Revolution in the Air

by Clinton Heylin

  What Dylan appears to be saying, admittedly some ten years apart, is that he felt an obligation to start recording again but had nothing he desperately wanted to record. As such, having initially considered re-recording "all these songs [already] on tape," he then thought about an album of covers. Finally, and disarmingly close to the start of scheduled sessions in Nashville, he decided to write what, to that rewired mind, seemed like "just real simple songs"—songs that "didn’t repeat" themselves; the kind of song he described on Biograph as "definitely not pussy stuff . . . songs [which] are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings." (The one specific example he cites, the traditional "Young but Daily Growin," he had recorded that summer, filling it with the full range of those raw emotions.)

  Where else could he turn save to them old "folk songs . . . the narrative ones"? It was this kind of song that had got him started a lifetime ago. Perhaps they could kick-start things again. Sure enough, most of the songs on John Wesley Harding are narratives (of a sort)—just as many of the covers recorded with The Band had been. Those that abandon the narrative approach were contrived at the end of the process, perhaps for the sake of variety or resolution (all three were recorded at the final album session). There is also a fair share of "faith in the supernatural" on the album (e.g., "Drifter’s Escape" and "The Wicked Messenger").

  One practice that did carry over from Big Pink was typing out lyrics first and then finding a tune to which it could be set. As he told Damsker, "It was the first time I ever did an album . . . [where most] of the songs were written out on paper, and I found the tunes for them later. I didn’t do it before and I haven’t done it since. . . . It was special." This time he allowed himself no real opportunity to work anything up in rehearsal, as The Band were otherwise engaged, making the album itself almost a demo. And all the better for it.

  Where "Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" departs from other kith and kin on John Wesley Harding is by sticking to that narrative, albeit one that resembles a medieval mystery play—with a mystery worth unraveling. Its closest relative can be found on the album, not in it. The sleeve notes, "Three Kings," tell a parable in prose. "Frankie Lee" tells a parable in song (the moral/s of the parable, given at song’s end, "If you see your neighbor carrying something / Help him with his load," is suitably trite, but sets up the real message of the album, "Don’t go mistaking paradise for that home across the road"). The post-accident Dylan claimed that "the only parables that I know are the Biblical parables. I’ve seen others . . . [but] I have always read the Bible, though not necessarily always the parables."

  As it happens, the sleeve notes already told us that the "key is Frank." They do not tell us, though, whether Frank might be shorthand for Frankie Lee. Vera calls Frank "a moderate man," which would suggest that he is not. The Frankie Lee in the ballad overreacts to just about everything he is told. After asking his friend not to "stare at [him] like that!" he is left alone, feeling "low and mean." When he is told his friend is "stranded in a house," his response is equally out of all proportion: "He panicked / He dropped ev’rything and ran." Eventually he loses "all control"; "foaming at the mouth he began to make his midnight creep," until finally "he died of thirst."

  Here, in unexpurgated form, is the world all the album’s characters are obliged to inhabit. And though Dylan knew this world-gone-wrong well, he hadn’t visited it in a while and did not plan to linger ("I knew I wasn’t going to stay there very long"—Dylan to Damsker, 1978). He later put his concerns to Jonathan Cott: "John Wesley Harding was a fearful album . . . dealing with the devil in a fearful way, almost. All I wanted to do was to get the words right."

  Fear—and loathing—ripple through the first ten songs on John Wesley Harding like rats in a cornfield. And perhaps that was why Dylan shied away from developing the songs in concert. Prior to 1987—with the obvious exception of "All Along the Watchtower"—songs from this album almost never received a live outing. Even at the Isle of Wight, when it was one of just two albums released since the last UK tour, he performed only three JWH songs.

  "Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" itself was obliged to wait twenty years for its meandering live debut on the July 1987 tour with the Grateful Dead. Reminded what a great little narrative he had written, Dylan persevered with it, performing a more compelling version on the Temples in Flames tour later the same year, set to the same arrangement as "Shelter from the Storm." Perhaps feeling more redemptive, he suggests on this occasion that Frankie Lee might not have died of thirst, the little neighbor boy carrying "him home to rest," rather than laying him "to rest." But Frankie and friend barely made the starting blocks on the Never Ending Tour. Since the G. E. Smith era, the song has been returned to its box, muttering underneath its breath, What gives?

  {231} DRIFTER’S ESCAPE

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, October 17, 1967—5 takes [JWH—tk.2].

  First known performance: Eugene, OR, April 30, 1992.

  If it took "Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" two decades to receive its live due, the sentence for "Drifter’s Escape" was twenty-five years. Were it not for the riotous release of racial tension that the "not guilty" verdict in the trial of the officers who assaulted Rodney King sparked, we still might not have heard this microcosmic masterpiece in a concert setting. Instead, on April 30, 1992, Dylan unveiled the song in Oregon, having clearly worked it up in a hurry, without having quite mastered the compressed narrative.

  As has often proven the case, it was only by performing the song that Dylan reminded himself how beautifully honed and economical this forgotten work was. As a result, he set about working up a proper arrangement (he even learned the lyrics), which he was ready to unveil by the time he arrived in San Francisco four days later; by which time the whole country "was stirring" at a rank injustice. As Dylan sang nightly, "The trial was bad enough / But this was ten times worse."

