Greatest magic trick under the sun: Perfectly executed, skillfully done.Īfter setting the scene, he starts to wax more adventurously poetic. It happened so quick and so quick by surprise, Right there in front of everyone’s eyes. The day they blew out the brains of the king Thousands were watching no one saw a thing. Like most honest chroniclers of the assassination, Dylan invokes the conspiracies without attempting to either confirm or deny their validity: He is unquestionably one of our era’s most gifted and accomplished writers, but he’s never been afraid to deploy a cliché or an awkward phrase to fill a verse or match a rhyme. I imagine Dylan wrote it all down in advance, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that he improvised some or even all of it. If anything, it reads like the kind of workaday poems that newspapers used to publish last century. They said, “Course we do, we know who you are.” Then they blew off his head while he was still in the car. He said, “Wait a minute, boys, you know who I am.” Good day to be livin’ and a good day to die,īein’ led to the slaughter like a sacrificial lamb. ’Twas a dark day in Dallas, November ’63, A day that will live on in infamy. Then comes Dylan’s voice, sounding less croaky than it often has in recent years, singing rhyming couplets: The track starts with a low cello drone and some tinkling piano. So what’s Dylan’s take on the assassination now? Well, it ain’t Don McLean’s “American Pie,” that’s for sure. So what are we to make of this new song? With the world experiencing a global pandemic on a scale not seen since 1918, and with a young generation seething with rage over the fallout from the perceived narcissism and selfishness of the baby boomers who launched him to global fame, Dylan has chosen this moment to release an extremely long song-his first original song in almost a decade, I might add-about the single most chewed-over trauma in the boomer historical hall of fame: the assassination of John F. But whether or not Dylan really was in a 19th-century state of mind when he wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind,” two things are clear: The song had a huge impact on the living, breathing young people of the 1960s, and that made Dylan deeply uncomfortable. This is a man who most recently collaborated with Martin Scorsese on a “documentary” whose infidelity to the truth was so extreme that it included fictionalized characters. It’s important to remember that nothing Dylan says can ever be taken at face value.