Fundamentally, what attracts me to murder ballads is the way they illustrate how truth is a compromise – between right and wrong, good and bad, kindness and violence, innocence and guilt, life and death. Pick your favorite opposites. The truth is in between. Some like to place truth on the top shelf with other virtues – humility, compassion, justice, and so on. But whenever I go searching for it, I find truth somewhere on the middle shelf between the virtues and the vices (and closer to the vices, usually). Just as often, I can’t find it at all. Its space on the shelf is empty; it’s out on loan; someone else is borrowing it. It’s cataloged and its place is marked, but it’s not there.In my estimation, no murder ballad illustrates the compelling, frustrating nature of truth better than Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane.” Like many others, I love this song, which served as the introductory track on Desire (1976) and the centerpiece of Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour (1975-1976). This song is seriously, seriously tangled up in truth.

Let’s start the untangling by stating some of the few undisputed facts. “Hurricane” is a protest song about the imprisonment of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a middleweight boxer who was tried and convicted, twice, for murdering three people in a bar (in 1967 and again in 1976). In 1985, he was exonerated by a landmark Supreme Court ruling. Dylan’s song chronicles the murders themselves, as well as the acts of racism, racial profiling, and false testimony that led (according to Dylan and many others) to Carter’s false conviction and imprisonment. In fact, Dylan and others who publicized Carter’s case are credited in part with his exoneration. “Hurricane” was a popular hit and continues to be one of Dylan’s most loved songs. Finally, it’s also a fact that, after his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Dylan never performed the song again.

Co-written with Jacques Levy, the song is fast, angry, and long (over eight minutes). Its expository lyrics are peppered with “real crime” details, direct quotes from witnesses and police, and general rumination on race relations in America. There are curse words and the “n-” word. Dylan is accompanied by an angry violin. The chord progressions recall those in “All Along the Watchtower.” Some have referred to it as “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” on steroids. Let’s hear it:

While there is no repeating chorus, Dylan uses the phrase “he coulda been the champion of the world” to anchor the narrative at the beginning, middle, and ending verses of the song. These verses summarize Dylan’s take on the story and so I’ll reprint them here (along with the penultimate verse which is a quintessential Dylan protest against an unjust America):

Pistol shots ring out in the barroom night

Enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall
She sees the bartender in a pool of blood
Cries out “My God they killed them all”
Here comes the story of the Hurricane
The man the authorities came to blame
For something that he never done
Put him in a prison cell but one time he coulda been
The champion of the world.

Four in the morning and they haul Rubin in

Take him to the hospital and they bring him upstairs
The wounded man looks up through his one dying eye
Says “Wha’d you bring him in here for ? He ain’t the guy!”
Yes here comes the story of the Hurricane
The man the authorities came to blame
For something that he never done
Put in a prison cell but one time he coulda been
The champion of the world.

Rubin Carter was falsely tried

The crime was “murder one” guess who testified?
Bello and Bradley and they both baldly lied
And the newspapers they all went along for the ride
How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fool’s hand?
To see him obviously framed
Couldn’t help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land
Where justice is a game.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
That’s the story of the Hurricane
But it won’t be over till they clear his name
And give him back the time he’s done
Put him in a prison cell but one time he coulda been
The champion of the world.

Dylan was actually quite slow to arrive on this murder scene. When Dylan took up his cause, Carter had been in prison for eight years. By 1973, his appeals were running out and he was penniless. As a last resort, he enlisted the help of an investigator, who searched for exonerating evidence, as well as a freelance writer, who encouraged others to write about the story and helped Carter finish an autobiography, entitled  The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to Number 45472. To promote the book, Carter sent copies to a wide range of celebrities, including Dylan.

This strategy paid off. In 1974, reporters from the New York Times tracked down Bello and Bradley and published recantations of their testimony. At the same time, Dylan finished reading his copy of The Sixteenth Round, visited Carter in jail, and decided to write a song about him. He also decided to promote Carter’s cause during his Rolling Thunder tour, which he was just putting together. Overnight, Carter himself became a celebrity.

In setting out to write “Hurricane,” Dylan quickly encountered legal problems of his own. Attempting to further vilify the discredited Bello and Bradley, Dylan included a description of them robbing the bodies of the murder victims, something no one had accused them of doing. Fearing a lawsuit, attorneys for the record label forced him to rewrite the lyrics and re-record the song. A very reluctant Dylan did so at the eleventh hour, in a single session. The new version was longer, angrier, and more frenetic; the next day, the record label released it as a single to popular acclaim.

