“I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” is my pick from the LP | Bob Dylan – ‘John Wesley Harding’ (Elektra EKS-74013) January 1968

Article published in Crawdaddy!, March / April 1968

Bob Dylan | God Bless America | So stop what you’re doing, and hello to ‘John Wesley Harding‘. The medium is the messenger, and wicked is as wicked does, anyway. Don’t ask me nothin’ about nothin’. Bob Dylan welcomes us all back to the centre ring, with many pithy wisdoms which we can take at surface value, surface value at a depth of ten feet, surface value at a depth of twenty feet, and on.

“Nothing is revealed.” Which is not to imply that the whole album may be unfathomable; at least the soundings are good. But why all these nautical jokes?

I don’t know what it means not to understand. It’s really an intransitive verb. Transitive stuff like “interpret” might hang you up with all sorts of doubts about will and the ability to choose and all, but there’s no freedom involved in understanding. You’ve gone and done it even if you chose not to.

And since you and I never quite see through the same eyeballs anyway, what do you care who understands which? We’ll all grow old together.

Bob Dylan | John Wesley Harding | (Columbia) 1968

But I know what you mean. When you’re out on the balcony saying run come see the lovely sunset and I look out commenting that’s a three-winged caterpillar and anyway the woods are full of them, there is a sense of communications loss which undermines togetherness.

A drag. And people who know they don’t perceive the same whatever as the rest of us generally have trouble with the feds. Crazy is not putting on a good enough act. Too many caterpillars, and they take you away. So let’s run ‘John Wesley Harding’ through the analysis mill and see if we can grind it down to oatmeal wretched enough to be universally palatable.

All gazing at the same Waterloo Sunset. And how come nobody ever talks about Madison Avenue any more? Like, John Wesley Hardin at 15 killed a nigger for being uppity, and kept up that kind of bullshit until 1878, when, foolish move or no, he got stuck in jail for sixteen years, missing his twenty-sixth through forty-first birthdays and the inaugurations of Grover Cleveland.

Wheels within wheels

Bob Dylan is nobody’s fool. He knows about John Wesley Hardin. Don’t underestimate him, and he’ll scratch your back too. But dear landlord, this is a mighty intentional record. Intentional and accessible, and that’s a tricky combination. Because if Dylan really knows how accessible it is, then maybe he’s playing around with the ways that we’re going to access it.

Wheels within wheels, generating spheres if you’re clever enough to tilt them, and at this point there’s a lot of control being exercised over the unpredictable. Said Frankie Lee with a smile. So the way you react might be part of the STOP PRESS! STOP PRESS! 3&77##seven minutes* Stand By. PARANOID X, with a message from your sponsor:

“Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.” Mr. Parks thought it “very nice” of Mr. Dylan to say this, and we all concurred. Trina noticed “two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl,” and in our several ways we tried to remember how the song had begun. THERE MUST BE SOME WAY OUT OF HERE . . . . THERE MUST BE SOME WAY OUT OF HERE . . . .

Bob Dylan | John Wesley Harding | (Columbia) 1968

“All along the watchtower . . .”, and it somehow bothered me that the line only appeared once in the song. It had seemed like twice, but . . . . And, kindly! The Thief he kindly said! Certainly was seeming Meaningful . . .

“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.” Well, we laughed and laughed.

But if Bob Dylan is nice enough to empathize with Mick Jagger (“. . . no relief”), then thieves might be all right too, and you can feel sorry for a joker with claustrophobia. Naturally if you start in the middle it seems like you need to look for a way out, and all; no reason to get excited, that’s okay, only, now that we’ve done that, well, the hour is getting late . . . .

Panic

And it’s a real feeling of friendship when he can say, let us not talk falsely now; Mr. Parks appreciates that sort of thing, and maybe we all wouldn’t mind being polite. If the hour really was getting late, and the thief was sympathetic to our occasional panic.

But this isn’t “the hour that the ship comes in.” And even though it sounds like Bob Dylan’s 115th dream, it’s not the same. There’s some business to take care of, folks, and Dylan can make the song more pleasant for you by starting in the middle, but in the end you’ve got to start at the beginning, if you know what I mean. Just a joke. But let us not talk falsely now . . . .

