A few months after his motorcycle accident, Bob Dylan, recovering at his home near Woodstock, New York, was transformed both spiritually and artistically. He had almost died. The “grim reaper,” a personification of death in European iconography, seemed to constantly hang around him since the suicide of Peter LaFarge (October 27, 1965) and the fatal motorcycle accident of Richard Fariña (April 30, 1966)—both folksingers and friends. He may also have thought about what a young Australian actress told him during his recent world tour: that he was the new Christ and had to sacrifice himself for others. The musicians supporting Dylan in the studio were struck by his metamorphosis. Bassist Charlie McCoy, who had already performed on Blonde on Blonde, told Richie Unterberger, “I’m not sure that that had anything to do with his recording attitude, but I noticed a really marked difference in his whole demeanor the second time around.”77 He added that he found Dylan much more relaxed than in the previous album.
Most of the songs on the John Wesley Harding album were inspired by the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. In his book The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan, Colbert S. Cartwright cited more than sixty biblical allusions over the 38½-minute album, including fifteen in “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.” In “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” Dylan cited the Christian philosopher St. Augustine, who sought to reconcile Platonic idealism and Christianity. In “All Along the Watchtower” and “The Wicked Messenger,” he referred to a section of Isaiah and the book of Proverbs, respectively, in the Old Testament. In 1968, when John Cohen told Dylan that he was probably not the kind of person to read the Bible in a hotel room, Dylan replied enigmatically, “Well, you never know.”20
This journey among the sacred is even more fascinating because it is marked by characters who shaped American history. The album opens with the title song, “John Wesley Harding,” about a Texan outlaw during the Reconstruction era who began reading theological books while in prison. The other characters include the hobo, a symbol of freedom and rejection of all conventions; the emigrant, who came to find in the New World what was denied in his own country; the unscrupulous property owner and a compassionate judge; and the joker and the thief who work together to get out of a strange watchtower, a metaphor for the materialistic West. Finally, in terms of style, Dylan’s writing changed. After the free use of references in his recent albums, this is the time of order. Dylan did not want to write in an unbridled manner, giving total license to his imagination as he had before. He explained in 1968, “On the new record, it’s more concise. Here I am not interested in taking up that much of anybody’s time.”20 Other than “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” songs on the album are no longer than three verses, without choruses. Allen Ginsberg explained, “He [Dylan] was writing shorter lines, with every line meaning 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.” The Beat poet continues: “All the imagery was to be functional rather than ornamental.”Eleven years after the release of this album, Dylan tried to explain its nature: “John Wesley Harding was a fearful album—just dealing with fear, but dealing with the devil in a fearful way, almost. All I wanted to do was to get the words right. It was courageous to do it because I could have not done it, too.”20
The photograph for the album was taken by John Berg in the back garden of Albert and Sally Grossman’s house in Woodstock, when the temperature was well below freezing. In an interview with John Bauldie printed in the Dylan fanzine The Telegraph, Berg explained, “Bob wanted to be able to see the pictures right away so he could decide, and I said, Fine. We can do it with Polaroids… It was the coldest day of the year… it was like twenty below zero. It was so cold, we would run outside, the Indians, the woodcutter, whoever was around, and shoot pictures for as long as we could, then put them under our arms—because pictures will reticulate in that kind of cold—and then we’d run back inside… Then we’d lay the pictures out on this big deal table and at the end of the whole thing, Bobby picked out this picture to use on the sleeve.” Dylan, in the center wearing a cowboy hat and the same jacket he wore on the cover of Blonde on Blonde, is pictured with two Bengali musicians, Purna and Lakshman Das, and a local carpenter and stonemason named Charlie Joy, who happened to be at the Grossmans’ that day. The “back to the roots” message is clear. The photograph selected by Dylan generated much curiosity: it has been rumored by some that the faces of the Beatles are hidden in the nodes of the tree in the back. Indeed, by turning the LP cover upside down (not the CD), the Beatles’ faces are seen, just above the le in Wesley. John Berg, told of this by Rolling Stone magazine, admitted his astonishment: “Someone had discovered little pictures of the Beatles and the hand of Jesus in the trunk. Well, I had a proof of the cover on my wall, so I went and turned it upside down and sure enough… Ha ha ha! I mean, if you wanted to see it, you could see it. I was as amazed as anybody.”
The liner notes on the back of the album sleeve give a text written by Dylan as a fable, a rather hermetic text. Unlike the Gospel according to Matthew, the “three kings” mentioned by the author did not bring gifts, having learned of the birth of Christ, nor were they guided by a star, but they did get something from Frank. To understand this, a key is needed, given by the third king—“the key is Frank.” The reader can replace Frank with Dylan (rather, the “new” Dylan, transformed since his accident), Vera with his wife Sara, Terry Shute with Albert Grossman, and see the three kings as representing the record studios who came to negotiate a next contract with the songwriter, as his current contract with Columbia Records is about to expire.
