Bob Dylan and Our Plague Years
BY Roberta Rakove
On March 19, 2020, California became the first state to issue a stay-at-home order due to the Covid-19 pandemic. One week later, Bob Dylan sent a midnight message on his website and social media:
Greetings to my fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty across 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.
With that message, Dylan released “Murder Most Foul,” one of the most remarkable songs in his catalog. None of us, including Dylan, knew that we were entering a period of twenty months when a pandemic would dramatically constrain our lives. But over that time, he gave us extraordinary work that included “Murder Most Foul,” a major new album, and a unique concert stream. Through the surprise of the releases and the startling imagination of its content and creative use of technology, his art offered a respite from both our fear and our pandemic imposed limitations. During a time of traumatic isolation, Dylan used music to create a sense of community among millions around the world.
Art and pandemics are not strangers. Dylan is part of a long tradition of using art as a response to plagues. As Frank Snowden points out in writing about the bubonic plague in Epidemics and Society, From the Black Death to the Present:
An entire genre of plague literature arose including works by Giovanni Boccaccio, Daniel Defoe, Alessandro Manzoni, and Albert Camus. It also transformed the iconography of European painting and sculpture, and it deeply affected architecture with the construction of major cathedrals and churches dedicated to the redeemer, the Virgin Mary, and the plague saints Sebastian and Roch… As late as the 20th century the disease inspired Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal. (31-32)
Later contagious outbreaks continued to generate art from the cholera outbreak that inspired Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Masque of the Red Death” to the visual art of the HIV pandemic that was closely linked to political activism.
While pandemics gave rise to many kinds of art, the role of music is different in its impact. Music has been credited with unique therapeutic roles in helping individuals and communities cope with epidemics, but as Remi Chiu notes in Plague and Music in the Renaissance, “while much research has been conducted on the political, economic, medical, and even literary and artistic consequences of plague, the connections between pestilence and music have been comparatively understudied” (5). Chiu’s work catalogs how music was recorded in plague tracts by Renaissance physicians as a part of a therapeutic regimen “to counteract the effects of fear with joy… and to distract the mind from vile imaginings” (16). The phenomenon of plague processions created a communal experience and an appearance of social order at a time of isolation. Music, including anti-pestilential musical prayers written to the plague saint Sebastian and others, was central to these processions (118-120).
Dylan was not alone in finding innovative ways to combine music and technology to ease the isolation and fear of the Covid-19 pandemic. Frontiers in Psychology compiled a list of over forty articles under the research topic “Social Convergence in Times of Spatial Distancing: The Role of Music During the Covid-19 Pandemic.” The impact of music during Covid-19 on both emotions and isolation was similar to its use in plague outbreaks in the Renaissance. In a December 2020 article in Frontiers of Psychology, Remi Chiu compares the uses of music in the outbreak of plague in Milan in 1576 and the Covid-19 pandemic noting, “It is perhaps not surprising that the mood maintenance and social cohesion functions of music emerge so clearly during epidemics past and present, given the sustained emotional turmoil and social isolation that result from widespread outbreaks of contagious disease” (“Functions of Music-Making Under Lockdown”). Examples during Covid-19 included the balcony flash mobs in Italy singing their national anthem, the citizens of Montreal singing the songs of Leonard Cohen from their windows, the streaming concerts by musicians from their homes, Yo-Yo Ma’s songs of comfort on YouTube, the use of Zoom to create choral and instrumental experiences, and the sharing of curated playlists on Spotify.
But Dylan, as always, was different.
Let’s start with that midnight announcement of “Murder Most Foul.” Dylan’s virtual audience may not be the size of Taylor Swift’s, but it is significant. His official X/Twitter account has over 400,000 followers. His YouTube channel following is three times that size, at 1.3 million subscribers. “Murder Most Foul” on YouTube has amassed 5.3 million views. Dylan’s announcement reached a large community.
At the time of the release of “Murder Most Foul,” the United States had been in lockdown for just a week. Just a few days before sending out “Murder Most Foul” Dylan had announced a cancellation of fifteen April concerts in Japan due to the Covid-19 outbreak. While it is possible that the song’s release was already scheduled, Dylan accompanying it with a personal message was highly unusual. As anyone who attends his live shows knows, he famously does not chat to the audience. When he says “thank you,” his audience goes berserk. If he tells a dad joke during the band introduction, Dylan social media lights up.[1] The fact of communication is powerful by virtue of its rarity. He is talking to us! In the first sentence, “Greetings to fans and followers with gratitude for all your support and loyalty across the years,” he acknowledged his community and reinforced our communal identity. In the second sentence, “This is an unreleased song we recorded a while back that you might find interesting,” he shocked us to attention. We might find it interesting? He must know that his community finds the smallest details about him interesting. An unreleased song, his first new song since 2012, isn’t interesting. It’s a 7.4 earthquake. In his last sentence, “Stay safe, stay observant, and may God be with you,” he sent a message of concern. One week into our isolation, we didn’t know what our lives would be, when we would be able to see our family and friends, and how we could avoid a frightening new illness. Bob reached out.
