted skeins of empathy that led Dylan to talk about his identification with Lee Harvey Oswald at the ECLC fiasco. You point out Kennedy was so angry after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion that he sacked Allen Dulles as Director of the CIA in November 1961. But JFK and his brother Robert were still ardent Cold Warriors and they continued to support covert attempts to sabotage Cuba and kill Castro. Suze Rotolo, who led a trip to Cuba in 1964, would have been very aware of that.
There is, I think, one error in your first essay which puzzled me. You write: “The most artistically ambitious song on Dylan’s sophomore album is ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, inspired by the Cuban Missile Crisis. In October 1962, spy plane photos revealed that the Soviets had placed missiles in Cuba, giving the rival superpower easy striking capacity against the United States. Kennedy shared the news in an address to the American people, and a terrifying standoff ensued for several days.”
But surely Dylan first performed “A Hard Rain” on 22 September 1962 at an all-star hootenanny at Carnegie Hall. (Clinton Heylin, “A Life in Stolen Moments: Day by Day 1941-1995”, p. 33) This is exactly a month before the Cuban Missile Crisis began on 22 October 1962 when President Kennedy went on national television to announce Soviet missiles had been discovered on the island of Cuba.
Dylan has encouraged the idea that “A Hard Rain” was born out of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Nat Hentoff’s sleeve notes on the back of the Freewheelin’ album, Dylan says: “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.”
The astonishing truth is that Dylan somehow anticipated the event. He conjured up the lyrical and musical and imaginative resources to create a work that captured the closest the world had come to nuclear Armageddon—before it happened.
Interesting you preface your third essay with Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death. That is the image that haunts DeLillo’s Underworld and (almost) ties the book together. Congratulations on a fine series of essays.
Thanks so much for this thoughtful and generous comment, Mick. That's a poignant story about your personal memories of the assassination. I should have known better than to take Dylan at his word in the Ray Coleman interview that "Hard Rain" was a direct response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. I'll insert a correction about the debut coming a month before the events that it presciently anticipates.
I'm glad that you made the DeLillo connection to Bruegel's The Triumph of Death. DeLillo is another one of my passions, and I've written a lot about his work elsewhere. He's another one of those artists whose work seems eerily prophetic at times. In retrospect, it seems that he had been writing about 9/11 for 25 years before it actually happened. I love his writing about art and artists, too. One of these days I need to write something on his early novel Great Jones Street, whose main character, Bucky Wunderlick, is clearly modeled after Dylan.
Thanks for your encouragement, Mick, and for giving me some extra shadows to chase after.
What an excellent way to round off this astonishing trilogy, my head is still spinning from some of the connections you’ve made. “Whenever something triggers the old trauma, the event is reenacted in the present as if unfolding right now for the first time.” – this in relation to Hamlet’s circular nature, is such a brilliant observation that could have somehow only come from you. It’s this kind of stuff that makes you one of the best writers on Dylan at the moment. And I’m not just saying that because you occasionally (and kindly) refer to my work.
I also want to add that my latest podcast was influenced by the first two parts of this series, though in ways that, while completely obvious to me when I started, I can’t fully recall now. Something about assassinations (Lincoln in the case of the episode) and Dylan’s long epic songs about disasters that might serve as analogies for our time? And of course, as you pointed out in your comment, Shakespeare. But I’ll stop trying to grasp at straws now.
I’ve always wondered about the message that accompanied Murder Most Foul, and I think I just realised what it is – it’s that he hoped we’d find the song “interesting”. Not “I hope you enjoy it”, or “I hope you like it”, instead, “you might find it interesting. It makes sense, because it’s not exactly a story you might “enjoy” (which reminds me Dylan taking a shot at people who say they “enjoy” Blood of the Tracks – “people enjoying that type of pain”).
I’m especially stuck on his wish to “stay observant” because “observe” has such a curious double meaning. Written at the beginning of the pandemic, did he mean for us to stay observant of COVID rules and regulations? Or did he mean “observant” in the sense of someone who is paying attention, another way of saying “be aware of what is happening”, or even, as one might have done before the backlash set in, “stay woke”?? In other words, observing those in power means what exactly? Obedience or Skepticism? But even if we settle on the definition of "observe" as "watch", the Zapruder film is a prime example that a consensus on what is being observed cannot always be reached. The irony is that Dylan couldn’t have known that he was writing this message at a pivotal moment when the divide between perceived realities among the US population was about to widen into a chasm. I can only once again recommend the Contrapoints YouTube video on Conspiracy, which I think you’ll love, and I’ll leave you with a joke I came across in the comment section to that video:
A JFK conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven.
When he arrives at the Pearly Gates, God is there to receive him. "Welcome. You are permitted to ask me one question, which I will answer truthfully."
