Murder Most Foul Performed Live by Tom Palaima and Joe Goodkin

MURDER MOST FOUL (MMF) by Bob Dylan

Released on Disc 2 of Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020)

https://www.bobdylan.com/albums/rough-and-rowdy-ways/

Official lyrics: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/murder-most-foul/

Official video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NbQkyvbw18

MMF LIVE VERSION

Tom Palaima – vocals

Joe Goodkin – guitar

Recorded by Shane Hendrickson at Studio 3024, Chicago, IL, on October 12, 2023 in one unedited take and performed from memory.

We hope our live version helps listeners to feel and understand the magnitude and emotional depth of this masterpiece by Bob Dylan.

About Joe Goodkin: Joe (b. July 8, 1977) is a Chicago-based singer/songwriter who has written and recorded twelve albums of original music under the name Paper Arrows and his own name.  He travels the country and world singing modern folk song cycle retellings of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad (The Blues of Achilles), a combined 450 performances in almost every US state as well as Greece and Italy. His 13th album is called Consolations and Desolations and will be available everywhere you get digital music on October 27, 2023.

More at:  https://www.joegoodkin.com

https://www.thebluesofachilles.com

https://www.joesodyssey.com

“I played a 1963 Gibson J-50 acoustic (like this one https://guitar.com/reviews/vintage-review/vintage-bench-test-1963-gibson-j-50/ ). An intriguing coincidence (if you believe in coincidences) that it is from the year Kennedy was killed and the young Bob Dylan experienced such trauma (see Background below).  I favor Gibson guitars for their darker tone and I especially favor vintage Gibson guitars for the additional sonic complexity that develops from aged wood and the decades of history that reside in the instrument.”

“I was first made aware of Bob Dylan’s music through cover versions of “All Along the Watchtower” (Jimi Hendrix) and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (Guns N’ Roses). I got a chance to see Bob live in 1993 in Chicago.  As my focus in music shifted from strictly guitar playing to songwriting/singing, I began to absorb his influence directly through his massive catalogue. The album Time Out of Mind was a game changer. Over the last few years I’ve been lucky enough to learn and perform Bob’s songs at least a dozen times (both in person and virtually) for Tom Palaima’s UGS 302 class at the University of Texas at Austin: Bob Dylan History Imagination. These performances have been both intimidating and inspiring, allowing me to get inside some of the seemingly limitless genius of Mr. Dylan’s singular oeuvre.”

About Tom Palaima: Tom Palaima (b. October 6, 1951) is in his last academic year as Robert M. Armstrong Professor of Classics and founding director of the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (est. 1986) at the University of Texas at Austin.

Since the 1990’s he has taught seminars, written book reviews and public intellectual commentaries, and lectured widely on human creative responses to war, violence and social injustice, ancient and modern, and on music and songs as social commentary, including the song poems of Bob Dylan.

He serves on the editorial board of The Dylan Review. He was a prime mover in the decision of TDR  to publish Dylan-inspired poetry, including his own, and to emphasize inspiring the upcoming generation to explore and feel Dylan’s music and express themselves about how his songs and performances affect them.

More at: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/classics/faculty/palaimat

Why record the song? During Covid (Spring 2020-Spring 2023) Joe Goodkin and Tom Palaima performed “Murder Most Foul” three different times via Zoom for annual iterations of Tom’s award-winning UGS 302 class at the University of Texas at Austin: Bob Dylan History Imagination. Tom then was using the printed text as a crutch.

They took advantage of Tom’s going to Chicago for a MacArthur Fellows Forum in mid-October 2023 to record MMF in the studio. Tom decided the only way to ‘know and feel’ the song fully and understand its complexity was to learn it by heart. This he did over a period of about six weeks.

The version of MMF here was done in one take in Studio 3024. It has certain live-performance ‘flaws’: ‘live’ substitutions and small mistakes and two vocal pauses filled by Joe’s fine guitar.

Tom also chants “Look Out” instead of “Hold On” when JFK realizes the trap he is in. He was so deep inside the song that he was warning the president himself rather than reporting the president’s own realization.

But we also got to update the chronology: “For the last sixty years they’ve been searching for that.” The end result is what it is and it’s our “Murder Most Foul.”

BACKGROUND TO DYLAN’S EPIC by Tom Palaima

Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” is a deeply disconcerting hymn of associative and dissociative memory and memorialization.

It is grounded in Dylan’s own original intense experiences of personal loss and menacing social hatred during 1963, the year when he celebrated in late May his twenty-second birthday. During that year Dylan in his famous Town Hall Concert (April 12, 1963) recited a capella, as it were, his seven-minute poem “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie.” Guthrie at age fifty was then about a decade into hospitalization with the extremely debilitating neural disorder Huntington’s chorea.

