Bob Dylan / 5:35
Musicians
Bob Dylan: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Charlie McCoy: bass
Kenneth Buttrey: drums
Recording Studio
Columbia Recording Studios, Nashville: October 17, 1967
Technical Team
Producer: Bob Johnston
Sound Engineer: Charlie Bragg
With eleven verses, this ballad is the longest song on the album. “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” is the story of the “best of friends.” One day, Frankie asks Judas for money. He places a roll of cash on a stool and says, “Take your pick, Frankie Boy / My loss will be your gain.” The choice is actually Cornelian: money or eternity; be a moral but mortal man or a soulless but immortal false prophet. Frankie then goes into a house “with four and twenty windows / And a woman’s face in ev’ry one”—a brothel in which he engages in debauchery for sixteen days and nights, and then dies of thirst in Judas’s arms on the seventeenth.
Unusually for Dylan, the last verse of “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” ends with a moral, just like Aesop and La Fontaine. “Well, the moral of the story / The moral of this song / Is simply that one should never be / Where one does not belong / So when you see your neighbor carryin’ somethin’ / Help him with his load / And don’t go mistaking Paradise / For that home across the road.”
Who are Frankie Lee and Judas Priest? They could be the two sides of Dylan, one dark and one light, or an allegory of the relationship between Dylan and his manager Albert Grossman—and, beyond that, the relationship between any artist and the recording industry. The moral for Dylan would be for each of us to take charge of our own destiny.
“The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” was the third and final song recorded during the first session for John Wesley Harding. Just one take was necessary. The song ends with a fast fade-out, suggesting a small recording problem. Like “All Along the Watchtower,” the song is based on three chords. The only difference between this song and “All Along the Watchtower” is that here Dylan repeats himself for three additional minutes, giving an unrelieved quality to the song, especially since the performance is not up to par. The guitar part lacks rigor and Bob Johnston probably was horrified at hearing, in just fifteen seconds, Dylan’s plosives on each letter p in the first verse, including “Priest” in the first line. Maybe Dylan hit the mic or the mic holder. The tone of the ballad is rather serene, with a touch of humor and irony in Dylan’s voice. Dylan performed the song live with the Grateful Dead in 1987.