Bob Dylan cranked out the grim reflections of this stripped down mythic folk as a deliberate response to the psychedelic movement. After he crashed his Triumph Tiger 100 motorcycle in July of 1966 on a road near his home in Woodstock, New York, breaking several vertebrae in his neck, Dylan took the opportunity to take an extended break: "I had been in a motorcycle accident and I'd been hurt, but I recovered. Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race."
During his extended recovery, he would record with The Hawks at his home and in the basement of their house 'The Big Pink', working on a loose and rootsy sound that would be documented on 'The Basement Tapes'. Dylan says the simplified style of the music was conceived as a cohesive concept partially in response to the Beatles 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' with it's sophisticated studio sound and to the excess of the whole psychedelic movement: “I didn’t know the studio like those guys did. They had obviously spent a lot of hours in the studio figuring that stuff out and I hadn’t. And not only hadn’t I, but I didn’t really care to and I’d lost my contacts at that point. I’d been out of commission for a while. All I had were those songs that I’d just sort of scribbled down.”
The songs were composed in about a month with only verses, no choruses. Dylan would reveal at the time: “What I’m trying to do now is not use too many words. There’s no line that you can stick your finger through; there’s no hole in any of the stanzas. There’s no blank filler. Each line has something.”
Dylan met up with producer Bob Johnston in Nashville and recorded 'John Wesley Harding' in only twelve hours over three visits to the studio. The sessions featured Dylan on guitar, harmonica, piano, keyboards, and vocals; with Kenneth A. Buttrey on Drums and Charlie McCoy on bass. Pete Drake played pedal steel guitar on two tracks. Johnston recalls: “I would place glass around Dylan for recording. He had a different vocal sound. I didn’t make his different vocal sound. He always had different sounds on. I never wanted to be (Phil) Spector… and while the rest of the world was doing an album as big as 'Blonde On Blonde', which everybody was — the more musicians they could get, the better it was. (But) we went in with four people… in the middle of a psychedelic world!"
Dylan remembers: “We recorded that album, and I didn’t know what to make of it. Lots of times people will get excited and they say, ‘this is great, this is fantastic.’ But usually they’re full of shit. They’re just trying to tell you something to make you feel good. People have a way of telling you what they think you want to hear – anytime I don’t know something and I ask somebody, I usually know less about it after I ask than before. You’ve got to know or you don’t know and I really didn’t know about that album at all. So I figured the best thing to do would be to put it out as quickly as possible, call it John Wesley Harding because that was one song that I had no idea what it was about, why it was even on the album. I figured I’d call the album that, call attention to it, make it something special... the spelling on that album, I just thought that was the way he spelled his name. I asked Columbia to release it with no publicity and no hype because this was the season of hype. And my feeling was that if they put it out with no hype, there was enough interest in the album anyway, people would go out and get it. And if you hyped it, there was always that possibility that it would piss people off. They didn’t spend any money advertising the album and the album just really took off. People have made a lot out of it, as if it was some sort of ink blot test or something. But it never was intended to be anything else but just a bunch of songs, really, maybe it was better ‘n I thought.”
'John Wesley Harding' went to number two in the US and number one in the UK. It anticipated a turn toward country rock that would sweep the music scene over the next year. The abbreviation of the title 'JWH' was an approximation of the Hebrew Tetragrammaton (JHWH).
http://bobdylan.com/
"All Along the Watchtower"
“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth”
“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”
All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl
Bob Dylan - All Along The Watchtower Vocals Only+ by Joh_Phe
"I'll Be Your Baby Tonight"
Bob Dylan - I'll Be Your Baby Tonight (1967) by alexnesic66
'John Wesley Harding'
full album:
All songs written by Bob Dylan.
Side one
1. "John Wesley Harding" 2:58
2. "As I Went Out One Morning" 2:49
3. "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" 3:53
4. "All Along the Watchtower" 2:31
5. "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" 5:35
6. "Drifter's Escape" 2:52
Side two
1. "Dear Landlord" 3:16
2. "I Am a Lonesome Hobo" 3:19
3. "I Pity the Poor Immigrant" 4:12
4. "The Wicked Messenger" 2:02
5. "Down Along the Cove" 2:23
6. "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" 2:34
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