  Back in October 1967, mired in a similar climate of fear, Dylan once again demonstrated his distaste for the legal process, preferring to leave Judgment to Him on high. Reversing "Percy’s Song" and "Seven Curses," he makes the judge compassionate but powerless. He also sets the drifter free, not at the whim of the judge, but via that most traditional of devices, the deus ex machina. A bolt of lightning causes everyone else to pray, allowing the (presumably faithless) drifter to escape. Dylan had found a way to tell a five-act story in just three verses. Enthused by what he had achieved, he began writing a whole set of songs along similar lines.

  {232} I DREAMED I SAW ST. AUGUSTINE

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, October 17, 1967—4 takes [JWH—tk.4].

  First known performance: Isle of Wight, August 31, 1969.

  The third and last song recorded at the first John Wesley Harding session, "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" was also the first to place a real historical character in circumstances that failed to resemble any previously documented (a dry run for Chronicles?). Like Tom Paine (in "As I Went Out One Morning") and John Wesley Harding, St. Augustine finds himself in a most incongruous setting. Attempting to dispense good advice ("Go on your way / And know you’re not alone"), he is "put . . . to death" for his troubles.

  The song’s martyr is clearly neither Augustine of Hippo nor the St. Augustine who brought the Word to the heathen Brits, and Dylan knows it. He is a cipher, serving to inform Dylan’s audience that nothing on John Wesley Harding is as it seems. Neither early Christian father was put "out to death." Nor would either have ever adopted as a catchphrase, "No martyr is among ye now." So Dylan has another martyr in mind, one who was "put out to death," and whose dying words were meant to offer hope and solace.

  Not one inclined to mention martyrs at the drop of a hat, Dylan did enthuse
about one such person who was a bit of a songwriter, in a September 1978 interview, shortly after discussing the merits of his 1967 LP: "Now those were good songs that Joe Hill wrote. He wrote some real good songs, but . . . in those days martyrs were easy to find. . . . Things were pretty simple."

  Joe Hill was a union organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who was convicted of the motiveless murder of a complete stranger on the grounds that he had sustained a bullet wound he could not explain. He was executed in November of 1915. Some fifteen years later, Alfred Hayes wrote a poem about Joe Hill’s fate, which Earl Robinson duly set to music. The poem, which was called "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night," contained the following opening verse:

  I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,

  Alive as you and me.

  Says I "But Joe, you’re ten years dead"

  "I never died" said he.

  Decades later, in Chronicles, Dylan admitted that the idea of writing a song about Joe Hill had long appealed to him: "Protest songs are difficult to write without making them come off as preachy and one-dimensional. You have to show people a side of themselves that they don’t know is there. The song ‘Joe Hill’ doesn’t even come close, but if there was someone who could inspire a song, it was him." And that song is . . .

  "St. Augustine" is, in fact, written from the point of view of a member of the jury who "put him out to death" and now sees the terrible error he has made. The parallels are clear. Just not exact. One should be wary of overstating Joe Hill’s resemblance to the august saint, for St. Augustine is as much a cipher for Dylan as he is for Hill. Having been cast as a messiah of sorts himself, Dylan recognized the importance of telling any obvious believers that "[no] martyr is among ye now." After all, here was a man who had already written a number of epitaphs, including one that read, "here lies bob dylan / murdered / from behind."

  Not only is "St. Augustine" a eulogy of sorts, it is exquisitely sung (even if Dylan and his fellow Americans don’t know how to pronounce the saint’s name, rhyming it with "mean," not "sin"). "St. Augustine" also seems to have been one of the few JWH songs he could bring himself to play, applying a slow waltz arrangement at the Isle of Wight, thus providing a possible insight into what a Band-embellished John Wesley Harding might have sounded like.[1] It also became a regular feature of the Rolling Thunder Revue as a Dylan/Baez duet (Baez having covered "Joe Hill" and "St. Augustine"). In the eighties it enjoyed another welcome revival at the hands of the Heartbreakers, but in the nineties, just as the rest of the album returned to the fold, our martyr fell from grace.

  {233} ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, November 6, 1967—3 takes [JWH—tk.3+insert].

  First known performance: Chicago Stadium, January 3, 1974.

  Two three-week gaps separate the three sessions from which Dylan’s eighth album was culled. In that time he found a willing muse and a surprising facility for filling in gaps to order. The only other album where he started every session knowing which songs he would record, aiming to place all of them on the finished artifact, would be Street-Legal, another album for which the lyrics were written first. But that album gestated for nine months, whereas the writing and recording of John Wesley Harding took six weeks. For John Wesley Harding, Dylan wrote exactly twelve songs, recorded exactly twelve songs, and released exactly twelve songs, while telegraphing his next move on the last two.