Without hesitating, the conspiracy theorist asks,
"Who really shot Kennedy?"
God replies, "Lee Harvey Oswald shot him from sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. There were no accomplices. He acted alone"
The conspiracy theorist pauses, thinks to himself, then says "Shit! This goes higher up than I thought.."
Last things first: ha!! I laughed out loud at the punchline of that joke, Laura. Laughing to keep from crying? Probably so. I still haven't left the headspace of my research on this topic and am continuing to read more history books on the Kennedy assassination. I may have finished this series, but apparently it's not done yet with me.
Once again you've proven yourself to be my ideal reader. I'm touched by your careful attention to my work, and as always your thoughts light new sparks for me. For instance, I hadn't dwelled over Dylan's use of the word "observant" in his MMF message, but you tease out some interesting connotations. I would add the religious meaning, too, like being an observant Catholic or observant Jew, meaning to faithfully follow the rules and rituals of the faith. Being observant is also the job description of a watchman, which brings us back to our earlier exchange about Kennedy's last (undelivered) speech, "All Along the Watchtower," and "Tempest." Dylan's "Stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you" begins to sound a lot like the verse from Psalm 127:1 that JFK used (or would have used) to conclude his speech: "Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."
Thank you Graley. As someone who remembered this day from practically minute to minute I found comfort and solace in Dylan’s releasing this song ... nothing in 2020 was as bad as what many people endured in 1963 on that dreadful day when for weeks and months no one believed that Oswald was the only gunman. The most operative words for me in Murder Most Foul are 1) I'm just a Patsy, like Patsy Cline, I never shot anyone from in front or behind. and 2) Let me know when you throw in the towel, It is what it is, and it's Murder Most Foul.
I wish I could have posted your photo of Wolfman Jack in his beautiful silk floral shirt with what Bob was wearing in his tour opener in Tulsa (photo by Duncan Hume).
Thanks, Nancy! I didn't live through those dreadful weeks and months in 1963, but Dylan did, and he must have sensed deep connections between the two times and experiences. He brings it back home with Murder Most Foul. Oswald used the same term as Dylan to describe himself after his arrest: "They are taking me in because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet Union. I'm just a patsy."
If he was a scapegoat, he was extremely well cast for the part. Not only did he defect to the Soviet Union, but he also (according to his widow Marina's testimony) fired a shot at Major General Edwin Walker in April 1963. Dylan makes a passing reference to the outspoken segregationist Walker in his ECLC speech, and Walker was precisely the sort of rabid anti-communist zealot Dylan satirized in "Talkin' John Birch Society Paranoid Blues." Walker and JFK were on opposite ends of the political spectrum, so it's hard to square Oswald attempting assassinations against both. One more unsolved puzzle.
Fascinating stuff, Graley. Dylan, Shakespeare, Blake = you are going with all my favourites as well as Gerald Smith's I see in the comment before mine*. If you had put in Dostoevsky too, it would have been the full set.
Well done with the warning before the video, as it still is a visceral shock after all these years and viewings.
Thanks too for enticing me into reading "Libra". DeLillo really gets inside the characters’ heads and, inevitably, the prominent DJ in it constantly brought Wolfman Jack to mind.
PS Thanks for the generous name-check.
---
*Comment 1 from Gerald Smith = "As a(n ageing English) fan of US history, Shakespeare, Blake and Dylan’s genius,"
Comment 2 from me = As a(n ageing Scottish) fan of , Shakespeare, Blake and Dylan’s genius,
Many thanks, Andy! And I'm glad to hear that I turned you onto Libra. As long as this three-part series was, it could have been even longer. One of the sections I had planned but ended up cutting for length was on Weird Beard, the Dallas DJ cut from the cloth of Wolfman Jack, whom DeLillo uses as a kind of Cassandra for the gathering storm in Dallas.
Russ "The Weird Beard" Knight was a real person. In fact, the popular DJ was acquaintances with Jack Ruby, which earned him a summons to appear before the Warren Commission.
Now I'll go read some Dostoevsky, and you can advance to DeLillo's masterpiece Underworld. Cheers, Andy!
Excellent. Thank you. As a(n ageing English) fan of US history, Shakespeare, Blake and Dylan’s genius, I find your insights and perspectives very stimulating.
This is a brilliant trilogy of essays on Dylan and JFK. I was knocked out by the research, imagination and scholarly insight, which culminates in what is surely the best account of “Murder Most Foul” I have read. I was 16 in 1963 so have some vivid memories of that dark day in Dallas. In suburban Wembley where I grew up, there was an American family on the corner of our road and my mother insisted on visiting that evening to extend her condolences. Stunned would be the simplest word to sum up the days after 22 November.
