Bob Dylan Releases 17-Minute Song About the JFK Assassination
Article by Chris Wellman March 26, 2020 (variety.com)
• On March 26th, Bob Dylan released a new ‘song’ called ‘Murder Most Foul’. The epic track, which runs nearly 17 minutes, focuses on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Said Dylan of the release, “Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty over the years. 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 – Bob Dylan.”
• Whether “a while back” means Dylan recorded the song months or years ago remains a mystery. It is Dylan’s first self-written song release in eight years. It contains minimal violin, piano and light percussion backing his quiet vocal tone. (see YouTube music video of ‘Murder Most Foul’ below) There’s literally half an album’s worth of lyrical material for Dylanologists to dissect. (see Editor’s Note below for my own dissection)
• The lyrics speak extremely literally of the Kennedy assassination, with a bent toward conspiratorial takes on the event. As the song goes along it breaks more freely into a pop-culture fantasia, referencing 1960s and 70s events with catchphrases such as “The Beatles are coming, they’re gonna hold your hand” and “I’m going to Woodstock, it’s the Aquarian age / Then I’ll go to Altamont and stand near the stage.” Dylan invokes myriad cultural references, from Buster Keaton to Houdini, ‘Gone With the Wind’ to Nat King Cole, Marilyn Monroe to Patsy Kline, the Eagles to the Allman Brothers. (see the song lyrics here – and NPR’s list of the 74 referenced songs here)
• Occasionally, Dylan directly marries his pop-culture references and the assassination, as when he sings, “You got me Dizzy Miss Lizzy, you fill me with lead.” Or: “What’s new pussycat, what’d I say / I said the soul of a nation been torn away.” When it comes to the actual assassination, Dylan doesn’t skimp on the details, describing the kill shot and frantic exit from Dealey Plaza in Dallas. Dylan does not shy away from provocative lines such as “We’ve already got someone here to take your place” and with regard to Kennedy’s brothers, “we’ll get them as well.”
• In 1964, only three months after the murder, Dylan and entourage reportedly drove the President’s route through Dealey Plaza so that Dylan could determine for himself what happened on that fateful day. He’s had 56 years to think about it. Writes Dylan: the killing of JFK was “right there in front of everyone’s eyes,” but became the “greatest magic trick” — one he thinks still has some relevance in 2020.
• [Editor’s Note] It is telling that among the few words that Dylan has said about this song, ‘Murder Most Foul’, he exhorts us to “stay safe, stay observant and may God be with you.” For me, Dylan’s opus marks a seminal moment in human history. I can feel the change happening in our society as the false reality that has been the mainstream narrative since World War II is being stripped away. It is a glorious thing to behold. And with this release, Bob Dylan contributes greatly to this paradigm shift.
There are very few artists with the star-power to be able to pull this off. The mainstream media cannot ignore this level of celebrity. As a cultural icon, he is now regarded as a ‘wise elder’ in American society. He is someone we believe has not been compromised, and whom we can look to for the truth. We can assume that as a major celebrity since the 1960s, Dylan has been exposed to truths at the highest level. And, courageously, Dylan uses his renown to call out the deep state government jackals who murdered JFK, cementing their sinister grip on governmental power for their own ends.
In this opus, Bob Dylan clearly blames a conspiratorial group of men for the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
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
There’s no mention of Oswald. The assassination is depicted as a professional hit job, “Perfectly executed, skillfully done.” Just who was this group of men that Dylan accuses? Public ridicule and mocking are notorious tools of the deep state, as UFO researchers well know. In perhaps the most obvious reference to the deep state government, Dylan alludes to Lyndon Johnson being ‘put in office’ by them:
We’ll mock you and shock you and we’ll put it in your face
We’ve already got someone here to take your place
In verse 2, Dylan assures us that he is familiar with JFK assassination lore and knows what he’s talking about. “There’s three bums comin’ all dressed in rags” is a reference to the ‘three tramps’ who were arrested at Dealey Plaza, said to be Chauncy Holt, Charles Rogers and Charles Harrelson (the actor Woody Harrelson’s father), who were deep state operatives deployed there to sow confusion after the shooting.
Dylan also manages to randomly include the work ‘bannister’ in verse 2 – perhaps alluding to Guy Bannister, an FBI agent turned private investigator who recruited Oswald to the intelligence community in New Orleans. As an FBI agent, Bannister had been charged with investigating several UFO sightings in the Idaho/Montana area. Of course, every sighting was dismissed as a hoax.
Toward the end of verse 2, Dylan asks: “What is the truth and where did it go? Ask Oswald and Ruby, they oughta know.” Oswald and Ruby were two of many related to the assassination who were subsequently silenced by the deep state. Says Dylan, “There’s a party going on behind the Grassy Knoll.”
Verse 3 continues with Dylan’s blatant references to “they” who plotted Kennedy’s death. “I’ve (JFK) been led into some kind of trap.” “They mutilated his body and they took out his brain. What more could they do? They piled on the pain.” This refers to persistent evidence that Kennedy’s brain had been replaced for the autopsy, with his real brain kept as a deep state souvenir.