On June 12, 1963, in a suburb of Jackson, Mississippi, Medgar Evers, a black World War II veteran, a lawyer and NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, arguably the deepest of the Deep South states, with all that this phrase implies, was shot dead in his driveway coming home late at night to his wife and three children.

Soon afterwards, Dylan wrote his penetratingly honest assessment of the incident “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and performed it on July 6 at a black voter registration rally in nearby Greenwood, Mississippi in the presence of Pete Seeger and Theodore Bikel. Bikel recollects the event, here.

On August 28, 1963, Dylan sang the same song from the very podium in the March on Washington where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Returning from Washington, Dylan composed his classic song about racial violence “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” He recorded it in October.

Less than three months later, Dylan and his then true love Suze Rotolo sat riveted to coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and its aftermath (November 22-25, 1963).

Finally, on December 13, 1963, three weeks after Kennedy was killed, at the dinner where he received the Tom Paine Award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Union, Dylan, having spoken in favor of pro-Castro activists, segued to the Kennedy assassination. He bravely and honestly said:

I’ll stand up and to get uncompromisable about it, which I have to be to be honest, I just got to be, as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where —what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I too – I saw some of myself in him. I don’t think it would have gone – I don’t think it could go that far. But I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt, in me – not to go that far and shoot.

THE POWERFUL MESSAGE OF “Murder Most Foul” (MMF) by Tom Palaima

The reference in MMF to searching for Kennedy’s soul for ‘the last fifty years’ gives us an indication that Dylan was thinking, as would only be natural, about the killing of JFK around the time of its fiftieth anniversary in 2013. The song distills the essence and the long-term impact of this shockingly brutal public murder upon American culture and the ‘soul of the nation’.

As I wrote during the covid period in an essay not long after the release of MMF in late March 2020, “Grassy Knoll Covid Morning,” Athenaeum Review 5 Winter 2021 FOLIO:

For close to seventeen minutes Dylan, with piano, cello and light percussion accompaniment, hypnotically meditates upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He takes us through the events of those late November days in 1963 when “the soul of a nation has been torn away” and “the age of the anti-Christ has just only begun.” The subdued meditative mood of the song matche[d] the gray mood of COVID times.

Dylan’s song is Nobel Prize-worthy. I would say he makes us relive the miserable killings, the grief of the Kennedy family, the quick changing of the political guard and what it all meant for us and our country, but in truth MMF makes us take these things deep into our minds and souls and really live them for the first time.

I lived through the assassination of JFK. I was twelve years old and sitting on the front steps of my neighbor friend Robbie’s house in the early afternoon on Sunday November 24, 1963, when his divorced mother came out the front door looking shaken and distracted. Because there were no adults around for her to talk to, she said, not really to us, “They just shot President Kennedy’s —.” I forget what she called Lee Harvey Oswald. Neither my friend Robbie nor I felt very much. We did not talk about the president or his presumed killer being shot. We were more interested in the Cleveland Browns football game that afternoon. By weird fate the Browns were playing against the Dallas Cowboys. I saw my Catholic parents grieving during this period, my mother crying during iconic televised and photographed moments like John John’s final salute to his father.

Dylan in his sung words and [with his] sea-like musical accompaniment takes us “Deep in a Dream,” into the kind of reverie where “junk” or heroin takes the jazz musicians he calls out. He re-creates what it was like for Kennedy himself to realize that he was being “led into some kind of a trap” and “gunned down like a dog in broad daylight” while “ridin’ in the back seat next to my wife / heading straight on into the afterlife.” Dylan conveys the meaning of this “vile, cruel and mean” act to Americans then and to us now, as it was captured forever on the famous Zapruder film.

Dylan never uses the clinical and emotion-obliterating word ‘assassination’.  He makes us feel the horrific moment as a murder most foul (a phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet that he uses to conclude all four main stanzas, and to end the song itself), a killing “with hatred, without any respect.” And we do feel what it was like when “they killed him once and they killed him twice / killed him like a human sacrifice.”

Dylan takes us away into our distracted American lives filled with Beatles music, Hollywood movies, Woodstock, Altamont, Patsy Cline, Etta James, Don Henley, Sonny Boy Williamson, Hoagey Carmichael, Shakespeare, the Who, Wolfman Jack and “the great Bud Powell.” He jars us [back] out of our American dreams by alluding to other brutal murders of innocents and not-so-innocents in our country’s history: Sherman’s march to the sea (1864), the Tulsa race massacre (1921), the sordid hanging for murder of Civil War veteran Tom Dula (1868), the violent killings of notorious gangsters Charles Floyd (1934) and Benjamin Siegel (1947). He then leaves us with a “blood-stained banner” and a final “murder most foul.”

