What is the name of the person who stated in a radio interview that hard rain isn't a reference to fallout rain or atomic rain, but rather "I mean some sort of end that's just gotta happen"?
Dylan was only 21 years old when he wrote one of his most complex songs, "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall", often referred to as "Hard Rain". Dylan is said to have premiered "Hard Rain" at the Gaslight Cafe, where Village performer Peter Blankfield recalled: "He put out these pieces of loose-leaf paper ripped out of a spiral notebook. And he starts singing ['Hard Rain'] ... He finished singing it, and no one could say anything. The length of it, the episodic sense of it. Every line kept building and bursting". Dylan performed "Hard Rain" days later at Carnegie Hall on September 22, 1962, as part of a concert organized by Pete Seeger. The song gained added resonance during the Cuban Missile Crisis, just one month after Dylan's first performance of "Hard Rain", when U.S. President John F. Kennedy gave his warning to the Soviet Union over their deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba, . Critics have interpreted the lyric 'hard rain' as a reference to nuclear fallout, but Dylan resisted the specificity of this interpretation. In a radio interview with Studs Terkel in 1963, Dylan said, "No, it's not atomic rain, it's just a hard rain. It isn't the fallout rain. I mean some sort of end that's just gotta happen … In the last verse, when I say, 'the pellets of poison are flooding the waters', that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers."
Many people were astonished by the power and complexity of this work. For Robert Shelton, who had given Dylan an important boost in his 1961 review in The New York Times, this song was "a landmark in topical, folk-based songwriting. Here blooms the promised fruit of the 1950s poetry-jazz fusion of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Rexroth." Folk singer Dave Van Ronk later commented: "I was acutely aware that it represented the beginning of an artistic revolution." Pete Seeger expressed the opinion that this song would last longer than any other written by Dylan.
Dylan