Dylan's John Wesley Harding vs. nothing in particular

We should talk about Dylan's fallow years, from 1967 to 1974, it's an interesting subject. But only if you want.

It has "Dear Landlord" on it too, doesn't it? That one's very good.

Agree about discussion of Dylan's 'intermediate' stuff. Discussion of Dylan in general on ILM is a rare treat.

Basement Tapes (recorded 67, released 75)
JWH (68)
Nashville Skyline (69)
Self-Portrait (70)
Dylan (this came out soon after - outtakes from Self-P no? It's the only one of these I've never heard)
New Morning (71)
Planet Waves (73)

and then you get Blood On The Tracks. There's also 'More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits' which had 3 or 4 exclusive tracks on. (Was he the first to do this on a G Hits?)

my love for Blood on the Tracks and Desire has kept me from sufficiently investigating Dylan more thoroughly for years -- I've meant to buy Nashville Skyline forever but never have

I think Dear Landlord is a kind of masterpiece in that it's very very good.

'Fallow years' hmmm. I'm no expert either but as far as I understand it, he had a motorbike accident, went a bit weird, confounded everyone with 'John Wesley Harding', got locked in a basement, went country, released a crappo double album that people thought might be a pisstake, had a premature 'return to form' that wasn't really, did some bad live stuff, broke up with his girlfriend and got mad as hell about it and called her names on a blistering return to his mercurial days of old. So fallow, yes.

While I typing all that I see Tom has bigged up Dear Landlord too. Hurrah!

This is spot-on and is part of what makes this album so appealing to me, I think: you can't pin it down. Where is the person behind these narrators? More hidden than the Dylan of Blonde on Blonde, who never seems far from view. (That Dylan may be/probably is a construct, of course, but is a known quanity & an agreed-upon assumption between performer & listener.) JWH just sounds incredibly new to me: Blood on the Tracks is of course tremendous but seems a product partially of time and place, whereas there's a timeless/nowhere-in-time quality to JWH. Though I can hear how some people might hear it exactly the opposite. Hm.

Dear Landlord! I've just realised that this is basically the template for (a sympathetic reading of) 'Bengali In Platforms'.

Yes, that's a big part of the ambiguity. There seems to be a new degree of remove between Dylan, the songwriter, and the narrators of the songs. They feel more like fables and less like personal stream-of-consciousness expressions. It feels like he's watching everything from behind a pane of glass, which would provide kind of an interesting interpretation of that line from "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine", in which he puts his fingers to the glass and cries.

I've deliberately not really broached the content of the albums released in this period. It's probably the most contested period in Dylan's career. It's hard for me to disassociate my impressions of these albums with the "biographical legend" of Bob Dylan as I've alluded to above. Dylan had gotten married in, I believe, 1966 (not to mention the motorcycle accident), had several children in short order, and I think he had little interest in maintaining the sort of career he had had before.

I'll let someone else take over---

Anyways, Tom, yes Dylan was released by Columbia in retaliation for Dylan briefly jumping ship to David Geffen's Asylum. It consists of outtakes from the 69–70 sessions, even more dessicated than some of the worst stuff on Self Portrait. It's never been reissued on CD to my knowledge.

Ah, so there's no reason to listen to it if you're already an Echo fan. Rah! ;-)

The stripped down instrumentation gives John Wesley Harding a unique vibe. I read someplace that he took the tapes to Robbie Robertson and wanted The Band to do some overdubbing and that he told them that it didn't need anything added.

As for covers other people have done of songs on this album, I always liked The Faces version of "Wicked Messinger".

I think a few people here are pointing out the great songs on JWH but -- correct me if I'm wrong -- I think John's point was that none of the songs are jumping up and down to tell you what a masterpiece they are -- none of them take up an entire side, or are jumping through hoops with wordplay or erudition.

Also, John: If you haven't heard it yet, I recommend New Morning, which has an even weirder vibe -- he's playing piano on most of the songs, singing small songs about homelife (which I guess might be a template for some of his much later work -- "Man In Me" -> "Most Of The Time", etc., but I'd have to think a bit more about that), and there's this one song with a woman scatting in the background. Very odd. And it has that same lack of insistent masterpieces that JWH has.

