top of page

HAPPENING NOW

Dylan Releases Assassination Song to World in Crisis

    Bob Dylan has chosen this moment, of all moments, to release his masterful epic (full lyrics below) on the assassination of President Kennedy, "Murder most Foul."  Why now?

    Could it be that his artist’s heart feels a world under assault, once again, by the powers that be?  For whatever the actual lethality of the virus, there is no doubt that we are all suffering from the same sort of “shock and awe” we did when our collective hopes for a New Frontier were blown away in 1963.

    You don’t have to have a religious streak for it all to feel something like the fulfillment of the prophesy spoken to Dylan’s narrator:

    The day that they killed him, someone said to me, "Son, The Age of the Antichrist has just only begun"

    When Kennedy died, so died the efforts he had been making to end the Cold War, to withdraw from Vietnam, to create a rising economic tide that would “lift all boats.”

    And while much has been made of Lyndon Johnson’s carrying-on of Kennedy-era social and civil rights initiatives, the reality was as Martin Luther King described it: “The promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam, making the poor, white and Negro, bear the heaviest burden, both at the front and at home.”

    Well, as Mark Twain once allegedly said: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."  

    Dylan describes the Kennedy assassination as “the greatest magic trick ever under the sun/ Perfectly executed, skillfully done.” 

    It happened so quickly, so quick by surprise

    Right there in front of everyone’s eyes

    It would seem Dylan, courageously, has sent us a message when we needed it most, with little in the way of encryption. It is up to us to break the simple code, take in its meaning, and act.

    Act as we didn’t then.


    “This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting.

    Stay safe, stay observant and may God be with you.”

    And also with you, Bob.  


    John Kirby is the director of Four Died Trying, an upcoming feature documentary about the extraordinary lives and calamitous deaths of John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy.  



    MURDER MOST FOUL

    Lyrics by Bob Dylan


    [Verse 1]

    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

    Shot down like a dog in broad daylight

    Was a matter of timing and the timing was right

    You got unpaid debts, we've come to collect

    We'll mock you and shock you and we'll put it in your face

    It happened so quickly, so quick, by surprise

    Right there in front of everyone's eyes

    Rub-a-dub-dub, it's a murder most foul


    [Verse 2]

    Pick up the pieces and lower the flags

    Put your head out the window, let the good times roll

    Put your foot in the tank and then step on the gas

    Blackface singer, whiteface clown

    Up in the red light district, they've got cop on the beat

    Cash on the barrelhead, money to burn

    Dealey Plaza, make a left-hand turn


    [Verse 3]

    Hold on, I've been led into some kind of a trap

    What more could they do? They piled on the pain

    But his soul was not there where it was supposed to be at

    I hate to tell you, mister, but only dead men are free

    Throw the gun in the gutter and walk on by

    Turn the radio on, don't touch the dials

    That magic bullet of yours has gone to my head

    Never shot anyone from in front or behind

    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

    Air Force One comin' in through the gate

    Let me know when you decide to throw in the towel

    It is what it is, and it's murder most foul [Verse 4]

    What's new, pussycat? What'd I say?

    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

    Play "St. James Infirmary" and the Court of King James

    If you want to remember, you better write down the names

    Play it for the man with the telepathic mind

    Play John Lee Hooker, play "Scratch My Back"

    Guitar Slim going down slow


    [Verse 5]

    Play "Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood"

    Play it for the First Lady, she ain't feeling any good

    Play tragedy, play "Twilight Time"

    Ride the pink horse down that long, lonesome road

    Stand there and wait for his head to explode

    The man who fell down dead like a rootless tree

    Play it for the reverend, play it for the pastor

    Play "Cry Me a River" for the Lord of the gods

    Play Number nine, play Number six

    There's twelve million souls that are listening in

    Don't worry, Mr. President, help's on the way

    Was a hard act to follow, second to none

    Play darkness and death will come when it comes




    FEBRUARY 21, 2020

      By the time Malcolm X was killed, he was a man reborn.



      ree

      In the words of Malcolm associate Peter Bailey, if Malcom were successful in bringing human rights charges in the World Court, “it would have been a devastating propaganda blow to the United States.”  Meetings were planned with Dr. King to enlist him in the effort.

