Between his accident in summer 1966 and his appearance at the Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert in January 1968, little was seen or heard of Bob Dylan. In the period immediately following the accident, he spent much of his time editing the TV special that had been commissioned by ABC and which, despite the network’s dismissal of it as “totally unsatisfactory,” would eventually appear as Eat The Document.
“He wore a neck-brace for a long time,” recalls Robbie Robertson. “That was mostly during the editing of Eat The Document, when I was living at his house, and the film editor Howard Alk was there. Bob and I would go in another room and fool around, play a little music, then come out and do a bit of editing, until the process wore him down and Howard and I would go ahead and work on it a while. That film was very much in the spirit of The Basement Tapes as well—there was no structure, it was very experimental; there was something going on at those times that let you feel like you didn’t have to be doing this for anybody in particular, so you did it for yourself.”
Having dispensed with one obligation, Dylan used his time to recuperate, kick back and raise a family. Ignoring the rumors that inevitably grew as his isolation lengthened, Dylan spurned any attempts by reporters to investigate his situation until, in May 1967, he told the New York Daily News’ Michael Iachetta that he had been “…porin’ over books by people you never heard of, thinkin’ about where I’m goin’ and why am I runnin’ and am I mixed up too much, and what am I knowin’ and what am I givin’ and what am I takin’. And mainly what I’ve been doin’ is workin’ on gettin’ better and makin’ better music, which is what my life is all about.”
Working on getting better was primarily the job of Dylan’s physician in nearby Middletown. Dr. Ed Thaler, a long-time leftist and civil-rights activist, had been recommended to Bob by his friend, the folk-singer Odetta. All the other facets of Dylan’s life were, however, more informed by the birth of Jesse, his and Sara’s first child together. The effect on his life was transformative. Bernard Paturel, the former Woodstock cafe owner who took on the job of handyman-cum-security guard at the Dylans’ around this time, admitted that until Bob had met Sara, he thought it was simply a matter of time before the singer died. “But later,” he admitted, “I had never met such a dedicated family man. There’s so many sides to Bob Dylan, he’s round.” Another acquaintance of this period, neighbor and musician Happy Traum, claimed that Dylan “turned into such an ordinary guy that he was actually a little boring to be around.”
After loosening up through the summer of 1967 in the Band’s basement, Dylan felt ready to record the follow-up to Blonde On Blonde. In October and November he made three trips down to Nashville to record what would be released as John Wesley Harding, using just the Blonde rhythm section of bassist Charlie McCoy and drummer Kenny Buttrey in an attempt to emulate the sound that Canadian folk-singer Gordon Lightfoot had got using the same crew. Pedal steel guitarist Pete Drake was added on a couple of cuts.
The recording of the album was in sharp contrast to the protracted hanging-around of the Blonde On Blonde sessions, however. Preparing themselves for another marathon bout of ping-pong and occasional playing, McCoy and Buttrey were shocked to find the material written and Dylan ready to record; the album was finished in three swift sessions—a total of six hours recording, according to Buttrey. The original intention had been for some of the songs to have overdubs added later but, after some thought, Dylan decided to release it as it stood.
“I remember Bob going and recording that when we were working on the Big Pink stuff,” recalls Robbie Robertson, “and when 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.’ And pretty soon you get used to something—you listen to it a while and it starts to sound more finished than maybe it did in the beginning—and so he ended up using it the way he had recorded it.”
“I didn’t know what to make of it,” Dylan himself later admitted. “I asked Columbia to release it with no publicity and no hype because this was the season of hype… People have made a lot out of it, as if it was some sort of ink-blot test or something. But it was never intended to be anything else but just a bunch of songs, really.”
At a time when everything was getting louder and more flamboyant and colorful, John Wesley Harding had an emphatic diffidence. It is one of the most quietly-recorded albums ever. It sort of shuffles in modestly with the title-track, and never bothers straining for the listener’s attention: the tales are here to hear, it suggests, but you’ll have to pay attention.