The gift he gave us was more than a song. It was a cultural and historical opus, not meant to soothe but to challenge. As the Renaissance physicians prescribed, the power of the song gave us something to think about other than our fear. Ian Grant, co-host of the Jokermen and Never Ending Stories podcasts, describes what that moment meant to him. In conversation with his podcast co-host Evan Laffer, he says:
I still remember where I was the first time I was hearing this song. I was in my kitchen in my little shoebox fucking apartment on Franklin in Bed Stuy and I was texting you about it and it was like seven in the morning, and it was several months before the show ever even started. It was just like I woke up and it was like “Bob Dylan 16 minute song, listen to this” and we were also like seven days into the shit that’s been going on for the last two and a half years at this point and it just really felt like a flash bulb moment for me and it just kept going and going and going and I remember the fucking moment it got to “rub a dub dub” and I just cracked a grin like I was in, I was in… (and in texting Evan in California) “hey wake up, there’s a 17 minute song from Bob Dylan about the JFK assassination!” (Jokermen, 11/20/2022)
Grant’s description of the power of “Murder Most Foul” to distract is even more powerful because at that moment in time, the city he was living in was in crisis as an early global epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Of all the songs recorded for Rough and Rowdy Ways, the complexity of “Murder Most Foul” allowed it to transport us out of obsessing about the virus and into a shared experience. Simon Vozick-Levinson was right when he wrote in Rolling Stone on March 27, 2020, “Murder Most Foul Is The Bob Dylan Song We Need Right Now,” but not for the reason he states: “Murder Most Foul is really about the ways that music can comfort us in our national trauma.” There is a lot going on in the song, but comfort is not at the top of the list. The song’s power came from the fact that you couldn’t stop listening to it, couldn’t stop thinking about it, and couldn’t stop analyzing it. As Anne Margaret Daniel notes reviewing the song in the summer 2020 issue of the Dylan Review, “From that first seventeen minutes to subsequent quarter-hours plus, one does not so much listen to ‘Murder Most Foul’ as be washed over by it… ‘Tempest’ may be his song about the Titanic but ‘Murder Most Foul’ is titanic.” Immediately, reviews, news reports, and podcasts appeared. NPR had a curated setlist of all the songs mentioned in “Murder Most Foul” up within hours of the release. Parodies were posted and arguments broke out. It became the first of Dylan’s songs to reach number one on the Billboard chart. On the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination in 2023, fans continued to share the song on social media. It is unimaginable that any other songwriter could create a work that would produce this reaction.
“Murder Most Foul” was the musical remedy prescribed by the Renaissance physicians during their plague. We stopped thinking about washing our groceries and sanitizing our hands. Instead, we thought about Wolfman Jack and the history of American music, the triple underpass, and the last thoughts of a martyred president. We shared our thoughts through technology within our community, restoring some social cohesion.
“Murder Most Foul” was quickly followed by the releases of “I Contain Multitudes” on April 17 and “False Prophet” on May 7. It became apparent that something was indeed happening here, creating a sense of anticipation that led up to the release of Rough and Rowdy Ways on June 19.
At the time Rough and Rowdy Ways was released, the United States was in the middle of another shockwave. On May 25, a white police officer murdered George Floyd, a Black man living in Minneapolis, while three other officers looked on. A shocking video of the murder went public. Large protests broke out in Minneapolis and spread to hundreds of cities and towns across the United States with estimates of between 15 and 26 million people taking to the streets (Buchanan, Bui, Patel New York Times July 3, 2020). There was widespread speculation and hope that perhaps this largest and most diverse demonstration in the history of the country would lead to historic change.
Bob Dylan was aware of these events. In a June 12, 2020, interview with Dylan in the New York Times the historian Douglas Brinkley wrote:
I had a brief follow up with Dylan, 79, one day after Floyd was killed in Minneapolis. Clearly shaken by the horror that had occurred in his home state, he sounded depressed. “It sickened me no end to see George tortured to death like that,” he said. “It was beyond ugly. Let’s hope that justice comes swift for the Floyd family and for the nation.”