There must be some way out of here. There must be some way out of here.

Bob Dylan | John Wesley Harding | (Columbia) 1968

End of flash. But where does this leave ‘The Notorious Byrd Brothers’? Well, for one thing, it’s obviously the same Bob Dylan, even though he’s hard to find on the cover, and curiously enough it’s the exact same Byrds even if there’s two in the bush. And mainly you have this incredible self-awareness, the artist knowing what he wants to do, and why, and just churning it out, just like any old accepted creative type.

In addition to which you have the good old America of science fiction and Tom Paine; and the Byrds have completely let go to bossa nova and square dance and eight miles high the same way Dylan has delightfully done a total Percy Mayfield, Sonny Boy Williamson Live in London (at the Crawdaddy Club!) with the Yardbirds, Eric von Schmidt, Geoff Muldaur, everything you could possibly want if we’d finally gotten around to just digging music.

Sort of like Love doing their movie music album, and Van Dyke Parks just being accepted on all fronts. We really are set free.

Half-Blues

And on a straight sociological level, that’s important. When Dylan started playing Those instruments, back in the Forest Hills/Newport days, he really did make it possible for a lot of serious and also okay music listeners to begin making that tough transition into rock.

And now the general importance of listening to a Dylan album, even if it does sound like some half-country half-blues guy with clever old Nashville cats helping him along, some guy who might in fact just be on the verge of inventing rock and roll in say 1954, even if it sounds like all that nice ethnic music that everyone can dig but no one can really get into, well, you’ve got to get into it because it’s a Dylan album.

And now I can start giving all my rock friends Percy Mayfield records. Because you can only listen to music openly and comfortably if you want to listen to it; and you only used to want to listen to it if it was Folk Ethnic, but it turned out then that you wanted to also if it was Bob Dylan, so you got stuck finding out about rock.

Bob Dylan | John Wesley Harding | (Columbia) 1968

And now you wouldn’t want to listen to Sonny Boy Williamson, though you might say “that’s nice” if I played you a little, but since nothing could be more exciting than a new Dylan album, why, here you are getting into it. Good old rock, expanding our minds, opening us up to the world, making us comfortable with and therefore able to appreciate more and more subtle, good stuff. Rock, the friendly music. Bob Dylan, frontier scout. Sociologists, take note.

And it all has to do with contexts. Like everyone else, I’m sure you have flashed one way or another on the realization that all things are related to all other things. That thing A, transcendental meditation, can always be related to thing B, spider crabs, if you do it step by step: APE ARE ARM AIM DIM DIN DEN MEN MAN. So it stands to reason that folksong A and rock song B are always related, can always be made to share some sort of fairly specific category.

Tension

There are more categories, therefore, than there are songs; so why categorically dislike things? To say (even to yourself) I only really enjoy classical music, is like saying, I only enjoy songs whose second verses begin with the letter “m.”

To have an open mind is to be unrestricted by the arbitrary, at least some of the time. Without such occasional indiscriminate behaviour, how could sunsets and caterpillars be made to coexist? How would we talk to each other?

And you wanted to read about Bob Dylan. A friend of mine confided that he felt considerable tension in listening to this album, and I think I can understand why. I get the same feeling. It has to do with everything on this album’s being at least relatively accessible, and at the same time so damn intentional; so any time you happen to say to yourself, “I wonder why he did that,” you really feel obliged to work at figuring it out. ‘Cause you know he did it on purpose.

Bob Dylan | John Wesley Harding | (Columbia) 1968

Earlier Dylan records seemed hard to listen to, at first, because so much was baffling; but we quickly overcame that by not getting uptight about what we didn’t understand—instead, just listening and enjoying what we felt.

This new album, which could be called merely a new arrangement of all those earlier names and prepositions, is so easy to just listen to that you can’t help absorbing all the words and getting involved in their implications; and pretty soon you’re all tense wondering what in hell he meant by that? When few things are baffling they become all-important.