When it appeared in February 1968, psychedelia was at its floral peak, with sleeve designs like those for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Incredible String Band’s 5000 Spirits and, most recently, Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love illustrating the era’s rococo tendencies. In the face of this cosmic maelstrom, John Wesley Harding offered a design of striking understatement: accompanied by a motley trio of characters, a hunched, thinly-bearded Dylan peers shyly out of a plain black and white snapshot set into a beige-gray frame. No bright colors. No fancy curlicues. Some funny hats, but no cosmic intentions. It was as if Dylan was deliberately distancing himself from the generational imperatives of an era he himself had done so much to define.
Fans searching for significance soon found it in the sleeve photo: turned upside down, it was possible to discern the faces of the Beatles and, some claimed, the hand of God emerging from the bark at the top of the tree. Photographer John Berg, when informed about the faces, checked his original and found them there, a purely serendipitous presence. He had taken the photo in the garden of Sally Grossman, Dylan’s manager’s wife (and the woman accompanying Dylan on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home), when the temperature was 20° below zero. Hence Dylan’s hunched pose: he and the others—Lakhsman and Purna Das Baul, of the Bauls Of Bengal musical group, and Charlie Joy, a local carpenter/stonemason who happened to be working at the Grossman’s—would pose for a few frames, dash back inside for a few warming slugs of brandy, then go back out for another frame or two. Snatched between slugs, the sleeve would come to represent a turning-point in pop, the precise moment at which psychedelia, having reached its furthest extent, retreated to the more comforting confines of country-rock.
The sleeve photo summed up the woolly western atmosphere of the album, which is populated with drifters, immigrants, hobos and outlaws. Here, Charlie Joy looks like an old Union infantryman and Dylan a shy gunslinger captured for posterity in a journalist’s camera; the Bauls, meanwhile, with their raggedy mix of eastern and occidental vestments, resemble nothing quite so much as the Indian guides who would be used to lead pioneer wagon trains and cavalry troops through dangerous, uncharted territory. This, Dylan seemed to be saying, would be a dry and dusty journey into Indian country. Though he seemed to be wearing the same brown suede jacket as on the Blonde On Blonde sleeve, there was none of that album’s air of stifling urban decadence; instead, a rural breeze whispered through its lonely margins.
Not that anyone realized it at the time, but following the jovial singa-longs recorded in the Band’s basement, which sometimes seemed to be just hearty choruses separated by verses of whatever popped into Dylan’s head at any given moment, John Wesley Harding contained no choruses at all, as if such whimsical, user-friendly business had been ruthlessly swept aside in pursuit of a simpler, more ascetic notion of songwriting truth. And with the sole exception of the lengthy ‘Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest’, all the songs were condensed, three-verse miniatures. In a conversation with John Cohen published in Sing Out! magazine in 1968, Dylan revealed that he had originally wanted to record an album of other people’s songs, but had struggled to find enough songs that could fulfill his stringent criteria for inclusion. “The song has to be of a certain quality for me to sing and put on a record,” he explained. “One aspect it would have to have is that it didn’t repeat itself. I shy away from those songs which repeat phrases, bars and verses, bridges…”
Consequently, in sharp contrast to the prolix surrealism and lyrical pyrotechnics of his “electric trilogy,” Dylan’s new album offered a series of brief, cryptic parables which both in form and, in some cases, content, reflected the time he had spent studying the Bible during his recuperation—indeed, he later referred to it as “the first biblical rock album.” And despite his subsequent scornful dismissal of those who saw the album as some kind of psychologically revealing “ink-blot test,” John Wesley Harding did seem to contain various allegorical musings upon the singer’s own situation, transmuted through a style that married Western myth to religious allegory.
As if to tease would-be interpreters, the album featured a rear-sleeve short-story which drew on the three kings of the nativity, here searching for the “key” to the new Dylan album. Lampooning the more ludicrous excesses of fervent Dylanologists, a character called Frank puts on a frenzied performance, waving his shirt around, stamping on a light bulb and punching out a plate glass window, which seems to satisfy the three kings that there is, indeed, deep meaning in the album. And indeed, there is: in various guises, from horseman to hobo, drifter to messenger, Dylan confronted his own fears and temptations through these songs, using the album as a means of mapping out his new ethical convictions in relation to his past life. As he said ten years later, “John Wesley Harding was a fearful album—just dealing with fear, but dealing with the Devil in a fearful way, almost.”
