[Tim McGrath]

In "Murder Most Fowl," Dylan gives us a free-wheeling tour of many of the cultural touchstones of the last hundred years, including popular music and, most prominently, the Kennedy assassination. However, the assassination is just a hook for Dylan to hang his coat of many colors on. He is free associating here, a technique he uses frequently, and the song's scaffolding or spine--it's organizing principle--is rhyme. By my count, the song has 82 couplets, or 82 rhyming opportunities, and in 80 of them the rhymes are exact. That works out to a little more than 97 percent, a good percentage even for Dylan, no slouch in the rhyme department, as Damian appreciates. Besides referring to rock, jazz and blues, he also mentions Shakespeare and the "Moonlight Sonata," although he gets the key signature of the sonata wrong. "The Moonlight" is written in C-sharp minor, not F-sharp as Dylan says, although the key does include an F-sharp note. You'd think that Dylan would know such things, and he probably does. As always, it's hard to fathom his intentions.