From this perspective, everything is more or less clear: the “new Dylan” no longer accepts Albert Grossman’s shenanigans and tells him uncompromisingly, “Get out of here, you ragged man! Come ye no more!” Then the three kings reveal the purpose of their visit: “Mr. Dylan has come out with a new record. This record of course features none but his own songs and we understand that you’re the key.” In the following negotiations, the “new” Dylan tries to impress his interlocutors with various antics. They then leave, happy and impressed, miraculously healed of the various ailments that had plagued them at the beginning of the story. Sara, his wife, is amazed that he does not show that he has become a modest man, leaving a false image of the “old” Dylan. “Patience, Vera,” he replies. At the end of the story, the message is clear: Dylan distrusted Grossman, whose methods disturbed him more and more, and now wants to assert his metamorphosis, his “normality,” and to move away from the image of the prophet or messenger that had previously been imposed on him against his will.
The twelve songs on the album John Wesley Harding gestated during Dylan’s fifteen months of recovery, and then were written during the five weeks preceding recording sessions—some of them even on the train between New York and Nashville. There were three sessions between October and November 1967, for a total of just under thirteen hours of recording. We are far from the recording of Blonde on Blonde, when the musicians had to wait several hours in the studio while the songwriter finished his songs. All the songs reflect a dramatic change from the previous three albums—the “electric trilogy”—and also from the recordings made in Woodstock with the Band between June and September 1967 and released in 1975 under the title The Basement Tapes.
Dylan sought a different kind of sound, similar to that of the album The Way I Feel (1967) by the Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot, whose manager was Albert Grossman. When Jann Wenner asked Dylan, “What kind of sound did you hear when you went in to make John Wesley Harding?” Dylan answered, “I heard the sound that Gordon Lightfoot was getting, with Charlie McCoy and Kenneth Buttrey… But we couldn’t get it… We got a different sound… I don’t know what you’d call that… it’s a muffled sound.”20
Just before booking a studio in Nashville, Dylan talked to Bob Johnston, who recalls, “He played me some songs and asked, ‘What do you think about a bass, drum, and guitar?’ ‘I think it would be f**kin’ brilliant if you had a steel guitar.”78 Thus Pete Drake, who was working with Chet Atkins, joined Charlie McCoy and Kenneth Buttrey, who had already backed Dylan on the majority of songs on Blonde on Blonde. Robbie Robertson, guitarist of the Band, remembers those first recordings: “[W]hen he came back, I remember he was referring to it as unfinished, and actually talking about me and Garth doing some overdubs on it. When I heard it, I said, ‘You know what, maybe it is what it is, and it doesn’t need to be embellished, doesn’t need to be hot-rodded at all; there’s a certain honesty in the music just the way it is.’”11 In reality, Dylan had doubts about the tone of his new album. He wanted to record songs unadorned, far from the psychedelic extravagance of the time. He almost gave up on the project. He affirmed in 1968, “I didn’t want to record this last album. I was going to do a whole album of other people’s songs, but I couldn’t find enough.”20 Dylan thought about adding some overdubbing to the basic tracks, but finally he kept the original form.
John Wesley Harding was released on December 27, 1967. Dylan asked Columbia to release it with no publicity, not even a single preceding it. He wanted to maintain a low-key profile and keep the album as a conceptual work. In a year when psychedelia dominated all albums, Jon Landau characterized Dylan’s eighth opus as reactionary, compared to other great albums released that year. He wrote in Crawdaddy magazine, “For an album of this kind to be released amidst Sgt. Pepper, Their Satanic Majesties Request, After Bathing at Baxter’s, somebody must have had a lot of confidence in what he was doing… Dylan seems to feel no need to respond to the predominant trends in pop music at all. And he is the only major pop artist about whom this can be said.” During the same year, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Jefferson Airplane Surrealistic Pillow, Pink Floyd The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and the Doors Strange Days. In this new album, Dylan spoke about neither Vietnam nor civil rights, but only about spirituality and love—all under the guise of a return to musical traditions. However, the album was well received by a majority of critics and the public, in part because they had waited a year and a half to hear a new Dylan album. And despite the biblical allusions, folk, blues, and country that confused more than one fan looking for the “ultimate” message, John Wesley Harding reached number 2 on the US Billboard charts and topped the UK charts. About three months after its release, the album was certified gold by the RIAA in March 1968. The album ranked number 301 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.” The last two songs on the disc, “Down Along the Cove” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” foreshadow the direction of Dylan’s next album, Nashville Skyline.
John Wesley Harding was the second album recorded in Nashville. Just over nineteen months elapsed between the completion of Blonde on Blonde (March 10, 1966) and the first recording session of the new album on October 17, 1967. If Dylan had changed, Bob Johnston kept the same production requirements and kept the tape recorder on while Dylan recorded. He also specified, “I never changed microphones on him.”80 Unlike Blonde on Blonde, the sessions for the album required no more than thirteen hours of recording, and only one technical setting was changed because of the number of musicians: Bob Dylan (vocals, guitar, harmonica, and piano), Charlie McCoy (bass), Kenneth Buttrey (drums), and Pete Drake (pedal steel guitar). A simple and quiet recording.
This album is, unfortunately, not as well documented as the others. There is no record of the instruments used by Bob Dylan. Inside the album sleeve he is holding an acoustic guitar, a Martin 0-18, probably the same one used for The Basement Tapes, and probably the one played on the recording of this new album. Did he also play his Gibson Nick Lucas Special? John Wesley Harding is entirely acoustic, no electric guitar is used. The piano is heard on two tracks, “Dear Landlord” and “Down Along the Cove.” Finally, although he did not play harmonica on The Basement Tapes, he plays it here in many keys, C, D, E, F, and B.