The lawyers didn’t prevent a lawsuit, however: witness Patty Valentine sued Dylan for defamation of character, charging that his song implied that she had lied during her testimony, misquoted her, and destroyed her anonymity. In his deposition, Dylan stated that the song was “written to right a wrong,” and that his poetic license was for a good cause. “The purpose,” he said, “was to bring justice to a man we felt was falsely tried.” His attorneys argued that Dylan had represented Valentine “accurately if not exactly.” Valentine’s case was dropped, but Dylan was skewered by critics (serious and fringe ones alike) for including a wide range of false details in the song, including quotes from the police that were entirely made up. Even today, there are angry websites dedicated to denouncing Dylan and taking the song apart word by word and comparing it to details of the case.The 1999 film about Carter starring Denzel Washington, which featured Dylan’s “Hurricane” prominently as both song and source, received the same response. Critics complained about its unbalanced representation of Carter (who had a long criminal history for assault), his career (not as glorious as depicted), and the case against him (not as cut and dry a farce).

Dylan’s staging of the truth during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour proved similarly problematic. In December 1975, a few weeks after “Hurricane” was released, Dylan brought his tour to Madison Square Garden to do a much-hyped benefit concert for Carter. As promotion, he met with Carter and performed in New Jersey’s Clinton State Prison, with the media in attendance. Among those present were reporters from People magazine, who wanted to photograph Carter talking with Dylan from behind bars. But Clinton was a low-security prison without bars, so Carter and Dylan used a hallway door gate to create the photograph the magazine wanted. The photo, also pictured above, became iconic.

Carter with Dylan in prison, but not behind bars.

As a whole, the Rolling Thunder Revue tour was a confusing, somewhat shifty stage on which to introduce Carter to the world. For the tour, Dylan had put together a motley crew of singers, poets, celebrities, and hangers-on, including Roger McGuinn of The Byrds, Mick Ronson of Bowie’s The Spiders from Mars, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Kinky Friedman, Sam Shepard, Allen Ginsberg and — for the Madison Square concert — Muhammad Ali and Roberta Flack, among many others. Throughout the tour, Dylan appeared in whiteface make-up and a flower-laden hat. He often wore a mask as well. The whole thing had a fantastic three-ring circus quality.

The tour was also filmed, ending up as Renaldo and Clara, an almost four hour feature directed by Dylan and co-written by Dylan and Shepard. In addition to concert footage and interviews, the film also included dramatic vignettes starring the Rolling Thunder Revue performers, who acted out a dramatic love triangle and waxed philosophic and bizarre on a variety of obscure, abstract, taboo and otherwise generally inaccessible topics. It received devastating reviews. Here is a representative clip, in which Dylan and the Revue crew have a picnic and Allen Ginsberg teaches them how to meditate:

The film also included footage of Rubin Carter. But why? Ostensibly, and according to Shepard, the film was Dylan’s attempt to infuse a Cubist influence into his work, to illustrate experience from multiple points of view and to break down traditional modes of perception through layers of deception and fantasy. Maybe he thought this would help Carter too, although it’s easy to see how that could go horribly awry. At any rate, it was all getting to be way too much for everyone, an uncomfortable trip down the rabbit hole, and the entire Rolling Thunder Revue enterprise started to devolve into meaninglessness. The second leg of the tour in 1976 was significantly less popular, received poor reviews, and ended on a decidedly poor note in a half empty concert hall in conservative Salt Lake City.

“If you’ve got any political pull at all, maybe you can help this man get out of jail and back on the street.” These were the words Dylan used to introduce “Hurricane” during the Rolling Thunder Revue benefit concerts. But whatever truth Dylan was trying to tell through the circus-like spectacle of the tour had little to do with Carter’s very specific predicament — at least, not in any way that those with the power to free him would understand.

Maybe Dylan recognized that. Or maybe, having sung his song, he just a-traveled on. In early 1976, towards the end of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour, and just a few months after Dylan released Desire to wide acclaim, Carter and Artis were released from prison. Because of the intense coverage and publicity, and the recantations of Bello and Bradley, their convictions had been overturned. But later that same year they were brought to trial again, Bello recanted his recantation, and Carter and Artis were convicted and sent to prison for life for a second time. Neither Dylan nor any of the other celebrities who had championed his cause attended the second trial, and they completely abandoned Carter after he was convicted the second time.

After Dylan’s big show, then, he was a no show. And, in fact, there would continue to be no show from Dylan when it came to Carter, or to “Hurricane.” As mentioned, after the Rolling Thunder Revue tour ended, Dylan never performed the song again. And, despite its continued popularity and legendary status, few others have tried to take it on; the only major cover of the song is a so-so one by Ani DiFranco:

After the Supreme Court finally overturned his conviction in 1985, Carter would comment that several of those who championed his cause (although not Dylan specifically) patronized him as a “trophy horse” — one who brought them money, fame, or just a good story. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim Dylan patronized him this way — not nearly so far. But I also don’t have the right words to define what Dylan actually did do.

Other than to say he wrote a fine murder ballad, of course. What do I think about “Hurricane,” ultimately? There are only two undisputed facts: 1) I don’t know where exactly to place its truth on the shelf; and 2) I love it.

I’ll follow up next week with a look (much shorter, I promise) at the other murder ballads on Dylan’s Desire.