Author: Rick Massimo

 

Since everyone seems to be taking a crack at writing about Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul,” released on Friday, I might as well. I could be the last person on Earth who bothers with it at this point — things do move fast these days.

By now, if you care enough to read this, you’ve already heard it: a 17-minute epic, with piano, strings and Dylan’s voice, placing the John F. Kennedy assassination at the center of the American culture that’s come since, Etta James and The Who and Don Henley and Bud Powell as spokes radiating out from that singular event and returning over the song’s epic length.

 

One of my ridiculously young (though prodigiously talented) co-workers described “Murder Most Foul” as “It’s 17 minutes, and the whole last half of it he’s just making requests.” As far as it goes, he’s not wrong. It’s tempting to hear a song that seems to place the murder of John F. Kennedy 57 years ago as the single essential turning point of American culture, shrug and say “OK boomer” – even for me, and even at a time of pandemic (which, let’s face it, is coloring people’s perceptions, it being a time for many of us to stay home and think about Where It All Went Wrong).

Indeed, “I said the soul of a nation been torn away/And it’s beginning to go into a slow decay/And that it’s thirty-six hours past Judgment Day” is asking for it, even from Dylan.

That’s always been the drag about Bob Dylan – this idea that you’re listening to the Voice of a Generation makes it all feel more like school than rock, or even folk. And at the risk of sucking up to the man, it’s probably the drag about being Bob Dylan himself. (“God, I’m glad I’m not me” is still my favorite thing he’s ever said.)

I think every Bob Dylan fan fantasizes about themselves being The One Bob Dylan Fan In the World Whom Bob Dylan Would Actually Like If They Got to Meet, and that probably colors my analysis as well. But I don’t think he can have made it any clearer over the past nearly 60 years that he has no desire for that kind of generational status, and if he wouldn’t exactly have been HAPPIER on balance spending his life playing piano for Bobby Vee – well, there would have been upsides.

What I’m eventually getting around to saying is that “Murder Most Foul” leaves me cold if I slip into PBS Pledge Drive Mode and take it as Bob Dylan’s magisterial, valedictorian masterpiece assessing Who We Are and Where We Are Headed – put me on Team Zeke and play some Cardi B.

But on Tuesday I read the always-excellent Elizabeth Nelson in the always-excellent Lawyers, Guns & Money, who described the last long section as “something of the unspooling of memory, King Lear-like, as a suddenly and frankly geriatric sounding man attempts to reorder the furniture of his mind while the room keeps shifting and the lights glow more dim.”

And that’s when I realized I was breaking my own rule – making my own mistake, if you get me.

When we think of the narrator not as some disembodied Soul of America, not as some witheringly clear-eyed Observer, but as the 78-year-old bag of bones known as Bob Dylan, the whole song takes on a different cast – and the shout-outs comprise the most moving part of the song.

If it’s not America, but Bob Dylan, remembering the cataclysmic effect of Kennedy’s assassination, the diverse smatterings of music and musicians referred to in the ending section – especially with its appeal to Wolfman Jack, the last worldwide oracle of pop music other than Dick Clark – take on the effect of the repeats, elisions and juxtapositions in Beckett’s gorgeous, perfect “Krapp’s Last Tape.” And the summing-up is that of an old musician marking his life the best way he knows how – not even through the music he made, but the music that had an effect on him, seen, as by Beckett’s narrator, through the eyes of experience and sadness and wisdom.

Now, it’s as likely as not that Dylan will blow all this up by putting out some blues shuffle or appearing in another car commercial. But maybe by then we won’t be in the middle of a pandemic, and we won’t need this song to mean as much as it could. Or does.

It happens a lot when I talk with artists about the Newport Folk Festival, and this year it even happened on stage – people think that the festival has always been at Fort Adams, and that they are, for example, standing on the actual stage where Bob Dylan went electric, or are walking through the same backstage arch that Mississippi John Hurt passed under.

It pains me to tell people that the festival moment they’re remembering happened at Freebody Park, or at Festival Field off Connell Highway. But this year’s Newport Folk Festival was capped off by a moment that recalled someone who had actually stood on that particular stage and was no longer with us.

The festival ended on Sunday, July 28, with an hour-plus sing-along tribute celebrating the centennial of Pete Seeger, who died in 2014. And the finale was a success, in that it produced some lovely moments while at the same time proving how much Seeger was missed.

While the finale opened with Kermit the Frog and Jim James on “The Rainbow Connection,” the best moments came on songs Seeger made his own, such as “If I Had a Hammer,” sung by Alyndra Lee Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff and Brandi Carlile, the curator of Saturday’s finale, as well as a high-octane version of “We Shall Overcome” by The Preservation Hall Jazz Band and Rachael Price, of Lake Street Dive. Chris Funk, of The Decemberists, quarterbacked the final segment indefatigably, and the diversity of the performers, especially on Seeger’s signature songs, made a statement the man himself would have approved of.

I appreciated the widening of what’s considered a sing-along repertoire, especially “Everyday People,” performed by Lake Street Dive and Hozier around one mike, and Native Daughter’s “If You Miss Me at the Back of the Bus.”

But some moments were a little impractical – it was great to see “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” sung to Judy Collins herself, by a collection of singers including Robin Pecknold, of Fleet Foxes, and James Mercer, of The Shins, but is it really a sing-along? Or “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” for that matter? (Even with a passport-style songbook handed out by the organizers, those aren’t easy to keep up with.) And while they didn’t play “Under My Thumb,” for the love of God who put it on the list? That song was a problem more than a half-century ago.

And the festival ended the only way it could have – with all remaining performers on stage. But they served mostly as chorus shouters to the unstoppable Ramblin’ Jack Elliott on (what else?) “Goodnight Irene.” For all the specificity that’s missing when performers relate Newport history – for all the times they stand at Fort Adams and remember something that happened in Freebody Park – it was odd how few times anyone referred to the fact that they were standing right where Seeger used to stand. I didn’t know Pete Seeger well, but I could feel his absence. And if I could picture the man, floppy hat, whispery voice and all, and tear up a bit, couldn’t everyone?