Backwoods Blog

BOB DYLAN

The Isolation Blues;

reflections during covid-19

The day that they killed him, someone said to me, "Son
The age of the Antichrist has just only begun."
I said the soul of a nation been torn away
And it's beginning to go into a slow decay
And that it's 36 hours past Judgment Day.

I'm going down to the crossroads, gonna flag a ride
The place where faith, hope, and charity died.

What is the truth, and where did it go?
Ask Oswald and Ruby, they oughta know.
"Shut your mouth, " said the wise old owl
Business is business, and it's a murder most foul.


Bob Dylan
excerpt from “Murder Most Foul.”  (2020)

‘Murder Most Foul’, it’s tempting to say, is a vast jigsaw puzzle for the times, but it’s far more than that. Greater than its few predecessors, ‘American Pie’,’ Sympathy for The Devil’, it’s a painterly masterpiece on the scale of Guernica, an impressionistic memento mori for America in the age of Trump…The last line of the song is the request: Play “Murder Most Foul”. Given the only song with that title is this one, Dylan creates a serpent that swallows its own tail, an Ouroboros – symbolizing the cyclic Nature of the Universe: creation out of destruction, Life out of Death. This is perhaps Dylan’s greatest achievement, a clarion call for rebirth and new hope in these calamitous times. So do the jigsaw I challenge you, but remember the big picture is not on the box so the challenge is to build it, there will be millions of solutions but they should all call for a better, more humane America. That’s the undeniable truth of ‘Murder Most Foul’.

review by Michael S. Genner Michael is a singer/guitarist, songwriter and retired English and Music teacher, living in Sydney after years of gigging around the world, teaching and working as a consultant in various educational settings.

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During the coronavirus pandemic Pulitzer Prize winning poet and songwriter Bob Dylan has been releasing new songs leading up to the debut of his latest album “Rough and Rowdy Ways” on June 19th (Columbia Records). The first song “Murder Most Foul” is a 17-minute ballad about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.  In its first week the song hit #1 on the Billboard chart and believe it or not, this is the first #1 hit for Dylan in his 60 year career.  Clocking in at 17 minutes it’s not going to get a lot of airplay on the radio, but I don’t think Bob really cares.  It reads more like a poem than a hit song; he’s speaking it more than singing it. It has a dirge-like quality with no real beat or melody (and no chorus), and while Bob’s voice is compellingly expressive he has less than a four note range in the song.  Dylan’s worn-out, old bluesman’s vocal quality makes him the perfect spokesman to summarize the exhaustive past five decades since JFK’s assassination. 

Dylan constructs the song in two ways; around the details of the crime and secondly by creating a playlist of songs from the last fifty years. He invokes the great Wolfman Jack as his DJ for the task:

Wolfman, oh wolfman, oh wolfman howl
Rub-a-dub-dub, it's a murder most foul.
Wolfman Jack, he's speaking in tongues
He's going on and on at the top of his lungs.
Play me a song, Mr. Wolfman Jack
Play it for me in my long Cadillac.

Perhaps you remember when Bob Dylan was a DJ on “Theme Time Radio Hour,” a satellite radio show he hosted on Sirius XM (2006-2009). Bob channels his inner-DJ on “Murder Most Foul” making reference to over 70 songs and personalities. (No wonder the song is 17 minutes long!) The best of art draws from and combines currents events, politics, religion, music, poetry and personalities. “Murder Most Foul” is an expansive collage (and soundtrack) that provides a 50 year perspective of where we’ve been as an American culture. What we need during challenging times such as these is inspiration. We need hope. We need a heart of charity. These are the things that Dylan saw dead on the road, but that can change. If enough people see their way forward more will follow. It’s hard to say what will happen next, but in that first step is the start…

It’s nice to know Bob is still around when we need him.

In the woods,

Dave

May 15, 2020