But Dylan did not comment musically at the time nor since. That lack of comment was certainly not due to a failure of commitment or insight from someone who has written and performed a long list of songs related to racial injustice for decades, many of which already addressed the issues raised by the George Floyd murder.
Added to the social upheaval of the reaction to George Floyd’s murder was the ongoing impact of a pandemic that had grown in geography, numbers, and mortality. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) created a timeline of the pandemic, noting of May, 2020: “The unemployment rate in the U.S. is 14.7% – the highest since the Great Depression with 20.5 million people out of work” (https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html). By the end of the month, the recorded death toll from Covid-19 in the U.S. surpassed 100,000. By early June, the number of confirmed cases in the country exceeded 2 million. Vaccines were being developed but not yet in sight. The President was at war with the public health establishment. We were exhausted and uncertain.
Fortuitously, Rough and Rowdy Ways had been recorded just weeks before all activity shut down in March of 2020. Its arrival in June was definitely welcomed. In his June 15, 2020 Rolling Stone review Rob Sheffield captured the intersection of Dylan’s music and the moment in time in which it was released:
Another apocalypse; another side of Bob Dylan. The man really knows how to pick his moments. Dylan has brilliantly timed his new masterwork for a summer when the hard rain is falling all over the nation: a plague, a quarantine, revolutionary action in the streets, cities on fire, phones out of order. Rough and Rowdy Ways is his first batch of new songs in 8 years, and it’s an absolute classic – it has the bleak majesty of latter-day Dylan albums like Modern Times and Tempest, yet it goes beyond them, tapping even deeper into cosmic American mysteries.
In other words, a masterwork that was just what the Renaissance doctors ordered, distracting us in perilous times with compelling music. But in July of 2021, Dylan had another surprise up his sleeve, this one created specifically for a pandemic release and reflecting our response to it in its staging: the unexpected streaming concert film, Shadow Kingdom. Like the passion plays written and performed in Oberammergau and the anti-pestilential musical prayers used in religious processions during bubonic plague outbreaks, our 21st century pandemic was a central part of the production of Shadow Kingdom. The creation of the songs from Dylan’s “early” period obviously preceded the pandemic by decades, but the film’s art direction and distribution were dictated by and reflected precautions and restrictions imposed by Covid-19. Rather than being constrained by these limitations, Dylan and his director, Israeli-American filmmaker Alma Har’el, used them to liberate the viewers from their isolation.
The announcement of the streaming event was a surprise. What it would actually be was unknown to everyone, including the owners of the livestreaming platform Veeps that would broadcast Shadow Kingdom. The media and the Dylan fans around the world bought tickets for what they were told would be 48 hours of access to …something. Viewers got their money’s worth both in the music and the production. In his review of the album release of the Shadow Kingdom music, Michaelangelo Matos writing in Rolling Stone on June 1, 2023 called Dylan’s reinterpretation of his earlier songs on the Shadow Kingdom album a triumph. But beyond the music, Shadow Kingdom offered an experience that challenged the pandemic limitations we had experienced for sixteen months.
In certain ways, the stream of Shadow Kingdom provided many of the features of attending a live concert. Viewers would have a limited number of hours to view it, although that time was extended. Just like a live Dylan concert, the bootleggers were ready to capture it and play a cat and mouse game with Dylan Inc., keeping videos up on YouTube. Importantly, the stream also allowed a form of audience engagement that moved the viewing of Shadow Kingdom from an individual experience to a communal one. Opening the concert site early with a worldwide chat room allowed viewers to not only gather in a virtual venue but to speak to each other, identifying their locations and sharing their excitement and hopes for what they were about to see. This type of virtual communication in a period of isolation is no small thing. In a study from Frontiers of Psychology on successful audience engagement with Covid-19- era YouTube music broadcasts, the authors identify five themes: interaction, unity, resilience, identity, and emotion (Fraser, Crooke, Davidson). The online messaging that preceded the start of Shadow Kingdom certainly allowed for most if not all of these.
Streaming concerts were commonplace during the pandemic. These were usually cozy events from an artist’s living room or an empty performance space. Of course they were enjoyable, but at the same time their settings were visual reminders of our inability to have a communal live concert experience. In Shadow Kingdom, Dylan and Har’el effectively removed the conventions of time and space to distance the viewers from pandemic physical restrictions. The Shadow Kingdom audiences in the different locations in the film seem to be from multiple eras and places. Are we in the Bon Bon Club in Marseille that is thanked in the final credits? Are some of the performances happening in an indeterminate year before smoking was banned? Are we in a Western saloon? Is this taking place before color film existed? Have we landed in the barroom with the jukebox on the cover of Rough and Rowdy Ways? As Kitty Empire noted in her five-star review of the Shadow Kingdom stream in The Guardian on July 24, “there is no drummer to keep time because that would be too definite, and we are in a realm where it could be the 20s or the 40s, night or day.” Through the visual clues in the different venues in which Dylan was performing, the film took us traveling across countries and decades.