I was impressed by the way you explored the twisted skeins of empathy that led Dylan to talk about his identification with Lee Harvey Oswald at the ECLC fiasco. You point out Kennedy was so angry after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion that he sacked Allen Dulles as Director of the CIA in November 1961. But JFK and his brother Robert were still ardent Cold Warriors and they continued to support covert attempts to sabotage Cuba and kill Castro. Suze Rotolo, who led a trip to Cuba in 1964, would have been very aware of that.
There is, I think, one error in your first essay which puzzled me. You write: “The most artistically ambitious song on Dylan’s sophomore album is ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’, inspired by the Cuban Missile Crisis. In October 1962, spy plane photos revealed that the Soviets had placed missiles in Cuba, giving the rival superpower easy striking capacity against the United States. Kennedy shared the news in an address to the American people, and a terrifying standoff ensued for several days.”
But surely Dylan first performed “A Hard Rain” on 22 September 1962 at an all-star hootenanny at Carnegie Hall. (Clinton Heylin, “A Life in Stolen Moments: Day by Day 1941-1995”, p. 33) This is exactly a month before the Cuban Missile Crisis began on 22 October 1962 when President Kennedy went on national television to announce Soviet missiles had been discovered on the island of Cuba.
Dylan has encouraged the idea that “A Hard Rain” was born out of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Nat Hentoff’s sleeve notes on the back of the Freewheelin’ album, Dylan says: “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song. But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.”
The astonishing truth is that Dylan somehow anticipated the event. He conjured up the lyrical and musical and imaginative resources to create a work that captured the closest the world had come to nuclear Armageddon—before it happened.
Interesting you preface your third essay with Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death. That is the image that haunts DeLillo’s Underworld and (almost) ties the book together. Congratulations on a fine series of essays.
Thanks so much for this thoughtful and generous comment, Mick. That's a poignant story about your personal memories of the assassination. I should have known better than to take Dylan at his word in the Ray Coleman interview that "Hard Rain" was a direct response to the Cuban Missile Crisis. I'll insert a correction about the debut coming a month before the events that it presciently anticipates.
I'm glad that you made the DeLillo connection to Bruegel's The Triumph of Death. DeLillo is another one of my passions, and I've written a lot about his work elsewhere. He's another one of those artists whose work seems eerily prophetic at times. In retrospect, it seems that he had been writing about 9/11 for 25 years before it actually happened. I love his writing about art and artists, too. One of these days I need to write something on his early novel Great Jones Street, whose main character, Bucky Wunderlick, is clearly modeled after Dylan.
Thanks for your encouragement, Mick, and for giving me some extra shadows to chase after.
What an excellent way to round off this astonishing trilogy, my head is still spinning from some of the connections you’ve made. “Whenever something triggers the old trauma, the event is reenacted in the present as if unfolding right now for the first time.” – this in relation to Hamlet’s circular nature, is such a brilliant observation that could have somehow only come from you. It’s this kind of stuff that makes you one of the best writers on Dylan at the moment. And I’m not just saying that because you occasionally (and kindly) refer to my work.
I also want to add that my latest podcast was influenced by the first two parts of this series, though in ways that, while completely obvious to me when I started, I can’t fully recall now. Something about assassinations (Lincoln in the case of the episode) and Dylan’s long epic songs about disasters that might serve as analogies for our time? And of course, as you pointed out in your comment, Shakespeare. But I’ll stop trying to grasp at straws now.
I’ve always wondered about the message that accompanied Murder Most Foul, and I think I just realised what it is – it’s that he hoped we’d find the song “interesting”. Not “I hope you enjoy it”, or “I hope you like it”, instead, “you might find it interesting. It makes sense, because it’s not exactly a story you might “enjoy” (which reminds me Dylan taking a shot at people who say they “enjoy” Blood of the Tracks – “people enjoying that type of pain”).
I’m especially stuck on his wish to “stay observant” because “observe” has such a curious double meaning. Written at the beginning of the pandemic, did he mean for us to stay observant of COVID rules and regulations? Or did he mean “observant” in the sense of someone who is paying attention, another way of saying “be aware of what is happening”, or even, as one might have done before the backlash set in, “stay woke”?? In other words, observing those in power means what exactly? Obedience or Skepticism? But even if we settle on the definition of "observe" as "watch", the Zapruder film is a prime example that a consensus on what is being observed cannot always be reached. The irony is that Dylan couldn’t have known that he was writing this message at a pivotal moment when the divide between perceived realities among the US population was about to widen into a chasm. I can only once again recommend the Contrapoints YouTube video on Conspiracy, which I think you’ll love, and I’ll leave you with a joke I came across in the comment section to that video:
A JFK conspiracy theorist dies and goes to heaven.
