32. As I Went Out One Morning

On my first listen to John Wesley Harding, on an evening I remember vividly (not long after the evening I first heard On the Beach, which today is my favorite Neil Young album; that was a good week), the title track hooked me—Kenny Buttrey! great singing! a weird-ass story! and the way it’s over almost before it’s begun—but As I Went Out One Morning rightly blew me away.

The song begins brilliantly, the harmonica casting you into the story’s lonesome fields with its first blast, while the pretty ascensions of Charlie McCoy’s bassline melody map out the contours of the horizon’s hills.

John Wesley Harding is full of songs that eerily imply more than they state, while the emotions that the music brings forth further complicate the pictures of disorder, confusion, and pain in a stark landscape of righteous outlaws and crooked judges (or, as here, corrupted reformers). In one of my favorite of all descriptions of Dylan’s music, a quote attributed to Rennie Sparks (of the Greil Marcus-beloved Handsome Family), “John Wesley Harding is like coming upon an abandoned farmhouse, where next to the rusted shotgun, you find a golden sword in a pool of fire.” The sword hangs low and glowing over As I Went Out One Morning.

As in the album’s other narratives, the main personages—only three of them, without the nameless crowds and side-actors that populate the title track, I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, Drifter’s Escape, and The Wicked Messenger—take on dimensions larger than you’d expect from the modest song length and from how sparing Dylan is with the words: As I Went Out One Morning has just three short verses, the word count only 140. But each of the three—the hapless, skittish narrator (“I offered her my hand / She took me by the arm / I knew that very instant / That she meant to do me harm”), the woman with her desperate and ultimately hopeless grab at liberty (the word “fly” puts me in mind of the notion of liberty, but the interpretations I’ve read that the woman is a slave don’t sound quite right to me, as why, then, would she say that she will “secretly accept” the narrator? Neither her tone nor her words seem to me to support the view that this encounter is between a gentleman and a slave, at least not in the straightforward historical sense), and “Tom Paine himself,” who can shift so smoothly (and suspiciously) from frantic behavior (“came running,” “shouting” and “commanding”) to mannerly words (“I’m sorry, sir, I’m sorry”)—“walks like a giant on the land,” to quote Neil Young.

The two moments in which the writing might seem to be labored (“I told her with my voice” and “from the corners of her mouth”) have, on the contrary, only grown in mystique since I first heard the song, and feel like touchstones of the story: details whose significance I don’t ever expect to understand, yet feel endlessly compelled to think over, like the details that S. Y. Agnon’s Book of Deeds stories are built out of.

I love the sinister way Dylan waits before enunciating the closing consonants of certain line-ending words: “Paine’s,” “chains,” “instant,” “moment.” It puts me in mind of the way situations may not develop or end the way one expects given how they start, just as the narrator casually and unthinkingly (or at least not thinking far beyond “fairest damsel”) gives the woman his hand, only for her to “take [him] by the arm.” He means nothing by his gesture, whereas she uses their meeting to invite him into the upheaval of her life.

If not for a rhythm flub on Dylan’s part, I would like the sole live performance of As I Went Out One Morning (from the arena tour with the Band in 1974) even better than I like the impeccable John Wesley Harding rendition. The beat that Levon Helm lays beneath Dylan’s rhythm guitar makes the arrangement brush up against reggae, and you probably know by now what a sucker I am for Dylan and reggae. Dylan delivers the words with care, and with grim authority. And then there’s Robbie Robertson’s lead guitar playing, which sounds as enormous and beautiful and otherworldly as thunder.

I recall a discussion between Steven Rineer and a mutual friend (who got both me and him into the Beach Boys) about how insufferable Robertson can seem in interviews, or onstage during the Band’s Last Waltz. They agreed, though, that when his guitar playing falls in sync with the cosmic strains, as it so frequently does, much can be forgiven. For his solos and licks in the live As I Went Out One Morning, the forgiveness might as well be total.

As I Went Out One Morning is the only John Wesley Harding song on my list for which I can’t point to an overwhelmingly awesome cover version (or several). But I do like what the Dirty Projectors did with it. I don’t think that the instrumental arrangement of their cover, a studio recording from their Bitte Orca era, is up to much, but (as one’d figure, in the Bitte Orca era) the singing is awesome. Dave Longstreth, lead vocalist, does a remarkable job bringing out the psychotic strains of everyone involved in the song’s strange drama. Even more impressive still are the stabs of backing vocals from Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian. Their voices convey the song’s murk, mystery, and woozy sense of doom as effectively as Dylan’s harmonica and McCoy’s bass do in the original. And the cover’s two mandolin-heavy refrains sound like Swans.