Remembering Denny Freeman

by Tom Palaima

April 29, 2021

The Old Austin is now officially dead. Denny Freeman did/played it all,

from Bob Wills and Hank Williams on pedal steel behind John Reed at C-Boy’s to Bob Dylan (March 2005-August 2009 for selections from his Dylan period go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAsLiqUAnlg );

from jazz standards behind jazz trombonist Jon Blondell at the Elephant Room and Hammond B3 organist Mike Flanigin at the Gallery to late 50’s into 60’s r&b and early rock and roll dance music at the Saxon Pub happy hour throughout the 2000-teens;

and behind great bluesmen and women at Antone’s and at the start with Paul Ray and the Cobras and with Stevie Ray Vaughan. He also long toured with Taj Mahal.

He did it with grace, modesty, dedication and a kind of genial seriousness of purpose.

And he did, as one headline proclaimed, make everyone else sound better.

Visitors and even Austinites whom I took to hear Denny in his many manifestations, all say the one time is memorable and they are grateful to have seen and heard him.

Two pieces sent my way from Denny’s friends

This profile is great on Denny. It is written by my friend of twenty years, Brad Buchholz, former feature writer for the Statesman:

https://www.austin360.com/story/entertainment/music/2021/04/25/austin-blues-guitar-great-denny-freeman-dies-toured-bob-dylan/7378738002/ (Links to an external site.)

This is a marvelous heartfelt interview found and furnished by my friend, Casey Monahan, former head for ca. 25 years of the Governor’s Music Commission, who knows knew everyone, because he set up the state index of musicians and supported/promoted Texas music personally and tirelessly. The interview will clue you in to life for someone coming of age in Texas 1962-70 and some deeply personal experiences we all go through, including how we handle becoming separate from our parents out in the world.

https://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/2021/02/23/d-freeman-interview/ (Links to an external site.)

Recordings of Denny’s music

I have put together in one folder 5 live tracks and one studio version that get across why Denny’s music gave us so much joy and helped us get through our blues and sorrow in whatever rough times we were in.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/rfdz2fiip1z9ol6/AADIFpkJx5HpEW4TLep8rdt_a?dl=0 (Links to an external site.)

I hope this works. Let me know if you have any troubles downloading the six files. They’re embedded below, too.

There are some small stutters in these.

They were recorded with an old small voice recorder kind of thing I had back then and then transferred onto computer.

Five Freeman classics live and One Ur-original

    1. Dylan (2005 Manchester) “Million Miles”
  1. Jazz (2011) 2 versions of “Riders on the Storm” premiere 082611 & 6 wks later 101611 with Mike Flanigin and Frosty Smith at The Gallery
    1. Version 1:

      On the premiere of “Riders on the Storm” you will hear Mike Flanigin at the beginning explaining to Denny some features of the structure of the song they are about to play and at the end Denny asking what song that was that he just played; my boyish voice twice says it’s the world premiere!

    2. Version 2, 6 weeks later:

      The Gallery on Sunday nights second set was pure heaven for the small audience; no one was there ’round midnight who did not want to hear great music. On the 101611 version you can hear Mike explaining there was no cover that night but we were encouraged to fill the tip jar, because “Denny Freeman doesn’t come cheap.”

      In fact, no. Denny was and will remain priceless as these bootlegs of mine will attest.

  2. Blues/jazz (2012) Denny’s ‘signature’ tune “Soul Street” the original released version from his 1988 album Out of the Blue AND 2 live versions, one with Derek O’Brien at Antone’s and the other with Jon Blondell and Frosty Smith (The Denny Freeman Trio) at The Gallery
    1. Original version:
    2. With Derek O’Brien:
    3. with Jon Blondell:

 

All my very best wishes. All this above and below helps me not feel so bad. Maybe it will do some good for you, too.

PS Here, too, is an oldie, but goodie from Gavin Garcia’s TODO Austin that recalls a time the late, great Cliff Antone, over my house for a reception, plucked Denny’s music out of the air in mid-conversation. I had thought this was when Michael Gray was visiting, but that was on September 7, 2006 and Cliff passed away on May 23, 2006. And this talks about Denny just having started to play for Bob, which he did from March 7, 2005 through August 2009.

I also thought it was “Million Miles” of which I have given you a magnificent Denny version here. But it actually was “Standing in the Doorway” which Denny played six times with Bob between March and November 2005: 11 March, 25 March, 8 April, 25 April, 21 June, 13 November.

Ain’t it just like your mind to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to make it be still and quiet.

This all captures some of the last gasps of old Austin. I think with Denny’s passing, even memories of old Austin will be gone, or else transform themselves in our imaginations as my mind has gotten two things wrong. But what I got right was Cliff and how he knew Denny’s playing style. And the emotion that student detected in Cliff is the same quiet love of music Denny put across on stage all the time.

TODO Austin 1:5 (October 2009)

“Dr. Antone: The Real Deal”

by Tom Palaima

“You know, if people wanna know why a brother can do down, can get down so much and really do the blues, it’s cause he lived the blues, he lived the blues.”

