Probably because gospel music is the music of good news and in these days there just isn’t any. Why didn’t more people pay attention to Little Richard’s gospel music? Did you listen to their music after they passed as a kind of tribute? Our world is already obsolete.Ī line in “False Prophet” - “I’m the last of the best - you can bury the rest” - reminded me of the recent deaths of John Prine and Little Richard. Telecommunications and advanced technology is the world they were born into. So it’s probably best to get into that mind-set as soon as we can, because that’s going to be the reality.Īs far as technology goes, it makes everybody vulnerable. Young people who are in their teens now have no memory lane to remember. When you see somebody that is 10 years old, he’s going to be in control in 20 or 30 years, and he won’t have a clue about the world we knew. In 20 or 30 years from now, they’ll be at the forefront. They have no past, so all they know is what they see and hear, and they’ll believe anything. We have a tendency to live in the past, but that’s only us. But that only applies to people of a certain age like me and you, Doug. There’s definitely a lot more anxiety and nervousness around now than there used to be. Sure, there’s a lot of reasons to be apprehensive about that. There is a lot of apocalyptic sentiment in “Murder Most Foul.” Are you worried that in 2020 we’re past the point of no return? That technology and hyper-industrialization are going to work against human life on Earth? I think about it in general terms, not in a personal way. Every human being, no matter how strong or mighty, is frail when it comes to death. Not to be light on it, but everybody’s life is so transient. I think about the death of the human race. Even though he hadn’t done a major interview outside of his own website since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, he agreed to a phone chat from his Malibu home, which turned out to be his only interview before next Friday’s release of “Rough and Rowdy Ways ,” his first album of original songs since “Tempest” in 2012. Given the nature of our relationship, I felt comfortable reaching out to him in April after, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, he unexpectedly released his epic, 17-minute song “Murder Most Foul,” about the Kennedy assassination. troops had butchered hundreds of peaceful Cheyenne and Arapahoe in southeastern Colorado. When I answered, “Not enough,” he got up from his folding chair, climbed into his tour bus, and came back five minutes later with photocopies describing how U.S. At one juncture, he asked me what I knew about the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. A few years ago, sitting beneath shade trees in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., I had a two-hour discussion with Bob Dylan that touched on Malcolm X, the French Revolution, Franklin Roosevelt and World War II.