Mick Clifford: Threat to humanity still blowin’ in the wind
Monica Barbaro and Timothée Chalamet in the Bob Dylan film, A Complete Unknown.
There is a scene in the movie where a young Bob Dylan is looking at TV waiting for the end of world. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was unfolding, Soviet missiles were en route to its ally Catro, in an attempt to gain advantage in the Cold War. Locating the armaments in the Caribbean island within range of the USA would have been a threat and victory rolled into one. US president John F Kennedy made it clear that he wouldn’t allow this to happen. He said if the Soviets persisted he would launch a first strike. The world held its breath as the ship carrying a deadly cargo ploughed through the waves conveying the prospect of annihilation.
All of this was going on before I was busy being born but for a few days, until the missiles were turned around, it looked like the world was busy dying. Dylan was living in New York, 22 years of age and going through a phase where he appeared to be a medium to channel into song the wonder, fear, and excitement of an old order rapidly changing. Watching the crisis unfold, he summoned his muse and wrote 'A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall'. Many years later he would recall how that and other songs that defined a generation in the 1960s came so easily to him, and how the facility deserted him, maybe around about the time the dream of the decade died. After that initial incendiary burst of creativity, he settled into a more earthy groove in which he turned out to be just the most prolific songwriter of the last half century.
