John Wesley Harding The eighth album, not counting greatest-hits compilations. This
quiet masterpiece, which manages to sound both authoritative and tentative (a mix that gave it a highly contemporary feel),
is neither a rock nor a folk album—and certainly isn’t folk-rock. It isn’t categorisable at all. The back-upmusicians are pared down to three: bass, drums and, on two tracks only, pedal steel. Plus Dylan on guitar, harmonica and piano.
Economy, in fact, is the key to this huge change of direction. There could be no greater contrast between consecutive albums than that between Blonde on Blonde’s richness and the
taut asceticism of John Wesley Harding. This album is no cheap thrill. It is, though, a most serious, darkly visionary exploration of the myths and extinct strengths of America; its Calvinist spirit gives it an eerie power in mixing the severely biblical with a surreal 19th century, American-pioneer ethos.
Dylan comes across like a man who has arisen from armageddon unscathed but sobered, to walk across an allegorical American landscape of small, poor communities working a dusty, fierce terrain. The masterpieces within themasterpiece are ‘I Dreamed
I Saw St. Augustine’, ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and ‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’. Then there are the last two tracks of the album: the a` la JERRY LEE LEWIS ‘Down Along the Cove’ and the brilliant country-pastiche song ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’. With these, Dylan was serving notice of the next sharp shift in direction that was to come from him. John Wesley Harding was to be Dylan’s last
masterpiece of the 1960s—and in spirit it was most markedly not a part of the 1960s world at all.
It is the most underrated of Dylan’s great albums: a record that everyone puts in the pantheon but few embrace. Yet how especially pleasurable it is to revisit now that so many years have passed since it was new: to bathe in the relief of remembering
that Dylan is not just the flailing old bruiser of the Never-Ending Tour, whose patchy virtues must be snatched from rough, loud, swirling chaos and carelessness, his intermittent inspiration lobbing out of the aural fog as he stumbles down his road. It’s salutary to be pulled away from picking through concert bootlegs for these rare and shaky treats and re-directed towards the Bob Dylan who
gave us John Wesley Harding, throughout which he insists upon the virtues of
calm and silence, of less-is-more, of exquisite precision and particularity, carved out with blade-sharp, unwavering certainty. Here, there is no floundering search for some
intangible juiced-up mystic rock’n’roll moment: there is instead the artist standing naked, with a very particular vision in his sights, and illuminating it with the intuitive alertness of his genius.
Michael Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia
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