Which is, I think, what Paranoid X was trying to tell us. “All Along the Watchtower”—a nice song. But certain minor questions arise. Why does it end “two riders were approaching . . .”? And why does the phrase “all along the watchtower” seem somehow out of place? Why is “There must be some way out of here” so incredibly successfully claustrophobic?

Why are we drawn to “so let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”? On an LP that is so very comprehensible on an objective level, you can’t help getting involved in these subjective questions. And that’s why I say Dylan-as-artist is even playing around with our personal reactions to the stuff.

Reaction

Because, without these subjective questions, I would never have discovered the most delightful aspect of the song. Its ends have been twisted, and taped together. In another universe, Dylan would begin: “All along the watchtower, princes kept the view . . . . Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.” The second and third verses would then be conversation between the two riders, the Joker and the Thief; and “Let us not talk falsely now . . . .” would close the song with comfort.

But only in this universe, with the song dissatisfying because the end seems to be in the middle of things, and the beginning stuck in there on the third verse, only in this world can the real claustrophobia of the Joker come through to us all. Because indeed, “There must be some way out of here”—what more natural reaction, caught on a moebius strip?

Bob Dylan | John Wesley Harding | (Columbia) 1968

When people ask me why I get scared on trips, I can point to this song.

And of course it has to do with Time. As more and more people get off the trolley ride, fewer and fewer are aware of 9 to 5, and SMTWTFS. And people’s ages. And which album came first. The existence of the jet doesn’t mean you can be everywhere at once, but it certainly allows you to think of your life in space as more than a point on a line.

And the more we read Borges and Pynchon and listen to rock, the more we ignore the supposed directionality of Time. After months and years, lovers continue to say “hello.” Time only takes place in our minds . . . and as we realize this, our minds become more than one-dimensional. We don’t have to always hear “Like A Rolling Stone” as after “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and prior to ‘Blonde on Blonde‘. We retain that feeling of progress, but discard the “future” and “the past.”

Analysis mill

And the music makes it seem so easy. It’s all incredible, probably the best electric bass-playing on record and truly brilliant, virtuoso work by the drums and steel guitar. Dylan’s voice on this album is so good, is put to such excellent use, that the stubbornest of doubters will be knocked out more than once.

His piano makes “Dear Landlord” the work of one of the world’s finest blues combos. And the guitar and harmonica provide that persistent link with the other albums, droning along and shaping everything in Dylan’s own image. Jes’ fine. The whole album offers this sense of shelter, of quietness and ease and protection with everything else that exists in the world ever-so-gently implied in the knotty wood of the cabin walls. “Down Along the Cove” is just about as nice as music can be.

I think I copped out. Looking back on this discussion, I don’t think I ran ‘John Wesley Harding‘ through the analysis mill at all; I seem to have circled it warily, poking at a theme here or there but never really pouncing on the beast.

Bob Dylan | John Wesley Harding | (Columbia) 1968

I haven’t told you why this strikes me as the most American record I’ve ever heard; I haven’t described these songs as being Dylan’s usual stuff but in different focus; I haven’t even gotten onto such grand topics as The Folk Process in Woodstock and Hibbing, or Will the Real John Wesley Harding Please Stand Up?

But what the hell. I just might be doing it on purpose. Without the deceptions of Time, who really knows the shortest possible distance between two points, and anyway how would it be possible for me to bring up a subject that didn’t relate to Bob Dylan? If you gaze long enough to see both caterpillars and sunsets, whole universes might open up; which is, I think . . . .

Enough of that. In Lot 49 is a lawyer, a child actor turned lawyer whose friend the lawyer-turned-actor is playing the part of him in a movie; and, as Metzger, the lawyer, points out, to portray the role properly the actor must act like a lawyer, who, after all, becomes an actor in the courtroom in front of the judge, and in this case was in fact an actor previously . . . . “The film is in an air-conditioned vault at one of the Hollywood studios, light can’t fatigue it, it can be repeated endlessly.”

Pynchon calls this the “extended capacity for convolution” (or anyway Metzger does) (or I just did); Dylan says, “There must be some way out of here,” and . . . No, come to think of it, the Joker said it . . . . “You can be in my dream if I can be in yours,” I said that . . . . So the way you react might be part of the this is the way out of here—> (Paul Williams)