When he arrives at the Pearly Gates, God is there to receive him. "Welcome. You are permitted to ask me one question, which I will answer truthfully."
Without hesitating, the conspiracy theorist asks,
"Who really shot Kennedy?"
God replies, "Lee Harvey Oswald shot him from sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. There were no accomplices. He acted alone"
The conspiracy theorist pauses, thinks to himself, then says "Shit! This goes higher up than I thought.."
Last things first: ha!! I laughed out loud at the punchline of that joke, Laura. Laughing to keep from crying? Probably so. I still haven't left the headspace of my research on this topic and am continuing to read more history books on the Kennedy assassination. I may have finished this series, but apparently it's not done yet with me.
Once again you've proven yourself to be my ideal reader. I'm touched by your careful attention to my work, and as always your thoughts light new sparks for me. For instance, I hadn't dwelled over Dylan's use of the word "observant" in his MMF message, but you tease out some interesting connotations. I would add the religious meaning, too, like being an observant Catholic or observant Jew, meaning to faithfully follow the rules and rituals of the faith. Being observant is also the job description of a watchman, which brings us back to our earlier exchange about Kennedy's last (undelivered) speech, "All Along the Watchtower," and "Tempest." Dylan's "Stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you" begins to sound a lot like the verse from Psalm 127:1 that JFK used (or would have used) to conclude his speech: "Except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."
To Laura, il miglior fabbro--you're the best!
Thank you Graley. As someone who remembered this day from practically minute to minute I found comfort and solace in Dylan’s releasing this song ... nothing in 2020 was as bad as what many people endured in 1963 on that dreadful day when for weeks and months no one believed that Oswald was the only gunman. The most operative words for me in Murder Most Foul are 1) I'm just a Patsy, like Patsy Cline, I never shot anyone from in front or behind. and 2) Let me know when you throw in the towel, It is what it is, and it's Murder Most Foul.
I wish I could have posted your photo of Wolfman Jack in his beautiful silk floral shirt with what Bob was wearing in his tour opener in Tulsa (photo by Duncan Hume).
Thanks, Nancy! I didn't live through those dreadful weeks and months in 1963, but Dylan did, and he must have sensed deep connections between the two times and experiences. He brings it back home with Murder Most Foul. Oswald used the same term as Dylan to describe himself after his arrest: "They are taking me in because of the fact that I lived in the Soviet Union. I'm just a patsy."
If he was a scapegoat, he was extremely well cast for the part. Not only did he defect to the Soviet Union, but he also (according to his widow Marina's testimony) fired a shot at Major General Edwin Walker in April 1963. Dylan makes a passing reference to the outspoken segregationist Walker in his ECLC speech, and Walker was precisely the sort of rabid anti-communist zealot Dylan satirized in "Talkin' John Birch Society Paranoid Blues." Walker and JFK were on opposite ends of the political spectrum, so it's hard to square Oswald attempting assassinations against both. One more unsolved puzzle.
Illuminating! Thanks very much for sharing this great thinking, so glad to read it.
All the best to your haunted and gloryous country!
Fascinating stuff, Graley. Dylan, Shakespeare, Blake = you are going with all my favourites as well as Gerald Smith's I see in the comment before mine*. If you had put in Dostoevsky too, it would have been the full set.
Well done with the warning before the video, as it still is a visceral shock after all these years and viewings.
Thanks too for enticing me into reading "Libra". DeLillo really gets inside the characters’ heads and, inevitably, the prominent DJ in it constantly brought Wolfman Jack to mind.
PS Thanks for the generous name-check.
---
*Comment 1 from Gerald Smith = "As a(n ageing English) fan of US history, Shakespeare, Blake and Dylan’s genius,"
Comment 2 from me = As a(n ageing Scottish) fan of , Shakespeare, Blake and Dylan’s genius,
What a fine sense of community!
Many thanks, Andy! And I'm glad to hear that I turned you onto Libra. As long as this three-part series was, it could have been even longer. One of the sections I had planned but ended up cutting for length was on Weird Beard, the Dallas DJ cut from the cloth of Wolfman Jack, whom DeLillo uses as a kind of Cassandra for the gathering storm in Dallas.
Russ "The Weird Beard" Knight was a real person. In fact, the popular DJ was acquaintances with Jack Ruby, which earned him a summons to appear before the Warren Commission.
Now I'll go read some Dostoevsky, and you can advance to DeLillo's masterpiece Underworld. Cheers, Andy!
Excellent. Thank you. As a(n ageing English) fan of US history, Shakespeare, Blake and Dylan’s genius, I find your insights and perspectives very stimulating.
Sounds like we've got a lot in common. Much appreciated, Gerald!