I posted something recently about Dylan’s live performances of Abraham, Martin and John. Thanks very much to the following correspondent who was there to hear one of those performances and sent his recollection:

I heard Dylan sing “Abraham, Martin and John” on November 21, 1980 at the Warfield in San Francisco.

It seemed to me that Dylan was specifically thinking about the murder of JFK that night.

Before the encore, I remember his saying in a soft midwestern voice, not the voice used to sing, You take care of each other now.

I thought it profound because when men like JFK, MLK, RFK, Abraham Lincoln are gone what is there left but to take care of each other … and Dylan’s reading was an affirmation as much as a question.

We know where the martyrs have gone and if we forget or don’t take care of each other in a just way, then the deaths of Lincoln, King and the Kennedy’s will be permanent. Now they do live on despite their physical deaths in the souls of those who remember or who feel their loss even though they were unborn at the time.

I felt the song united the disparate parts of the audience that night, the old fans, many of them like myself Jewish, and/or secular, who came to hear or hoped to hear the old songs, the Christian audience, younger and wanting to hear the gospel songs: Dylan’s interpretation of the song took us all out of our own preoccupations and into the world as it was at present: I remember walking out into the street. The lobby had been decorated by Bill Graham and associates with old photos of Dylan, the concert had been a blending of old and new songs but “Abraham Martin and John” had a binding effect … here we were on the eve of the seventeenth anniversary of JFK with Martin Luther King and Bobby gone as well, as bereft as the nation was in the decades after Lincoln’s murder and what was left was to not forget and to take care of each other … maybe old friend Bobby was Dylan talking to himself and to us telling us that the spirit of what was idealistic in him was not gone … I walked out onto Market street, with the homeless in rags, the prostitutes, the violent, the men and women looking for their cars or getting taxis, and leaving the concert I felt that something had been connected again but not in an obvious way … connection didn’t mean the lessening of pain but the acceptance of it and the will to remember and go on…Marek Breiger

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