Contrary to Dylan’s claim in the song, John Wesley Hardin—the real Texan outlaw’s name has no “g”—was no great friend to the poor. He did, however, maintain that he never killed anyone who did not deserve it, which is not quite the same thing. He carried a gun in each hand, which he used to dispatch his more than 30 victims with efficient ruthlessness.
Born the son of a Methodist preacher on the 26 May 1853, Hardin lived a life of gambling, roaming and killing, with several notches on his gun-handles before he reached the age of 21, largely as a result of the hair-trigger temper for which he was famed. Again contrary to Dylan’s interpretation, he was not immune to the occasional foolish move, the most serious being when he attracted the attentions of the Texas Rangers by killing a deputy sheriff of Brown County, Texas. Hardin was tracked down and captured in Pensacola, Florida in July 1877, and sentenced to 25 years in jail the following year. He was released with a full pardon in 1894, having spent his time in prison learning law. Upon his release he became a lawyer, and it was while prosecuting a case in El Paso, Texas, that, on August 19, 1895, he himself was finally killed, shot in the back of the head by one John Selman, a local constable, in an echo of the death of Jesse James mentioned by Dylan in ‘Outlaw Blues’.
Such are the facts about the real-life outlaw. There are several possible reasons for Dylan’s altering his name here, the most obvious being that, as he later claimed, it was simply a mistake—though this seems unlikely, especially given that the gunslinger was apparently an ancestor of the singer-songwriter Tim Hardin, one of Dylan’s more talented contemporaries. There is the remote possibility of a fear of libel, although under American law, it is impossible to libel the dead. The most likely reason, then, is that the name-change, along with the alterations to Hardin’s true life story, indicate that Dylan was not writing about this one outlaw specifically, but about the outlaw myth which runs so deeply through American folklore, and which even today encourages militant right-wing Americans in a bogus claim on pioneer individualism.
In the late Sixties, however, after decades in which the Hays Code and the domineering presence of John Wayne had ensured that the Western was the most conservative of movie genres, the outlaw-outsider myth was being reassessed, with counter-culture overtones being reintroduced through such movies as Arthur Penn’s Bonnie And Clyde and Little Big Man, George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, and even Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. Thus does Dylan’s outlaw embody the popular Robin Hood traits of selfless courage, evasive cunning, dislike of authority and generosity toward the poor. All outlaws, Dylan is perhaps suggesting, should be this way.
Taken as an allegorical reflection upon his own career, the song could be a succinct assessment of how the young singing sharpshooter roved across the nation’s airwaves, helping emancipate the disenfranchised, and smiting with his pen only those who most deserved it, before evading the attentions of fame and the futile attempts to pin him down to a specific stance or message. And as for that fortuitous bike accident, well, given his circumstances—the final lines seem to wink—how foolish a move did that turn out to be?
In 1969, Dylan admitted to Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner that there was no such hidden meaning in the song, that he had simply intended to write a long cowboy ballad but had run out of steam in the second verse. Rather than discard a nice tune, he quickly added a third verse and recorded it, then put it at the start of the album to lend it a significance it perhaps didn’t deserve, and head off criticisms about its slightness. In the event, the song plays as concentrated western epic, a précis of outlaw legend in which the truth rattles hollowly about inside the myth.
With ‘As I Went Out One Morning’, Dylan used the conventions of the traditional ballad—the archaic form of the title, and the presence of a fair damsel—to criticize the ingrained, autocratic attitude he had encountered in his dealings with the civil rights movement a few years earlier.
In this case, however, the fair damsel proves to be a siren spider-woman. While out taking the air “around Tom Paine’s” (a reference to the revolutionary libertarian writer who was a touchstone for the civil rights movement of the Sixties), he offers help to the imprisoned damsel, who then attempts to ensnare the singer more deeply in her cause—just as Dylan had been required to fend off a constant stream of requests from political organizations following his initial, unprompted contributions: after acting purely from personal conviction, he discovered that there were forces who claimed those convictions their own property, along with his songs and, they presumed, his time. “I’ve found out some things,” Dylan told Toronto journalist Margaret Steen around the end of 1965. “The groups promoting these things, the movement, would try to get me involved with them, be their singing spokesman—and inside these groups, with all their president/vice-president/secretary stuff, it’s politics. Inside their own pettinesses they’re as bad as the hate groups. I won’t even have a fan club because it’d have to have a president, it’d be a group. They think the more people you have behind something, the more influence it has. Maybe so, but the more it gets watered down, too. I’m not a believer in doing things by numbers. I believe that the best things get done by individuals…”
The presence of Tom Paine in the song is doubly significant. Firstly, it links directly to the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, the acceptance of whose Tom Paine Award proved such a drunken debacle for Dylan in 1963.