Kennedy’s soul was the soul of the nation. “But his soul was not there where it was supposed to be, For the last fifty years they’ve been searchin’ for that freedom, but only dead men are free.” Dylan is saying that fifty years after JFK’s death, freedom still doesn’t exist among we the living.
Then Dylan shifts to the point of view of Kennedy: “[Y]ou filled me with lead, that magic bullet of yours has gone to my head.” Of course, the ‘magic bullet’ is a fiction used by prosecutor Arlen Specter of the Warren Commission to support a ‘single bullet theory’, in order to draw attention away from the true deep state culprits.
They killed him once and they killed him twice
Killed him like a human sacrifice
Dylan is saying that the deep state killed Kennedy, the man, and they also killed Kennedy, the dream. Kennedy’s dream was to overcome the deep state tyranny and ‘splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.’ But with the assassination, “[T]he age of the Antichrist has only just begun”. With “Johnson sworn in at 2:28”, the fate of America was sealed, and the American people may as well “throw in the towel.”
Verse 4 is devoted to the American culture that consequently suffered under decades of deep state rule. Among these pop culture references, Dylan mentions Jack Ruby and Marilyn Monroe – both of whom were connected to the assassination and were poisoned by CIA/deep state operatives. (Monroe was told of the extraterrestrial presence by Kennedy, and threatened to reveal it to the press. Dallas nightclub owner Ruby was a bagman for the deep state tasked with killing Oswald before he could talk. The deep state then killed Ruby in turn.) Dylan may have also included an extraterrestrial being among those affected by the assassination, citing “the man with the telepathic mind”.
Toward the end of the opus, Dylan reminds us that “They killed him on the alter of the rising sun”, just as America was rising with the consciousness of the planet. Then, Dylan invokes the Kennedy brothers, Bobby and Ted, to characterize the deep state’s utter contempt for rule of law and the American public.
Don’t worry, Mr. President, helps on the way
Your brothers are comin’, there’ll be hell to pay
Brothers? What brothers? What’s this all about?
Tell them, “We’re waiting, keep coming, we’ll get them as well”
The deep state’s ruthless and invisible hand suppressed the Kennedy brothers and taunted the American public. Where was the public outrage against the plotting deep state operatives within our government? The public proved too intimidated or brain-washed to stand up against this evil cabal. Being all powerful, the deep state only continued to threaten anyone who dared to question their authority: “We’re waiting, keep coming, we’ll get them as well.”
It is very unusual for a celebrity to put a target on their back by coming out and bluntly revealing such dangerous truths. It is said that Dylan worked for years on the wording for this composition. Why then did he choose to release it now? Is Dylan telling us that the time has come for a shift in human consciousness? Is Dylan aware of the imminent downfall of the deep state? Of the arrests? The termination of the Federal Reserve? The global financial reset? Is Dylan aware of an awakening within the mainstream public? Such an awakening will invariably lead to further revelations of the existence of advanced technologies that can transform the planet; the existence of secret space programs, bases and colonies throughout the solar system and beyond; and not only the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations, but the fact that they are all around us, and that it is time for the human species on Earth to join with a thriving galactic community.
To be sure, Dylan’s presentation to the American mainstream establishment of the truth about the JFK assassination by a deep state bastion within the government represents a fundamental shift in our collective consciousness. I commend and applaud Bob Dylan for his courage, his patriotism, and his fidelity to the people, as opposed to the uber-elite cabal and the deep state military industrial complex that usurped our democracy for themselves when they eliminated a President who would return the legacy of this planet to we, the people.
For years, Bob Dylan fans have spoken in a sort of hushed awe about the longest song he ever released,
“Highlands,” an album side-length 1997 track that ran 16 minutes and 31 seconds. Now, 23 years later, he’s slightly outdone himself. As the clock struck midnight on the east coast Friday morning, Dylan released a new song, “Murder Most Foul,” that has a running time just seconds shy of the 17-minute mark — and it’s an epic free association on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Little information was given about the surprise track, except for a brief statement from Dylan himself:
“Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty over the years.
“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.
“Bob Dylan”
A Dylan representative said the statement was all the information they would be releasing about the song, so whether “a while back” means a matter of months or many years remains a mystery.
Dylan’s tender vocal tone — a trademark of his more recent shows and recordings — and elements of the song’s minimal bed of violin, piano and light percussion quickly had hardcore fans guesstimating that the tune might actually be of fairly recent vintage.
His last album of original material, “Tempest,” came out in 2012, although he has released three sets of his interpretations of songs from the Great American Songbook in-between, the last of which was the triple-album “Triplicate” three years ago. Rumors have been rampant that this year Dylan might be releasing his first album of self-penned songs in eight years, but there’s been no confirmation of that.
The lyrics of the monumental track will fascinate Dylanologists who’ve waited years for something fresh to dissect, since there’s literally half an album’s worth of lyrical material just in one track here.
In verses that proceed freely enough that it’s not always easy to break them down into separate stanzas, the lyrics often speak extremely literally of the Kennedy assassination, with a bent toward conspiratorial takes on the event. But as the song goes along it breaks more freely into a pop-culture fantasia.
16:56 minute – Bob Dylan’s ‘Murder Most Foul’ official music video (‘Bob Dylan” YouTube)
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