(Planet Waves feels like something of a warm-up for Blood on the Tracks -- some good and odd stuff but not as essential.)

Anyway, back to JWH. One of the other historical aspects of this album that usually gets trotted out is that this was Dylan's first album released after Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper and all that, and so its musical minimalism is often viewed as a reaction to all that excess.

Arrgh. I have more to say but this stupid cold makes it difficult to concentrate. This is one of my favorite Dylan albums, for many of the same reasons you describe. So, more later, maybe.

just curious,what do you mean by this?
i've been listening to girl from the north country a lot recently,its one of my favourite songs,and i always thought the voices sounded great together...

I'll be the first to admit that I find all this charming, even moving, but it does point the way to pisstake-as-master aesthetic of Self Portrait which so alienated people.

It’s stripped with Bob deliberately using both his words and music sparingly, making every moment count. Bob has said that at the time of JWH he was interested in a kind of minimal, economic narrative, making every word vital, with nothing superfluous to the whole. He later chatted to Ginsberg about this shift: "In 1968 he was talking poetics with me. He was telling me how he was writing shorter lines and that every line had to mean something. He wasn’t just making up a line to go with a rhyme anymore. Each line had to advance the story, bring the song forward. From that time came some of the stuff he did with The Band, like ‘I Shall Be Released’ and some of his strong laconic ballads like, ‘The Ballad Of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.’ Anyway, listen to JWH and you’d have to agree he practices this approach with some expertise, and the contrast to the earlier symbolist/surrealist work is striking but no less effective or intriguing.

But JWH is much more than a literary exercise or experiment. I think it’s the groove of the songs on JWH that keeps me coming back to it. The bounce he brings to the pieces ensures the album rattles along. ‘As I Went Out One Morning’ is a personal favourite – I can’t get enough of that jumping bassline but of course ‘Watchtower’ is always a delight. Someone said above that the guitar is tentative but I don’t buy that – the riff of ‘I Am a Lonesome Hobo’ reminds me of something like the Happy Mondays. It’s sparse perhaps rather than tentative but the feeling I get is that it’s all very deliberate; used as a shade to Bob’s words rather than as the kind of showy counterpoint The Band sometimes delivered.

Tom: RE: ‘Dylan’ (1973) was a Columbia cash-in, after Dylan switched labels briefly, and Bob never wanted it released (hence it’s later deletion). It’s patchy to say the least, but a ragged cover of Jerry Jeff Walker’s ‘Mr. Bojangles’ is pretty rousing and a cover of Joni’s BYT is noteworthy since it’s rare for Bob to tip his hat in the studio in such a way to his contemporaries. The rest of it I can take or leave. Not as bad as ‘Self-Portrait’ – the man’s deliberate attempt to sack his own audience, but you’re not really missing much here.

The last really consistent album for a good few years, but all the early seventies albums have great moments on them - "I Threw It All Away", "Little Sadie", "Sign on the Window", "Going, Going, Gone", "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" (before its hideous metamorphosis into lighter-waving stadium rock), etc. "New Morning" and "Planet Waves" are better than 90% of the stuff he's released since.

Anyone who hasn't heard the 1975 live album should go to www.bobdylan.com and at least listen to the excerpts. Even "Hattie Carroll" is great, and I can't listen to the original version. Definitely the best release of last year as far as I'm concerned.

what do you all make of pat garrett and billy the kid?

i really like it,i mean in terms of the significance or meanings that people are attatching to the albums on this thread it probably seems fairly inconsequential,but as an enjoyable album to listen to,its exceptional...the lyrics on the songs that have them may be a bit dodgy,but the instrumentals are great,they sound like they wouldn't be out of place on something like the klf chill out...

PGABTK is OK, but as someone who digs Bob most when he’s twisting words around great melodies, it’s not one of his works I reach for with any regularity.