Secondly, it draws attention to the precarious balance between liberty and equality that has dogged left-wing organizations throughout the century—specifically as to how greater equality might be achieved without making catastrophic incursions into personal liberties. Paine was a free-thinker whose individualism eschewed ideological dogma, and it’s appropriate that in the final verse, it’s he who in turn rescues the singer from the damsel and apologizes for her presumption.
Just as Dylan’s John Wesley Harding character bears only the slightest resemblance to the historical figure upon whom he is based, so too does his St. Augustine differ from its historical precursor—not least in being put to death by a mob.
The real Augustine was in fact an eminent bishop of the Catholic Church’s North African ministry, rather than a martyr. A philosopher-cleric, he is most well-known for his Confessions and City Of God, works in which he described his youthful life of debauchery and subsequent conversion to Christianity, and for his unusual, pioneering attitude toward the theological problem of evil, as formulated in his Encheiridion: “Since God is supremely good he would not allow any evil in his works unless he were sufficiently omnipotent and good to make good come even out of evil.”
It’s this position, poised on the cusp of good and evil, which seems most relevant to Dylan’s song, in which the ghostly figure of the cleric stands for the singer himself, left weeping against a mirror in the final verse, contemplating his own failings and desire for salvation. He is, perhaps, regretting his own earlier criticisms of religion, in which he may have unjustly condemned individuals of Augustine’s nobility and holiness along with the organized church they represented. Alternatively, it may be that he suddenly realizes his own part in luring the righteous from their path through his own brand of the Devil’s music.
Augustine is depicted in Dylan’s dream as wearing a golden coat and carrying a blanket, signifiers respectively of the worldly excesses of mankind in general and the Catholic Church in particular, and the more ascetic leanings of the prophet. He seeks the “…souls/Whom already have been sold,” the first of several references on the album to the commercialization of man’s inner being, notably in ‘Dear Landlord’ and ‘The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest’. There are, he claims, no modern martyrs among humanity’s most gifted individuals to lead mankind toward the light, and man is accordingly condemned to seek his own transcendence—though he should be assured that he is not alone in his search.
The inference is clear: Dylan, who had narrowly avoided becoming a martyr of sorts when he survived his motorbike accident, has realized that his youthful attempts to “save” society from itself have come too late—most of American society had already sold its soul to a variety of temptations, the like of which not even Augustine could have imagined (including the pop scene in which Dylan acknowledged his own complicity), and any salvation could henceforth only come through the individual’s determined efforts. Ironically, the song’s opening couplet directly paraphrases ‘Joe Hill’, the tribute to the eponymous union martyr who, as a leading light of the American syndicalist organization The Wobblies (The American Industrial Workers Of The World) would doubtless have disputed such a denial of the efficacy of collective action.
In ‘All Along The Watchtower’, the contrasting spirits in Dylan’s character, dramatized so evocatively in ‘I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine’, are here characterized as the joker and the thief, both trapped in the here and now with little prospect of transcendence.
The joker rues the way that philistine businessmen make free with the profits of his creative work, without according it due respect. This was clearly a heartfelt complaint from Dylan, who had recently been embroiled in contract negotiations with both his record company CBS and his manager, Albert Grossman, both of whom he considered were treating him with less respect than he deserved. His record royalties from CBS were nothing special, and Grossman seemed to consider him simply a cash cow to be milked as quickly and as deeply as possible, piling tour date upon tour date with little regard for his client’s physical and emotional well-being or for his creative needs.
And that was just the tip of what appeared to be a particularly venal iceberg. “If it’s not the promoter cheating you, it’s the box office cheating you,” he complained to Robert Shelton. “Somebody is always giving you a hard time… Even the record company figures won’t be right. Do you know that up to a certain point I made more money on a song I wrote if it were on an album by Carolyn Hester, or anybody, than if I did it myself. That’s the contract they gave me. Horrible! Horrible!” Ultimately, after scaring CBS by signing to MGM when his contract was up for renewal (the MGM deal was subsequently nixed by Allan Klein, one of the industry’s sharpest money-men), Dylan re-signed with them at double his previous royalty rate.
