We all remember where we were when Walter Cronkite brought
us the news. I had just finished playing ball and took a shower in the gym at
Danbury State Teachers College, now Western Connecticut University. The weather that
day, November 22, 1963, was fairly mild, around 50 degrees. Cars were parked in
the lot, students crowded around some of them. The girls were weeping, the boys
somber, a look of fury and shame on their faces.
“What’s the matter?” I asked
I remember thinking to myself – why would anyone want to
shoot Ed Kennedy, my roommate?
“President Kennedy has been assassinated.”
It was all a jumble of impossibilities. A day later, three
of us decided to hitch to DC, as a mark of respect and love for John Kennedy,
so that we might be present as he lay in state at the Rotunda of the Capitol
Building in Washington. The roads were busy, but we made the hitch in only
three rides, the most memorable of which was the last. Our chauffeurs were two
gents, not much older than ourselves, who we later supposed, from their thick
southern accents, might have been from Tennessee. They wanted to shake some
money from our pockets for gas, but we hadn’t any. They deposited us late at
night at Union Station, where we stretched ourselves out on a bench and slept
the sleep of the just. In the morning a police baton tapped the soles of our
shoes and woke us.
“Time to get up boys,” the cop said.
The streets were massed with people. I was thinking, oddly
enough, of Walt Whitman’s poetic tribute to Lincoln in his poem “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
Coffin that passes
through lanes and streets,
Through day and night
with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the
inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black…
On occasions like this, one does not join a crowd for
company. That day one could feel entirely alone in the smothering crowd.
Bob Dylan is not Whitman, who simply could not keep himself
out of his poetic way. But there is no doubt that Dylan’s new release, a 17-minute song about the Kennedy
assassination, is a free-form poem in which the teeth and claws of the Kennedy assassination
are set against a backdrop, the revolutionary 60’s, that hangs over the
assassination like Whitman’s “great cloud darkening the land.”
Here is Dylan’s prosaic
prelude to the poem, a message to his fans:
“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”
Dylan has never been
interested in explaining either himself or his sung poems to a media he has politely
disdained. This time was no exception. “A Dylan representative,” the New York
Post tells us, “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.”
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