-James Brown, “Like It Is, Like It Was” 1970

One of the happiest turns in my life was getting to know Clifford Antone personally through our mutual friend Gavin Lance Garcia. We became friends at lunch with Gavin at Hoover’s on Manor Road just after New Year’s Day 2004. I had, of course, seen Clifford at his club at least a hundred times since my first time there in late December 1983, when, in my memory, Cliff had managed to bring in the reclusive jazz-inflected bluesman Fenton Robinson. What made Cliff special, even from a distance, was the respect and courtesy he conveyed in introducing the blues artists who graced his stage and his own child-like happiness in being able to hear them live, close-up and personal, and to give the gift of their music to people like me who were smart enough to realize that a night of music at Antone’s was the best thing Austin had to offer.

I brought to our lunch at Hoover’s a paper I had presented at a Fulbright conference in Austria in November 1992. I had discussed blues and race relations in the United States, which was then a hot topic in circles such as Living Blues magazine. A friend back in the States had gone to the old Antone’s on Guadalupe one afternoon and, with the kind permission of Susan Antone, had taken slide photos of the whole interior and its many memorabilia, so that I could show Austrian students the environment for the music I was playing them: Zuzu Bolin, Herbie Bowser and T.D. Bell, Jimmy Rogers and the Antone’s House Band, master-of-the-telecaster Albert Collins, Junior Wells and James Cotton. Well, talking about all these blues legends was okay twelve years later at Hoover’s, but it was when I mentioned a special set I had heard at Cliff’s club by the great husband and wife team Carol Fran and Clarence Hollimon that Cliff said to Gavin, “The man knows his blues.”

When the bill came, I went to pay. Cliff insisted that he pay. I said I would take $20 from him, but only if he signed it. That bill is now framed on the wall of my office, Andrew Jackson staring over at the big C in Clifford’s signature and the Antone 04. Below in the same frame is Cliff’s business card with Pinetop Perkins’ autograph from the interview I did with Pinetop for anAmerican-Statesman commentary. Cliff had brought Pinetop to Austin and had seen to all of his living arrangements when it became known to him that Pinetop was being taken advantage of by music people up in Indiana.

The Cliff I knew was the real deal. I think that Cliff, like Bob Dylan, heard music all the time. Once we had him to dinner with a small group of aficionados of other kinds of music. I thought it would be nice to put some Antone’s Records cd’s on softly as background.

Impossible. In the middle of a conversation, Cliff would suddenly say, “Listen to what Kaz (Kazanoff) is doing here.” Or his conversation would stop as he was transported away by Kim Wilson playing harp alongside Jimmy Rogers. Most remarkable was this. Denny Freeman had then just started to play with Bob Dylan. I had put on a bootleg which had Bob and his band doing a beautiful, spare, bluesy version of “Standing in the Doorway.” Cliff, again in the middle of talking, said, “Hey, listen to Denny.”

Cliff was the real deal and he respected real music. I remember getting a call from him saying, “The place to be tonight is Jovita’s.” When I got there, Cliff was dreamily taking in the Cornell Hurd Band. And it was Cliff who turned me on to Hard Core Country Tuesday at the Broken Spoke, with James White and Alvin Crow and Johnny X playing genuine country music. Cliff heard the reality in their non-amplified, front-room renditions of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and country blues yodeler Jimmy Rodgers.

The place where Cliff’s deep love of blues music, music-makers and people in general really came across was in the course he taught with Kevin Mooney at UT Austin, “The Blues According to Clifford Austin.” I was lucky enough one semester to be able to sit in regularly.

Cliff would walk in with a suitcase full of dvd’s, vhs tapes, cd’s, books and photos and then give as much of it as he could to the students. Enrollment grew from 60 in 2004 to 180 in 2006. As Kevin recalls, “Cliff’s excitement was infectious, as it always was when he showed us an extremely rare film of B.B. King sharing the stage with T-Bone Walker or a video clip of a young Stevie Ray Vaughan taken from his private collection.” Cliff often said: “This film is so great, I can’t even watch it.” I can corroborate what Kevin says, “He liked to answer questions and showed an enormous amount of respect for the students. He would ask them if they had ever heard of a certain musician and often seemed shocked when only a few hands went up, but that reinforced how important it was for him to be there.”

Cliff died just weeks after the spring 2006 semester ended. I remember getting a call from Gavin while at a dinner before a lecture I was giving in New York City. The bad news sucked the life out of me. What one student wrote on his course evaluation sums Cliff up perfectly, “I have never seen someone so passionate about music. He wanted everyone to feel what he felt and he kept everyone interested with the hundreds of stories he had.” He lived the blues.

PPS Denny lived the blues and so much else through music.