Howl, Wolfman

In 2020, as the world struggled to deal with a burgeoning, and worsening, global pandemic, Bob Dylan released a 17-minute song about the Kennedy assassination. Yes, seventeen minutes. The overall reaction was, more or less, “Not now, Bob.”

The song, “Murder Most Foul,” is spare. Three chords on the piano: C, F, and G. A little bit of percussion, some strings, not much else. Seventeen minutes of unchanging chords, unchanging tempo, sans chorus, sans flashy musicianship, sans everything except those three chords and Dylan’s smoky voice. It’s among the finest songs of his career.

Good day to be livin' and a good day to die
Being led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb
He said, "Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am?"
"Of course we do, we know who you are"
Then they blew off his head while he was still in the car.

I’ve been writing a bit about music lately because I’ve had an almost insatiable appetite for the stuff since the election. I’ve rarely enjoyed reading music writing because it hardly seems possible to translate music into the clumsy medium of words. Why bother even making music if words can accomplish the same? Why make words when we have music?

Then again, why make anything?

The act of creativity is an act of defiance although, unless we’re talking about protest art, we rarely think of it in those terms. Art, in all of its forms, is among the most potent ways people have to assert themselves. When we wrap our fingers around the barrel of a pencil, we are a threat. It’s why artists of every variety have been among the first to face persecution from those that would have their populations fall in line. But art’s inherent defiance need not be directed at the authorities. Sometimes it’s directed at oneself.

Bob Dylan, in black and white.

Dylan has always been confounding, a man who seems utterly uninterested in celebrity who, nevertheless, among the most famous people on Earth. He’s anti-commercialism, except that he did a Victoria’s Secret commercial. He’s a Jewish guy who released a triptych of Christian albums in the late 70’s and early 80’s. He’s a guy who didn’t attend his own Pulitzer ceremony but lives in Malibu surrounded by Hollywood royalty.

The other night, my daughter and I watched a screener of the new Bob Dylan movie, A Complete Unknown, which is about the early part of Dylan’s career, from his arrival in New York City in 1961 until the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when he “went electric,” turning his back on the folk music that defined his first successes.

The movie is Frankenstein-in-reverse, the story of a Creature so beloved he had to destroy his Creators to save himself. Frankenstein’s alternate – and lesser-known - title is The Modern Prometheus. For those who can’t immediately recall their Greek mythology, Prometheus brought fire to mankind in defiance of the Gods and suffered the punishment of being chained to a rock and having his liver eaten by an eagle every day for eternity.

Since the election, how many of us have felt ourselves to be suffering a similar punishment perpetrated by our own nation’s eagle, albeit a little less dramatically than the fate suffered by Prometheus? That eagle can be a persnickety fellow. Just ask JFK.

They killed him once and they killed him twice
Killed him like a human sacrifice
The day that they killed him, someone said to me, "Son
The age of the Antichrist has just only begun"

Are we now in the Age of the Antichrist? People have seemed to think so for centuries, possibly millennia. The end is always nigh, it seems, yet it never seems to arrive despite our most earnest attempts. I imagine Bob Dylan must have looked at his own times (including these, of course) and wondered how he found himself here, as so many of us have.

“A Murder Most Foul” is a survey of the second half of the American 20^th century, a span of decades that came to exist, in no small part, due to Dylan himself. It was Robert Zimmerman, standing on the shoulders of his own giants, who gave a generation its voice, then left them behind when that voice started to sound too much like his own. Listen to 1975’s Blood on the Tracks, in which Dylan sings with a, literal, different voice. Maybe that was just the booze and the cigarettes, but maybe he was attempting to become somebody new.

Other artists have done the same. Picasso comes to mind, changing his style from the realism of his early career to the abstraction of cubism to the grandiosity and despair of Gurenica to the spare, elegant lines of his final years. Miles Davis, too, had a similar trajectory as Dylan. There’s a story of Miles Davis at a White House dinner in 1987. He got to talking to the woman beside him who asked him what he’d done to deserve being there (I don’t think she meant it in a snobby way, but how the hell do I know?). Davis replied, “We’ll, I’ve changed music five or six times.”

That’s a hell of a thing to say, isn’t it? I’ve changed music. Good on ya, Miles. Good on ya, Pablo. Good on ya, Bob. Good on ya, Lady Gaga, who seems the contemporary artist most likely to inherit their crown.

There are Dylan obsessives out there. I’m not among them. Years can go by without me listening to any Dylan at all. But every now and again, as happened after the viewing of A Complete Unknown, I am inspired to revisit Highway 61. I don’t know how long I’ll linger here, but I’m glad to have spent the time. I have a lot of gratitude for iconoclasts, especially when the icon they’re tearing down is themselves. We are all artists. All defiant. All capable of metamorphosis.

I'm goin' down to the crossroads, gonna flag a ride
The place where faith, hope, and charity died
Shoot him while he runs, boy, shoot him while you can
See if you can shoot the invisible man

Goodbye, Charlie, goodbye, Uncle Sam
Frankly, Miss Scarlet, I don't give a damn
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

2025 is just about upon us. It promises to be a year – perhaps four years – most foul. So be it. We need not befoul ourselves. Make noise. Make art. Or, as Johnny Cash tells Bob Dylan in the film, “Track a little mud on the carpet.”