The thief sympathizes with the joker, adding that he’s not the only one who considers the situation absurd, but warns against letting such worldly matters prey upon his mind too heavily, since there are far more pressing matters to be addressed. What these matters are is made clear in the brief outline sketched in the final verse, which draws upon the prophet Isaiah’s prediction of the fall of Babylon, in Isaiah 21, 6–9: “For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth. And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed; And he cried, A lion; My Lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower in the daytime, and I am set in my ward whole nights; And behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.” And subsequently (Isaiah 21, 11–12): “Watchman, what of the night? The watchman said, The morning cometh, and also the night; if ye will inquire, inquire ye: return, come.”
In the face of the howling, apocalyptic wind approaching, it is far more important, the thief suggests, to seek remedy for the soul rather than for worldly injustices. Then again, of course, the thief would say that, having been responsible, by dint of his underhand trade, for some worldly injustices of his own. In Dylan’s version of the song, it’s the barrenness of the scenario which grips, the high, haunting harmonica and simple forward motion of the riff carrying understated intimations of impending cataclysm; as subsequently recorded by Jimi Hendrix in an arrangement so definitive as to be adopted by Dylan himself in later years, that cataclysm is rendered all the more scarily palpable through the virtuoso’s dervish whirls of guitar.
Another misbegotten pair of symbolic characters inhabits this, the album’s longest (and dullest) track, representing respectively the straight-talking, candid and simple soul (Frankie Lee: “frankly”) and the forked-tongue betrayer (Judas Priest). For all its length, the song is basically a simple parable comparable to the Devil’s tempting of Jesus in the wilderness, except that in this case, Frankie Lee—presumably the character with whom Dylan most identifies—eventually gives in to the temptations of the flesh, after procrastinating half-heartedly over the temptations of materialism. Dylan, like Frankie, had never placed that much importance on money and material things, but had always demonstrated a keen appreciation of the more experiential benefits of his position, the various dalliances and indulgences available to the Sixties rock demi-god.
The early verses, in which Frankie agonizes over Judas’s offer of money, presumably echo Dylan’s recent contractual negotiations, or those earlier in his career: certainly, Judas’s attempt to rush Frankie into a hasty decision “before [the dollar bills] all disappear” closely reflects standard negotiating practice in the music business. As, indeed, does Judas’s dangling of carnal carrots to help sway Frankie’s mind, in the form of the brothel in which he eventually exhausts himself. To Frankie, such worldly delights are represented as “Paradise,” though the devilish Judas recognizes their true price is “Eternity”—Frankie’s mortal soul.
Possessing little self-control, Frankie takes the bait, and as a result loses control over his destiny, not to mention “everything which he had made” in his more considered moments. After 16 nights of sustained indulgence—analogous to the high life Dylan had been encouraged to lead over the last few years—Frankie dies of thirst in Judas’s arms, an indication of the insatiable, addictive nature of such behavior. It’s hard to view the Judas Priest character as anyone but Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, just as the “little neighbor boy” whose guilt is “so well concealed” (and who has a vested interest in hoping that “Nothing is revealed” of his complicity in Frankie’s downfall) surely stands for the various cheerleading cronies who encouraged Dylan in his dangerous excesses. The final verse, with its bland moral, serves warning that, in future, he would be exerting more control over his life and career; and indeed, when his manager’s contract came up for renewal a few years later, Dylan chose to sever his association with Grossman.
Built around a single suspended guitar chord, with Dylan’s anguished vocal entreaties furnishing most of its melodic shape, ‘Drifter’s Escape’ is a simple parable of the singer’s release from his previous life, with the apostolic intervention of the bolt of lightning enabling his escape.
