Bob Dylan is 80-Years-Old Today. His Soul Is Infinitely Older.

Shortly before midnight, on March 27 of the plague year 2020, something shifted in the tectonics of a benumbed and petrified nation. A droning at first, and then a piano playing across town, or maybe across the long, bloody years of the last century. It was hard to tell. And the first two lines.

Twas a dark day in Dallas, November ’63A day that will live on in infamy…

It was dark, conjuring music, with a violin floating in and out of the arrangement like a haunt in a mansion with no windows. The lyrics were barbed and accurate, the facts of November 22, 1963 honed like diamond-tipped drill bits and deployed throughout the song like a sword in a cane. FDR’s words after Pearl Harbor repurposed for use about the murder of a president. Perfect.

There’s a party goin’ on behind the Grassy KnollStack up the bricks, pour the cementDon’t say Dallas don’t love you, Mr. President.

Perhaps the last words John F. Kennedy ever heard. Nellie Connally, riding in the jump-seats in front of him in the limousine, said that to him just before the first shot sounded.

I’m in the red-light district, like a cop on the beatLivin’ in a nightmare on Elm Street.

The president was killed on Elm Street.

You got me dizzy, Miss Lizzy, you filled me with leadThat magic bullet of yours has gone to my head.

As cold a pun as any of Shakespeare’s.

I played the song, “Murder Most Foul,” three times running, the same way I played “Desolation Row” in 1965, and “Tangled Up In Blue” in 1974, and “Gates of Eden” repeatedly on a jukebox in the Avalanche Bar in Milwaukee in 1975, and “Jokerman” in 1983, and “Blind Willie McTell” in 1985, and “ Not Dark Yet” in 1997. All of them contained at least one or two lines that nailed my heart to the wall and my head to the sky.

Everybody is making love or else expecting rain.

Some are mathematiciansSome are carpenters’ wives.

The motorcycle black MadonnaTwo-wheeled gypsy queen.

You’re going to Sodom and Gomorrah but what do you care?Ain’t nobody therewould want to marry your sister.

Well I heard that hoot-owl singingAs the were taking down the tentThe stars above the barren trees was his only audience.

Feel like my soul has turned into steelI’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal.

And then, in a time when time itself seemed stunned and staggering, when simple human interaction was a deadly threat, when dread and fear and loss were triumphant, suddenly, out of nowhere, into these weird aquarium lives into which the plague had locked us, here came these amazing 17 minutes, words like cool cascades of sudden water, sweeping us back to our history, all of it, good and bad, reminding us of the first time most people my age saw our easy assumptions about this nation detonated.

Gunfire on a sunny afternoon.

Murder most foul.

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How does he do it? How has he done it for going on 60 years now? How does he find exactly the right words for exactly the right moment at exactly the right time? How does he always—always—wrestle the baffling and formless zeitgeist into something so familiar that it fits perfectly into both our common history and our most uncommon mythos. How does he fit John F. Kennedy so tightly into the fabric of subterranean American history that also holds Staggerlee, and John Henry, The Butcher’s Boy and the Wagoners Lad, John the Revelator and the Coo Coo Bird, and Huck, lighting out for the west, for the newest frontier? How does brilliant, charismatic JFK turn into just another luckless victim, like Pretty Polly or the nameless corpse from “The Long Black Veil.” How did our entire country turn into one prolonged murder ballad, and how did Bob Dylan see it clearly enough to write it?

Damned if I know.

He turns 80 today, the Master does. By my count, he has had at least seven different careers, something that Todd Haynes captured brilliantly in his movie, I’m Not There. (And on his latest album, he cops a little somethin’-somethin’ from Walt Whitman, a direct literary ancestor, and titles a song, “I Contain Multitudes.” He’s not kidding.) For so many years, he captured the moment and bottled it in words, and now he seems to be writing from some timeless place of myth and story. He’s the Norse skald, telling the stories of forgotten kings. He’s the Irish seanchai, singing around the fire of the deeds of Cuchulainn. He’s Virgil. He’s Homer. He turns 80 years old today. His soul is infinitely older.

Bob Dylan receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2012.

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America prides itself on being a land of constant reinvention but, very often, that’s a sleepy old-wine-in-new-bottles exercise. Dylan is someone who’s been calling that bluff since he rolled into Greenwich Village from the rusted hills of Minnesota’s Iron Range. For example, imagine if that motorcycle had rolled a few more times over him in 1966, if he ended up underneath it the way Duane Allman did. We would have lost them all—John Wesley Harding, the joker and the thief, Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts—all of the characters that came later, including everyone he name-checks in “Murder Most Foul,” even the killers of JFK. The extraordinary richness of his catalogue is a direct result of the fact that he was never content with one persona telling one kind of story. He contains multitudes and he shares them with all of us.

It is a ghost who first utters the phrase, Hamlet’s murdered father, haunting the parapets of Elsinore, ginning up revenge in his son.

Murder most foul, as in the best it is. But this most foul, strange and unnatural.

I’ve always associated Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower” with the opening of Hamlet. There’s something spectral about the lyrics, mysterious doings in a castle in some country only vaguely familiar in some indefinable time.

All along the watchtowerPrinces kept the viewWhile all the women came and wentBarefoot servants, tooWell, uh, outside in the cold distanceA wildcat did growlTwo riders were approachingAnd the wind began to howl.

Of course, Hamlet is what happens when those two riders finally get there, intrigue and bloody mayhem in their saddlebags. Dylan completes the lesson that Shakespeare wants to teach by filling in the immediate backstory, by providing a context into which he can wrestle the events of Denmark. How does he do that, over and over again?

He’s 80-years old today.

Damned if I know how.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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