Assorted Gems: John Wesley Harding

BOB DYLAN - JOHN WESLEY HARDING  (1967)

This is one of those albums that just makes you think, “What...?”

Or more elaborately: “What... what happened? Where on earth did this come from?” And let’s say that, seeking the answer to your question, you go research the background of the album. Aha, you think, so that’s how it was. Then you go back and listen again, armed in contextual information, and this time you think: “What... what happened? Where on earth did this come from?” 

Big Blood’s Night Terrors in the Isle of Louis Hardin is like that. There’s all the albums the band made around the same time, and then there’s... Night Terrors. Also: Neil Young’s Peace Trail (musically modelled on John Wesley Harding, as it happens). And, to some extent, Daniel Romano’s Finally Free. And maybe also —

No, that exhausts it. I’ve looked over the albums of my Personal Canon, and nothing else fits the bill. Those albums all belong within the arc of a larger story. Even the one-offs are cozy inside the lore of their one-offness. But John Wesley Harding... 

You can say, “Blonde on Blonde and the touring life were too crazy, so he went rustic.” Okay, but if we’re talking lyrics, then Lost on the River is the rustic album, and if we're talking music, the Basement Tapes came first. You could counter, “Well, Dylan didn’t record Lost on the River, and he didn’t release the Basement Tapes. So JWH was the official start of his second folksy era.” Fair enough, but after JWH came a year and a half of silence, and while Nashville Skyline obviously grew out of the last two JWH tracks, neither it nor 1970’s Self Portrait and New Morning really feel like follow-ups. 

John Wesley Harding just sort of sits there, like a dragon on top of but not exactly guarding its treasure horde. It sits and watches you, and if you approach, it might give a warning sniff, but won’t bite your head off. It won’t allow you to make off with any riches either. Or maybe it would, but you’d never think to try, because that stare freezes you to the spot. You and the dragon watch each other in silence. And finally you turn around and leave, climbing back up the tunnel toward daylight.

You bring the memory of the cave and its treasure with you. Then you become a metalworker so that you can create swords and pendants and necklaces yourself, and what you make is beautiful. But it's earthly, or downright ordinary, compared with what inspired it.

In other words, another strange aspect of John Wesley Harding, which I don't think applies to Night Terrors, or Peace Trail, or Finally Free, but which does (or might) apply to another weird album Dylan made twenty-three years later, called Under the Red Sky — another strange aspect of John Wesley Harding is that it proved to be ridiculously fertile ground for cover versions.

Jimi Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower is the most famous of them, a reinvention so awesome that even Dylan never performed the song in the JWH arrangement again. But there have been very, very many excellent others. It’s like the songs are ready to become anything you want them to; you dream it, they'll become it.

Except that once they leave the hands of Dylan, drummer Kenny Buttrey, and bassist Charlie McCoy — once they break out of that Nashville autumn of 1967 — the dark and rare magic of the songs, which the three musicians themselves probably didn’t understand and never recreated, seeps away. There is nothing as captivating, confusing, and unsettling as the original.

I think this would also prove true of Al Joshua’s Anomalous Events, a descendant of JWH. God knows how many great full-band arrangements its songs could spark. I love to imagine what the rootsy, punky, psychedelic Skeletons at the Feast band might have made of them. It's also fun to cast the net further and think — if someday the wider public recognizes Al’s genius, and tribute/cover albums start to emerge, what would, say, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard do with an Anomalous Events track? or Decisive Pink? or Quinnisa Kinsella Mulkerin? There's no limit to the possibilities — but no matter what interesting things might happen musically, on an atmospheric level, the original would remain untouchable. The ghost inside that handful of 2020 recordings will never let itself be tamed.

I wrote a lot about John Wesley Harding in my Dylan series from a few years back, so if you'd like details, please venture along this way. To avoid repeating myself (too much), I'll end with six lessons that I, as a songwriter and musician, have taken away from this album:

1. You can make great music with very simple chord progressions.

2. You can make great music in standard tuning, especially if you have a capo lying around.

3. You can make great music while flying directly in the face of what the wider music culture or the record-buying public currently deem worthwhile (which in Dylan's case, back in the autumn of 1967, meant Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band).

4. You can make great music without meaning to. Reports indicate that Dylan wrote the lyrics on train rides to the sessions (he was living in New York and recording in Tennessee). And the recording sessions took about twelve hours total. That probably includes the time Buttrey and McCoy spent learning these songs, as I don't think Dylan held any rehearsals.

5. It doesn’t really matter how high you mix any given instrument, even one as shrill as a harmonica. Nothing matters but the songs.

6. However, if you as a singer-songwriter have the chance to be backed by the best rhythm section in history, take it!

(Back to: A Personal Canon)