Fair call Max. It's a rough as guts line and to say you don't respect someone after you've killed them probably goes without saying. But I think Dylan is using the idiom of the folk/blues/jazz cat tongue. It's not what he's saying, it's the way he's saying it. To my ear, he pulls it off. There's probably a thousand worse Dylan lines that don't cut the mustard on the page e.g. He sings "Whenever someone around him died and was dead" in Red River Shore. Now to my knowledge, it goes without saying that someone who dies is dead, but strangely this line works.
Interesting observation Tim about Moonlight Sonata. That's not my area of expertise, but maybe Dylan's hinting at something with that line. On the subject of the music in "Murder Most Foul", I hear the violin almost mimicking the violin in Van Morrison's "Madame George" threatening to burst out of the shadows. But it never does.
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