Dylan's John Wesley Harding vs. nothing in particular

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