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three years pass...
three years pass...
Thanks! Good point about the craving for isolation, the slipping around in the backwoods and 'round the corner, yet still having to witness so much, and speak his pieces. More upfront about the personal struggle with this on New Morning: from "Went To See The Gypsy, to"Day of the Locusts," to "Time Passes Slowly" (for instance).
From the recent Top 25 Albums of 1967 poll:
1. John Wesley Harding 2. Sgt. Peppers 3. Safe as Milk
― o. nate, Monday, July 21, 2014 1:58 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Damn, I might make JWH my first choice too---not that it's the best, but one that may well have gotten further under my skin than any other (but can I really say that, considering VU & N, Peppers, Piper, others--?) Anyway, I played the hell out of it in high school, and then again several years later, when I was doing acid. It wasn't actually more alienated and compulsively observational than much of his other 60s stuff---how can you get more etc. than most of Highway 61?---but the boondocks bleakness, times little-but-wiry resourcefulness, especially spoke to hick me: kind of Huck Finn, back for more All-American civilization frustration (spoiler: he finally gets laid). The title song seemed like take-off on cowboy politics (as busted by New Left smarties). the laid-back roll of the outlaw Pres, plus "a gun in every hand": how many hands did he have? The distortions of colorful "historical" BS, not so far from Georgie Washington's cherry tree (and several decades before Frances Fitzgerald's classic America Revised, 'bout how public school textbooks in use all over the country were skewed to the dinosaur demands of major markets like Texas). And actual historical anomalies, like, way before Fawn Brodie brought up Jefferson's slave relations again, Dyl's already got Tom Paine(!) apologizing to him for a runaway gal's drama.
And the album still seems like a rebuttal to "Americana," way back when hippies were just starting to get back to th' country. Not that "Watchtower" and "Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" aren't whole stories in themselves.
― dow, Monday, July 21, 2014 3:23 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
― dow, Friday, 12 September 2014 22:45 (nine years ago) link
Not nec. a rebuttal, but a cautionary note to self and others. Also see Chronicles re the Civil War, and more recent quote re America being cursed because of slavery.
― dow, Friday, 12 September 2014 22:51 (nine years ago) link
that all sounds so good, nicely put.
one thing i was reading recently was the 1968-ish interview with bob by happy traum and john cohen, which is one of the more lucid (tho still pretty non-lucid) interviews w/ bob I've read. can't seem to find the whole thing online, but there is a bunch of good JWH-related stuff in there. as opposed the rolling stone interview from the next year, dylan seems to take his interviewers and their questions seriously (at least to some extent).
― tylerw, Friday, 12 September 2014 22:52 (nine years ago) link