This does not mean that Shadow Kingdom ignores the disorientation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. As Nathan Schmidt notes in his review of Shadow Kingdom in Dylan Review 3.2, the juxtaposition of “masked band and unmasked audience members signify the duality of the way things are and the way they used to be.” By presenting both, Dylan and Har’el acknowledge the present but do not restrict the viewers to it. The film does not offer a vision of a post Covid-19 future, but it effectively recalls a past of live performances that may yet come again.
Other forms of shared communication among Dylan fans, beyond those related directly to Dylan’s musical output, grew virtually during Covid-19. The growth of podcast listeners during Covid-19 has been well documented and Dylan devotees have certainly had a wide choice. Craig Danuloff, the founder of the FM Podcast Network, identified fourteen Dylan podcasts in his panel on Dylan podcasting at World of Bob Dylan 2023 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Of these, three were launched during Covid-19, including The Bobcats, Jokermen, and The Dylantantes. London-based podcast host Laura Tenschert utilized her influential Definitely Dylan program to create a virtual international group of subscribers who continue to meet monthly over Zoom. As a proxy indicator for the popularity of these podcasts, Definitely Dylan has almost 9,000 followers on X/Twitter and close to 20,000 on Instagram. Jokermen has close to 12,000 followers on X/Twitter and 8,000 on Instagram. Music writer Ray Padgett’s Dylan Substack e-newsletter, Flagging Down the Double E’s, launched two months before the March 2020 shutdown, has over 12,000 subscribers. When the University of Tulsa Institute of Bob Dylan Studies was forced to move its second symposium, Dylan at 80, online in 2021, the sold out attendance was almost double that of its initial and highly successful first in-person World of Bob Dylan in 2019. Dylan at 80 drew an international sold-out enrollment of close to 1,000, and presentations from Italy and Denmark.
By the fall of 2021, a combination of effective vaccines, physical and electronic evidence of vaccination, and ready supplies of high-quality masks made the possibility of live indoor performances of music once again available. Dylan was among the first performers to respond to this opportunity. On September 26, 2021, his website and Twitter account published the message: “Bob Dylan’s Fall U.S. tour dates have been announced. The first dates go on sale starting Friday, October 1.” Perhaps even more optimistic was the attachment of the poster for the tour with the message “Bob Dylan Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021- 2024.” When an 80-year-old man announces a three-year worldwide tour and invites us to join him, who are we to think we don’t have a future? Concerts commenced in November, 2021, many including meetups of followers who had first engaged online during the pandemic. When he completed the last concert of his triumphant 2024 American spring tour in Austin on April 6, 2024 he had performed 202 concerts in North America, Asia, and Europe over a period of thirty months, something that seemed unthinkable when society shut down in March of 2020.
It is not always clear when pandemics end. Though the World Health Organization called an end to Covid-19 as a public health emergency in May, 2023, 10,000 people died of the virus that December. It is even more difficult to understand the effect of pandemics on society until we have the perspective of distance. But unquestionably, Covid-19 has been a traumatic event. Music was not a cure for that trauma, but there is evidence that it helped relieve stress and isolation. The music that Dylan provided and his use of technology to make it available achieved both of these outcomes. As Dylan noted in his interview with Jeff Slate in December 2022, “Technology can nurture us, or it can shut us out.” At the height of our isolation, he merged his art and technology to nurture us. In the same interview, Slate asked Dylan why, in The Philosophy of Modern Song, does he thank the crew from Dunkin’ Donuts. Dylan responded, “Because they were compassionate, supportive and they went the extra mile.” During our plague years, so did he.
[1] The Dylan site Expecting Rain has an ongoing list of Dylan’s dad jokes which generally appear during band introductions such as this painful one about drummer David Kemper: “He once swallowed a roll of film, we’ll see what develops.” (www.expectingrain.com/jokes.html)
Works Cited
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— “Functions of Music Making Under Lockdown: A Trans-Historical Perspective Across Two Pandemics. Frontiers in Psychology, December 17, 2020, Sec. Cultural Psychology. Volume 11 – 2020 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.616499
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