These things happen on Thanksgiving, especially in the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts where this all happened. It’s the kind of town where littering could be the biggest crime of the last twenty years – or at least, it was on November 25, 1965, when Arlo Guthrie and his friend Richard Robbins were arrested for illegal dumping of garbage.
Two days later, the case came to court, where the judge, one James Hannon, was blind. Unfortunately for the prosecution, this meant that he was unable to see the “27 8-by-10 color glossy pictures, with the circles and arrows, and a paragraph on the back of each one, explaining what each one was, to be used as evidence against us“. Nonetheless, Guthrie and Robbins were each fined $50 and had to pick up the garbage in the snow.
Later, Guthrie learned that his criminal record (consisting solely of this incident) disqualified him from military service in Vietnam on the grounds that he was not sufficiently moral to be drafted.
Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were a couple who seemed made for each other. He was a would-be neo-Nazi, she was a survivor of domestic abuse who had been taught that violence was the only way to win respect. When they met, he was 27 and she 23 – he had already done some prison time, she had already been through a failed engagement. They each saw themselves as an outsider, and both wanted to make a mark.
Unfortunately, the only way they could think of to do so was to commit murders. From July of 1963 through to October of 1965, they abducted and murdered four people, burying the bodies on Saddleworth Moor, near Manchester where they and their victims lived. In each case, Brady would commit the actual murders, and often, he would sexually assault the victims, too.
They were eventually caught when Brady tried to include Hindley’s brother-in-law, David Smith, in their crimes. Although he played along, Smith later went to the police, and told them of the murder he had witnessed. Hindley and Brady were arrested the next day, and both eventually received sentences for lifetime imprisonment for what the British press dubbed ‘the Moors Murders’.
Referenced in:
Mother Earth – Crass
Very Friendly – Throbbing Gristle
Suffer Little Children – The Smiths
On August 11, 1965, a random traffic stop in Watts, a depressed area of Los Angeles with a largely negro population was the spark that set the racial tensions in the area on fire.
Lee Minikus, a California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer, pulled over Marquette Frye, whom Minikus believed was drunk. But then Minikus made a tragic error of judgement – he refused to let Frye’s sober brother drive the car home, instead radioing for it too be impounded.
As tempers frayed, and the crowd of onlookers grew, someone threw a rock at the police – and that was all it took to start the avalanche. When the riot was finally ended, 6 days later, 34 people had been killed, more than a thousand injured, and nearly four thousand arrested. It was the worst riot in LA history until the Rodney King trial verdict in 1992.
Referenced in:
One More Time – The Clash
Trouble Every Day – Frank Zappa
In The Heat Of The Summer – Phil Ochs
She Is Always Seventeen – Harry Chapin
Although the world is full of songs inspired by stories, few songs can claim to be the remains of one. But Like A Rolling Stone is one that can. Extracted from a short story Dylan wrote, and which he describes as “20 pages of vomit“, the song is about alienation – although whose alienation remains a matter of some debate. (The leading candidates are Edie Sedgwick, Joan Baez and Dylan himself.)
Despite being six minutes long, it was released as a single, and rose to #2 on the American charts, making it Dylan’s biggest hit to that time. (It was beaten out of the top spot by “Help”.) The song marks Dylan’s first use of electric guitar in his music, and thus represents his shift from his folk roots to a more pop sound. Not coincidentally, it also marks the point from which he became a part of the cultural mainstream, albeit remaining an iconoclastic and dissenting part of it.
The song was first performed live by Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Since then, it has been covered by numerous artists, including Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine proclaimed the song, with its characteristic restraint, “the greatest song of all time.”