As the song opens, the drifter is trapped in a Kafkaesque inquisition, his crime a mystery to him—just as Dylan had been baffled by the constant criticism that had dogged his path as he drifted from folk-singer to rock star, all the way around the world. The judge seems sympathetic to the drifter’s plight, suggesting that his confusion may be more successfully relieved by not actively seeking “understanding” of his situation in a strict, rational sense. The jury, however, has scented blood, and bays for more—just as, regardless of the criticisms voiced by older folkies, Dylan’s fan-base had grown all the more oppressively obsessive following his transformation into rock’n’roll idol. But God intervenes to save the drifter by hurling a bolt of lightning at the courthouse, an obvious metaphor for the motorcycle accident that helped free Dylan from his previous nihilistic lifestyle.
Ironically, the drifter makes his escape by slipping away while everybody else resorts to prayer—an indication that, while Dylan may have undergone some kind of Damascene conversion around the time of the accident—he did, for instance, keep a Bible handy on a lectern in his artist’s studio during his recuperation—his relationship with his god remains a personal, one-to-one affair, untainted by the interference of the organized churches.
A weary, maundering piano blues, ‘Dear Landlord’ has been interpreted by some as Dylan addressing his god, and even—by biographer Anthony Scaduto—as Dylan’s mind addressing his body (which would certainly fit in with the album’s other dualistic texts, ‘I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine’ and ‘All Along The Watchtower’). It’s more readily viewed, however, as a direct entreaty to Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman—whose Woodstock house and Gramercy Park apartment the singer often used as homes, and who subsequently leased a Woodstock cottage to his client—to reduce the burden of work constantly thrust upon his shoulders. Compared to the contemptuous, dismissive tone of put-downs like ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’ and ‘Positively 4th Street’, or the bitterness of ‘Masters Of War’, this finds Dylan eschewing rancor in favor of a more resolute, persuasive approach toward his opponent, as if serving notice to quit.
Again, Dylan is concerned about the price placed on his soul by the purely commercial attitude taken toward his work—such creative matters, he insists, are “beyond control,” and when the time is right, he will make records again. Dylan’s contract with CBS had run its course, and it seems likely that in order to help in his negotiations with Mortimer Nasatir of MGM Records, Grossman had been pestering the singer for new material, if only to demonstrate to Nasatir that the rumors about Dylan’s decline—some suspected that he had suffered irreversible brain damage in the motorcycle accident—were unfounded.
At that time, nobody realized how enduring rock’n’roll careers might be, and it must have annoyed Grossman to observe his client squandering his talent and his time on a bunch of throwaway nursery-rhyme singalongs like The Basement Tapes, at exactly the time he most needed to reassert his public profile. In his first post-accident interview, with Michael Iachetta in May 1967, Dylan made what appeared to be thinly-veiled threats toward his management and record company, by revealing that he did in fact have songs buzzing round his head as per usual, but that “…they’re not goin’ to get written down until some things are evened up. Not until some people come forth and make up for some of the things that have happened. Somethin’ has got to be evened up, is all I’m going to say.”
Accordingly, in the second verse Dylan advises that his landlord should cool his jets awhile: there’s no point in working so hard for too much, too soon, he contends; and anyway, materialism is just a bottomless addiction—there’s always something else that you don’t have, always another glittering temptation leading you on, right through to the end of your life. The final verse finds the singer stubbornly sticking to his guns, refusing to discuss the matter or adopt a more conciliatory position. I know you’re good at making money, he assures his landlord, but we’ll get along better if you try not to ignore the more intrinsic qualities of my work—it’s not just product, after all.
The album’s most straightforward moral parable, ‘I Am A Lonesome Hobo’ finds the eponymous vagrant offering free advice to those who might think themselves his betters. Despite having tried a variety of criminal pursuits to get by, including bribery, blackmail and deceit, he still retains enough self-respect to eschew begging, the ground zero of human activity. Or at least, he’s never been caught begging, which is a different matter entirely…
Once wealthy and well-fed, his downfall is sketchily presented, in a manner typical of the album as a whole; but the crux of the matter is faithlessness, a lack of trust in his brother. It’s left him an outsider, someone whose life is so apart from the normal realm of societal experience that he might as well be an alien. But in his solitariness, the hobo has found a certain philosophical stability, which leaves him standing in the garb of prophet rather than beggar, a salutary lesson for those who drift away from righteousness.
