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B

In at least one interview, Bob Dylan recalled that when John F. Kennedy was killed, it made him fear for his life.

He had recorded his signature protest album The Time’s They Are a-Changin’ on October 14th and 15th, 1963, just over a month before the assassination. Three weeks after the assassination, at a dinner where he was being recognized by the Emergency Civil Liberties Union, he gave a rambling speech where he was booed off the stage for saying of Lee Oswald, “I saw some of myself in him.”

The next time Dylan was in the recording studio, in June of 1964, he was showcasing “Another Side”. The album is much less political than his previous work. There is “Chimes of Freedom,” but it is not a combative song like “Masters of War” was. In “My Back Pages”, he renounces that direct style of political songwriting. In a contemporaneous interview, he stated “I don’t want to write for people anymore. You know, be a spokesman.”

It’s not clear to me if Bob Dylan really believed that one “lone nut” killed the president, and then another “lone nut” killed him the next day. Perhaps he had some awareness that the “Masters of War” had a hand in the affair. Either way, it was not unreasonable for a prominent protest figure like Dylan to feel afraid. I wonder how much this fear played a role in his transition towards electric rock music and lyrics that were much less directly political.

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