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{l Quote}:
This is one of the best protest songs ever composed. In eleven short stanzas, Bob Dylan gets to tell the whole story of the 1966 frame-up of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, whose real crime, Bob asserts, was being a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was released on the Desire Album on 5 January 1976, just after Blood on the Tracks.
We find none of the abstraction here as in, say, Blonde on Blonde. The song unrolls like a cinematic experience with the powerful chorus reinforcing the central theme: “this is the story of the Hurricane, a man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done”. Note the deliberate “done” for “did”. Bob is championing Rubin’s cause and wants us appreciate his perspective, to have empathy for him, so he presents the narrative in a vernacular the Hurricane might use himself. The gravity of the injustice is measured by the denial of Rubin’s manifest destiny to become world middleweight boxing champion. Scarlet Rivera’s violin perfectly compliments the bottom sound, pulsing like a heartbeat to Bob’s oration – he recites the verses, rather than sings them.
Towards the end of the song, Bob make brilliant use of irony. He provides a visual snapshot of the incarcerated Rubin with his bald head, assuming the pose of the Gotama Buddha, the universal embodiment of tranquility and forbearance, and contrasts that with the real perpetrators who are free to enjoy all night cocktail parties in their tuxedos and bow ties, just like old time gangsters:
“Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise, while Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell, an innocent man in a living hell”.
Bob excels at this narrative story telling. Song to Woody, Ballad of Hollis Brown, Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, John Wesley Harding, Billy, and Joey (on the same album) are examples of this biographical song writing.
Rubin was freed in 1985 and in 1999 Academy Award winner, Denzel Washington, played his character in the movie Hurricane, which engendered a lot of sympathy for him. Rubin, now 70 years of age, is a popular public speaker making up for lost time.