Set to the traditional folk melody ‘Come All Ye Tramps And Hawkers’—which Dylan had earlier borrowed for ‘The Ballad Of Donald White’, one of his earliest (unreleased) compositions—‘I Pity The Poor Immigrant’ is among the album’s most confusing songs, balancing itself precariously between compassion and condemnation. Is Dylan singing about a real immigrant, or just about someone who lives their life as if an immigrant, a displaced visitor in an alien society? Following hard on the heels of ‘I Am A Lonesome Hobo’ and ‘Drifter’s Escape’, it’s an outsider parable of a sterner cast, Dylan’s judgment flinty and unstinting, though his gentle and piteous delivery belies his tough attitude.
Through the three verses, Dylan builds an itinerary of the immigrant’s unprepossessing characteristics, which starts off with a propensity to strive for evil, and carries on through a damning catalogue of lying, cheating, greed, self-loathing, uncharitableness and ruthlessness—a fairly accurate portrait of everyday business practice, in other words.
The American experience of immigration is different from that of most European countries: while ostensibly more welcoming of foreign immigrants, America has traditionally offered them little reliable access to justice. The result has been that each successive immigrant community has been forced to throw up its own “strong men” to guard its interests, and in time these localized guardians have grown into powerful crime figures, most famously with the Mafia, though the process doubtless holds true for all subsequent waves of immigrants, through to the Jamaican Yardies and Russian Mafiosi of today.
It may be that Dylan is satirizing this process in ‘I Pity The Poor Immigrant’, criticizing the prospect of great bounty with which America lures other races and nations to its doorstep. After all, in a country founded on greed and theft, who can blame those who fancy a slice of the pie for themselves? In a sense, then, all immigrants to the United States have fallen “in love with wealth itself” simply by wishing to become Americans. The final line, in which Dylan contemplates the moment at which the immigrant’s “gladness comes to pass,” is a beautifully double-edged conclusion, the singer both pitying the immigrant who achieves his or her selfish dream, and savoring the point at which such dreams finally curdle in a horrifying flash of self-realization.
The eponymous messenger is, of course, Dylan himself, the bringer of harsh home truths, and certainly a man possessed of the kind of mind “that multiplied the smallest matter.” Like the messenger, Dylan had spent much of his recent life touring assembly halls, until he too found his feet burning up from the hectic pace of his schedule.
Again, the song is riddled with biblical allusion: the title itself derives from Proverbs 13:16–17: “Every prudent man dealeth with knowledge; but a fool layeth open his folly. A wicked messenger falleth into mischief; but a faithful ambassador is health.” The high priest Eli, from whom the song’s messenger came, was one of the more knowledgeable and intellectual characters of the Old Testament. To have been sent by him would imply a heavy reliance on intellect rather than instinct, suggesting that Dylan perhaps felt he had valued rationality too highly over spirituality.
The revelatory, heart-opening message the messenger himself is given, “If ye cannot bring good news, then don’t bring any,” pivots on the notion of good news, which in the gospel sense refers strictly to the Christ story. If Dylan had not, in fact, already undergone conversion to Christianity, he was certainly doing his best to make it appear that way.
The album’s final two songs prefigure Dylan’s full-blooded move into country music on his next album. With Pete Drake’s pedal steel guitar sidling around Dylan’s gently syncopated piano figures, ‘Down Along The Cove’ is an understated number of no import beyond offering Bob an opportunity to express his guileless, open affection for his “little bundle of joy,” most likely Sara, but possibly one of their two children that had been born in 1967, Jesse Byron and Anna. Where before he had denied his marriage, and even, on one occasion recounted by the journalist Jules Siegel, suggested that Sara hide from a reporter in a hotel closet, here he wants to shout his love from the rooftops, pleased as punch that any passers-by watching the two of them walking along hand-in-hand will recognize their love.
The simplest song Dylan had probably written since high school, ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’ has the self-contained perfection of a natural classic, achieved through a sly manipulation of the songwriter’s standard romantic clichés. At one point, it’s almost as if he started out rhyming “moon” with “June,” only to relent and have the moon instead shine “like a spoon.” In the context of the album as a whole, its relaxed, acquiescent tone comes as a soothing balm after such a parade of austere parables, while in the context of Dylan’s career, it serves notice of his next career shift, which would see him embracing not just the musical talents of Nashville, but its sound and style as well.