While we were sleeping, Bob Dylan dropped a seventeen-minute song into our dreams.

These are the times that try men’s souls. Work is hard to concentrate on, and also hard to hold onto; our poisoned planet fights back with rising seas and new disease; creeds are outworn; governments flail and fail to govern and defend us; parents are terrified for children and vice versa.

Since he was a youth, Bob Dylan has had the phrase “voice of a generation” hung about his neck like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross. I’ve always wondered, though: what generation? Dylan speaks and sings for people who loved him in 1962, who’ve come along since then, and for those born long before, as well. With “Murder Most Foul,” he leaves no question that his voice is ours: Boomers and Zoomers and folks in between, all of us terrified and angry and wanting to help and heal and survive. The murder of John F. Kennedy shattered America to pieces; we’re still broken. The American Dream: did it ever exist? If it did, unironically, Kennedy’s assassination swept away that phantasm’s last traces.

Longer than “Tempest,” longer than “Highlands,” “Murder Most Foul” rolls down like waters. It’ll take many hearings, soakings really, to begin to take in what he’s singing, the story he’s telling, the irrefragable questions he’s asking. The violent horror of Kennedy’s killing, sung gently, in Dylan’s clearest voice in a decade, is indescribable. Don’t listen to what I say about it. I am just grateful for “Murder Most Foul,” and hope it heralds a whole album of new songs — which has been rumored since last winter. Delighted to be telling you about it. Listen for yourself.

Bob Dylan, “Murder Most Foul,” via Bob Dylan / Sony Music Entertainment 2020

Bob Dylan and his band, Beacon Theatre, NYC, December 5, 2019 photograph © Andrea Orlandi

Now somebody else is going to be allowed to see what I said to myself.

                                    — Bob Dylan to Paul Robbins, 1965

         Bob Dylan said this in 1965 about his novel Tarantula, which was not officially published until 1971. One reason for the delay was that Dylan didn’t want it released; already a famously private public personality, perhaps he’d had second thoughts about letting anyone else see what he said to himself.

         Literary archives are the most intimate way for a scholar to gain access to a writer’s creative process.  The Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, now open for research on a strictly regulated basis, provides astonishing revelations about Dylan’s care in drafting, revising, rewriting, and perfecting.  In pristine acid-free grey boxes and brand-new mylar sleeves rest notebooks, shards of note pads, hotel stationery, business cards, even bits of brown paper bags, covered in Dylan’s small, hard-to-read handwriting.  As James Joyce did, Dylan writes on anything and everything to hand, when the words and phrases strike, which seems to be any time, all the time.  I could absolutely have stayed forever and never realized the time, but my purpose, on a first visit, was to review the Blood On the Tracks song drafts written in two spiral notebooks that have, until now, been inaccessible….

* Please read the rest of this article in hard copy as the cover story in Hot Press Annual 2019, published on November 29, 2018. Thank you.

Copyright © 1974 Ram’s Horn Music. Renewed, 2002 Ram’s Horn Music. Additional lyrics, Copyright © 2018 Ram’s Horn Music.  Courtesy of THE BOB DYLAN ARCHIVE® Collections, Tulsa, OK.

There is a chicken in this image.

Hello, friends.

I doubt I will be blogging here, but if I do, you will be the very first to know. Thank you for visiting.  

The chicken’s name is, or was, Stripe.