by Andy Gill
Closing the album at a peak of sinister mystery, ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ finds Dylan straining to hit the highest notes, as if emotionally wracked by his experience. Given suitably enigmatic melody by Rick Danko, Dylan’s lyric draws again on Shakespeare’s King Lear (“Thou art a soul in bliss/But I am bound/Upon a wheel of fire”)—itself inspired by the biblical visions of Ezekiel, possibly the Old Testament’s nuttiest prophet—to offer what seems like a mea culpa for past transgressions, a moment of self-revelation in which the singer realizes that in order to get to this, it was necessary for him to go through that. The road down which the flaming wheel rolls is, of course, the road of excess which, Rimbaud claimed, leads to the palace of wisdom.
In his Lyrics 1962–1985, Dylan illustrates ‘This Wheel’s On Fire’ with a badly-drawn cartoon depicting three people exclaiming “Look out!”, “Yikes!” and “Holy cow!” as they leap out of the way of a (non-blazing) runaway cartwheel, but this seems a cavalier deprecation of a serious work. The mood of the song itself is far more portentous, capturing a soul suspended on the cusp of torment and deliverance, unable to arrest its headlong drive toward destruction, yet aware of the tasks which have yet to be completed. It is virtually impossible not to see the locked wheel of Dylan’s Triumph 500 in the title, the very wheel upon which his own accelerating pursuit of disaster was borne so swiftly, and then arrested so abruptly. The verses brim with unfinished business, anchored by the certainty that “we shall meet again.”
In the UK, Julie Driscoll had an April 1968 Top 5 hit with the song, backed by Brian Auger & The Trinity; it was also covered by the Byrds, and re-recorded for the Band’s Music From Big Pink. A quarter of a century later, it provided the perfect theme music for the 1990s British TV sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, where it brilliantly evoked the high-octane burn-out of the show’s hippie-hangover characters.
JOHN WESLEY HARDING
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 wh
o 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.”
JOHN WESLEY HARDING
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.
AS I WENT OUT ONE MORNING
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 pu
rely 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.
I DREAMED I SAW ST. AUGUSTINE
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.”