Robin, have you seen the film Pat Garrett...?

can't believe no one has mentioned "frankie lee and judas priest" surely the stand out track?

o keep on, have fun
:-(

That said, it's always dangerous to attempt to pin down a Dylan record in interprative terms, since teh genius of the man lies in his ability to produce art that is so brilliantly multi-faceted.

Robin, yeah, I take your point, and certainly the Chill Out ref is on point. The film is alright in my book, though I prefer Leone's visions of the West. Dylan's part in it is amusing though far from outstanding.

JWH is gnomic." Hmmm, please expand

and I'm not even getting into the whole "Beatles hidden in the trees" myth..

I've been tempted to get this reissue (among others) just because I like the album so much, but musically it is one of the more spare Dylan recordings, so I'm not sure it will be as revelatory as say the "Blonde on Blonde" re-ish.

Well would I?

Has anybody remarked on the amazing resonance of "Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" with Hank Williams' Luke the Drifter stuff?

"ballad of frankie lee and judas priest" is one of his top 5 songs ever.

don do you like "the nashville sound"? "nashville skyline" is kind of "the nashville sound" denatured...

This is my favorite Dylan album by a country mile. It unsettles me.

What an odd record for a guy to make while still in his 20s.

Yup, he was old/wise beyond his years. Van Morrison recorded "Astral Weeks" when he was only 23/24, which rivals Dylan as far as recording a mature work at such a young age.

JWH actually reminds me of Oar by Skip Spence more than it does a lot of other Dylan records...they both have sort of a murky, mysterious, bass-y quality to them...hillbilly dub or something.

I love how Dylan went in a completely different direction than the other big artists at the time. Compare pretty much any other 1967 releases: Sgt Pepper, Axis Bold As Love, Forever Changes, Sell Out, Satanic Majesties, Something Else, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Strange Days, Younger Than Yesterday. Etc. This of all things was his follow up to Blonde on Blonde - total shift of gears. It's like he decided, why be bombastic when you can slay with a soft shuffle? For just one example, I Pity The Poor Immigrant is as damning as any of his classic vitriol songs, but with that understated delivery it's just devastating.

(boy, I used to drink a lot of coffee back then: "wheee, I can type!")Good point, dad a; he stole the show, or the scene, to some extent, by going that way. And I certainly rode much furrthurr with JWH than all those others you cite,combined. Good as they were and prob still are (though I still haven't heard Satanic Majesties, despite digging what Paul Williams said about it in Outlaw Blues). Sort of like BOOM SIZZLE, pre-suck-jazz-rock! And then... Miles slips in... (but he did that on his own records, upstaging even the JWH Effect). "Dear Landlord" is still one of his most beautiful, with that thing that happened when he slipped into his piano (and speaking of that, Planet Waves has the great "Dirge," and many other fine tracks; I'd still take it over Nashville Skyline. It's kind of like if Sir Douglas Quintet were from Minnesota and Canada--) "Dear Landlord" has always seemed kind of Kind Of Blue, too. Did Aretha cover it, or did I just dream that?

it is kind of a weirdly evocative record in a bunch of different ways isn't it? for me, all of the songs are kind of like dreams of folk songs -- songs that appear to be in the trad format, but then you listen to them and they don't add up. Like "St. Augustine" -- it's this heavily emotional track ("I put my hands against the glass and hung my head and cried," is the end) but then you wonder what exactly the song is actually about, what it's doing. I think it's kind of impossible to say. The folk form Dylan's borrowing has trained you to expect a payoff, a moral or something, at the conclusion of each song, but most of the tunes leave you with something a lot more ambiguous. I mean, he sings: "The moral of this story, the moral of this song/ is simply that one should never be where one does not belong / If you see your neighbor carrying something help him with his load / and don't go mistaking paradise for the home across the road." All well and good sentiments, but (to me at least) they have very little to do with the song that precedes them. It's a shaggy dog tale, but a shaggy dog tale that resonates in this uncanny way. Don't know if any of this makes any sense, but it's an album that -- despite its austere sound -- is bottomless.

I second BIG HOOS on his O. Nate props, a few months ago. That was one of those posts that justifies all the "Nu-ILX Wahhh!" outbursts that show up here occasionally.