  Of these three sessions, the most productive would be the second. On November 6, in just three and a half hours, Dylan recorded five strong songs. And he began with the most carefully crafted (and best-known) song on the released album, "All Along the Watchtower." Recorded with minimal fuss, the song set the listener up for an epic ballad with its first two verses, only to cut, after the briefest instrumental interlude, to the end of the song, leaving the listener to fill in his or her own (doom-laden) blanks. It was a technique he employed a couple more times on John Wesley Harding—notably on "The Wicked Messenger"—but as Dylan told John Cohen some months later, this particular song "opens up . . . in a stranger way":

  The scope opens up, just by a few little tricks. I know why it opens up, but in a ballad in the true sense, it wouldn’t open up that way. . . . See, on the album, you have to think about it after you hear it, that’s what takes up the time, but with a ballad, you don’t necessarily have to think about it after you hear it, it can all unfold to you. . . . The third verse of "The Wicked Messenger" . . . opens it up, and then the time schedule takes a jump and soon the song becomes wider. . . . The same thing is true of . . . "All Along the Watchtower," which opens up in a slightly different way, in a stranger way, for here we have the cycle of events working in a rather reverse order.

  Much has been made of this song’s supposed circularity—i.e., the last line could be the first, and vice versa. Dylan’s comment about "the cycle of events working in a . . . reverse order" does suggest there is something to this. Indeed, in performance he has occasionally played with the order of the verses (not always knowingly). One particular night in the fall of 1989 in New York’s Poughkeepsie, he sang the opening two verses a second time, as if the nightmare would never end, i.e. there really is no "way out of here."

  Folk have also gotten very excited at the handful of allusions the song contains to the apocalyptic sections of the Bible. The late Bert Cartwright, the most knowledgeable of Dylan-Bible scholars, cites five biblical references for "All Along the Watchtower" in his seminal study, The Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan, quoting in full the section from the Book of Isaiah that foretells the fall of Babylon (21:6): "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 . . ."

  Cartwright was hardly alone in suggesting that the thief in "All Along the Watchtower" is probably the messianic One foretold by St. John the Divine in Revelations, who "will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee." Which might mean that Dylan is the joker complaining of "too much confusion," and this song is a conversation between the lapsed Jew and his Redeemer. On the other hand, the thief could as easily be the Dylan of yesteryear ("you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate")—i.e., the pre-accident Bob, the thief of fire who had taken Rimbaud’s dictum to heart ("Why must I always be the thief?" he asks on the contemporaneous "Tears of Rage").

  Should one depict the song as apocalyptic—and the End appears to be evident everywhere the joker looks—it is the Apocalypse of "When the Ship Comes In." At the head of the queue for those who shall be judged are all those "businessmen [who] drink my wine." This is the same Dylan who had told Michael Iachetta in May, "Songs are in my head . . . [but] they’re not going to get written down until some things are evened up." He was even blunter to Kurt Loder in 1984: "I had that motorcycle accident which put me outta commission. Then, when I woke up and caught my senses, I realized I was just working for all these leeches." Hence, one suspects, the sense of retribution that permeates the entire album—as well as contemporary songs like "Down in the Flood" and "I Shall Be Released." As Dylan told the L.A. Times’ Robert Hilburn semi-seriously in November 1991, when he finally let the song linger awhile: "‘All Along the Watchtower’ may be my [only] political song."

  How ironic, then, that it should receive an arrangement by guitar-God Jimi Hendrix—recorded just a couple of months after Dylan’s own version—that conveyed all that terrible beauty in the tenor of the music (which prompted Dylan to write of Hendrix’s covers of his songs: "he played them the way i would have done them if i was him"). That "cover" version became another radio hit in which the import of the song was lost in the translation. Few might consider Dylan’s subtler, more worldly-wise rendition preferable, but the many in this instance would be wrong. Hendrix turns it into a rock anthe
m, when it was written as the very antithesis of that. The song, written as a "homespun ballad," had been hijacked by psychedelic rock’s talisman.

  Disappointingly, even Dylan was swept up by its success. His own ubiquitous live treatments have generally adhered to the Hendrix template, making the music sound vaguely apocalyptic but losing the power and precision those 129 words originally brought to the process. Only in the eighties did he begin to consider the error of his ways. In 1985 he set the less ambiguous "When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky" to the 1978 live arrangement of "All Along the Watchtower," while in 1987 he set "Watchtower" to the same, slow-burn setting as his first post-conversion song, "Slow Train," making a point on each occasion.

  {234} JOHN WESLEY HARDING

  Published lyrics: Writings and Drawings; Lyrics 1985; Lyrics 2004.

  Known studio recordings: Studio A, Nashville, November 6, 1967—2 takes [JWH—tk.2].

  Dylan’s abiding fascination with outlaws, particularly cowboys like Billy the Kid and Jesse James, is well documented. So the decision to write a cowboy ballad about the notorious gunfighter John Wesley Hardin should have come as no surprise. Hardin was another cold-blooded murderer who bragged that he had killed forty-four men, including one he shot for snoring too loudly, before being cornered in 1875 on a train bound for Pensacola. Amazingly, he was not executed, but served seventeen harrowing years in a penitentiary before emerging from jail with a law degree. He practiced law until 1895 when an argument over his prostitute girlfriend led one John Selman to return later, while Hardin was playing dice in a saloon, and shoot him three times in the back ("he was shot in the back / by a hungry kid . . .").