      The prospect of Malcolm and Martin joining forces was FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover’s “worst nightmare.”


      As he traveled the world, Malcolm survived assassination attempts and sharpened his analysis of the world situation.  His words at the Oxford Union just weeks before his murder resonate more painfully today than when he first spoke them:


      We’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built. And I for one will join in with anyone, I don’t care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.


      On this, the 55th anniversary of his death, it is worth it to consider whether Hoover’s nightmare might have been one of the country’s last, best hopes.

      ​

      John Kirby is the director of FOUR DIED TRYING, an upcoming feature documentary on the major assassinations of the 1960’s and their calamitous impact on the country. To join the struggle for justice for Dr. King, Malcolm X, and John and Robert Kennedy, sign the petition.



      THE FORGOTTEN KING

        (Originally published January 21, 2020)

        ​

        The King of the March on Washington is encased in amber, his still-deferred dream reduced to a harmless platitude, its endless repetition a proof of virtue.


        But the King who declared from the pulpit of Riverside Church on April 4 th , 1967, that his beloved country had become “the greatest purveyor of violence on earth” cannot be resurrected for the cameras or deployed as a spokesman for American redemption. For that King might wander off the stage into the street, might occupy Wall Street and the Pentagon, or insist on reminding us that “a nation that continues, year after year, to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”


        When he publicly declared his opposition to the Vietnam War in April 1967, King earned few friends in the administration, the press, or even among the civil right establishment. FBI surveillance and harassment was ordered intensified. He was relentlessly attacked from all sides for straying out of his “area” in criticizing the foreign policies of a President who had been so strong a Negro ally. But if King hadn’t made pellucid the undeniable connection between the “giant triplets” of "racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” in his speech at Riverside, he doubled down a few days later at a massive peace rally at United Nations Plaza.  “The promises of the Great Society have been shot down on the battlefields of Vietnam, making the poor---white and Negro--bear the heaviest burden.”


        The Johnson administration’s failure to rate the plight of the nation’s impoverished above the needs of its military-industrial complex compelled King inexorably to his next project: the Poor People’s Campaign. On December 4th, 1967, he announced:


        “The Southern Christian Leadership Conference will lead waves of the nation's poor and disinherited to Washington, D. C. next spring to demand redress of their grievances by the United States government and to secure at least jobs or income for all.”


        King’s plan was nothing less than to occupy Washington with a multi-racial army of the poor. They would not be moved until the nation’s attention and resources were lent to the needs of millions of forgotten Americans. King placed the burden where, in a nominal republic, it lays:

        “The President and the Congress have a primary responsibility for low minimum wages, for a degrading system of inadequate welfare, for subsidies of the rich and unemployment and underemployment of the poor, for a war mentality, for slums and starvation, and racism.”

        That King’s plan was intolerable to the National Security establishment and the country’s secret police is visible in the manner of his death. On April 4 th , 1968, a year to the day from his speech at Riverside Church condemning the slaughter of women and children in Vietnam, King was gunned down outside his hotel room in Memphis, Tennessee.


        King’s protection had been withdrawn, his hotel room altered, his organization infiltrated. The crime scene was not sealed, key witnesses were not interviewed, an all-too-convenient bundle of evidence, including a rifle and an unlikely map of King’s itinerary was left in a doorway for easy collection. The alleged shooter was himself eventually collected in England, a shiftless, penniless, escaped convict who somehow possessed a number of expensive false passports. In later years, Attorney Bill Pepper, friend to Dr. King, would bring enough real evidence, eyewitnesses, and confessions into court to flesh out a portrait of the unspeakable: from the highest levels of the United States Government, the same one that King sought to save from itself, came the orders to kill.


        Dr. King said, ‘”If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read “Vietnam.”’


        It is the sad verdict of history to note that America’s soul has been so poisoned, and part of the autopsy must read “Assassination”.

        ​

        John Kirby is the director of FOUR DIED TRYING, a feature documentary and series on the major assassinations of the 1960’s and their calamitous impact on the country. To join the struggle for justice for Dr. King, Malcolm X, and John and Robert Kennedy, sign the petition.

        bottom of page