So many people on this really very good thread analyse John Wesley Harding so much better than I can, yet I do have to add my own peculiar synesthetic response to this album. In a word, it is airless. In a lot more words, this means (to me, as someone who occasionally suffers -- thankfully -- from relatively mild asthma) that there's a bank of still air, filling the vast space from bottom to top -- the surface of the earth to the high but iron-dense cloud cover -- and it is waiting, expectant like the neutral air before a summer storm, and it is difficult to draw into my lungs, in spite of the fact that it seems so clear and uncluttered. Suddenly, this feels like a dream, and an ominous one at that. My own subjective undercurrent of panic beneath these ostensibly folkie ditties lends them an inescapable darkness, and the incongruous swing is like some trickster gleefully cavorting over my ridiculous misgivings. Then I wake up. Maybe.

Ha ha, no, I really am trying, and failing (I should probably add), to find a way to express in language the feeling this record gives me.

I can understand now why John D loves this album – at his best his own records use the "implied menace" of the best JWH songs. "I put my hands against the glass and hung my head and cried" and the way in which it's sung and placed in the song is a verse I can imagine John using.

Also great is how "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" works as a coda. For a long time this was my goodnight lullaby to my kids. On the heels of "Down Along The Cove" it's like you've entered another record, where the king of overspill shows that he can pare things down to Tin Pan Alley levels. The ambiguity of the record isn't resolved, it's just set aside. Which is as it should be. All the foreboding leads into genuine sweetness, which in a way is more unsettling than any more portents of doom.

i'm still scratching my head over exactly who tom payne is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine

thanks!

i love this record

Yup, he was old/wise beyond his years. Van Morrison recorded "Astral Weeks" when he was only 23/24, which rivals Dylan as far as recording a mature work at such a young age.

-- Jazzbo, Monday, June 18, 2007 7:54 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Link

ehhhh astral weeks is great, but it sounds exactly like a really mature 23/24-yr old made it. dylan recording JWH is weirder i think - its def w blonde on blonde as my favorite dylan alb.

Rereading one of the Phil Ochs biographies (There But For Fortune). Here's something Dylan said to Ochs a few years later, in late 1971:

"You were lucky not making it so big. There's no one around protect me from the fans and the media. The media is always trying to use you, and strange people come to my front door. They know too much about me." He kept changing, he said, to keep people at arm's reach. "I did John Wesley Harding to create room for myself."

Of course, knowing that he said that about the record is just another example of knowing too much about him, but the cat is out of the bag. I hadn't noticed before but all of a sudden the lyrics on this record make sense as a concept album (!) exploring Dylan's desire for isolation. On the first side, isolation and captivity are treated as opposites: Harding can't be chained down, someone out strolling is accosted by a damsel in chains, St. Augustine haunts a man even in his dreams, there's the paranoid trapped feeling of Watchtower, and Frankie Lee says "sometimes a man must be alone and this is no place to hide." Then the drifter, who's like an archetypal version of the condemned in so many of his early folk songs, lives out every sentenced man's fantasy and escapes.

Side two though undermines the ideal of isolation. Dear Landlord points out that suffering isn't unique, and having a special gift isn't unique either. The Lonesome Hobo and the Poor Immigrant are treated like a matched set, one isolated by poverty and one by wealth, neither of them happy or admirable. His homeless figures keep getting worse off, as if he keeps looking closer at the dream of being untouchable and rootless and alone until he sees it as an illusion: the drifter might be a romantic figure, but a hobo is just po' broke and lonely, and finally the Wicked Messenger who sleeps behind the assembly hall seems to be accursed.

After all that, going from viewing isolation as freedom to just another trap, there's not much left to do but sing ditties to your true love and settle in together for the night.

nice

this is a great thread. i miss j0hn d4rnie11e's contributions to ILX.

Listening to this for the first time in years.

The first three songs are good as it gets.

anyone ever listened to the album dylan's JWH cover co-stars made at big pink?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3hWnTfc2yY

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

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.

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).

man this thread rules