Bob Dylan (26 page)

Whichever it is, the tone is more sad than angry, as if the betrayal hurts the singer's sense of honor more than his pocket. “Take care of yourself and get plenty of rest,” he advises the reneger, an ambivalent salutation that's part threat and part solicitous farewell.

Though the title and the version of the song included in
Lyrics 1962–1985
address the instruction to Homer, the song as sung refers to Richard. It makes a little more sense when you learn that Richard Manuel's nickname among the group was “Homer,” and that the invocation “Open the door, Richard” was a staple routine used by comics at the Apollo Theater in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s as a kind of weekly running joke–the various confusions between the characters stuck on opposite sides of the door never being resolved by the door being opened, of course. In 1947, Jack McVea and Dan Howell wrote music to accompany burlesque duo “Dusty” Fletcher and John Mason's comedy routine, the quartet enjoying a postwar novelty hit with the result.

Poised between irony and self-assurance, the song lopes along jauntily, tendering obscure bits of baffling advice, some commonsense, others with the cryptic power of folk remedies: value your memories properly, they won't come again; flush out your house if you don't want to be housing flushes; swim a certain way if you want to live off the fat of the land; and forgive the sick before you try to heal them. The sensible ones lend a sort of bogus credence to the less sensible, while the sheer conviction of the chorus vouches for the advisor's
bona fides:
it's good advice
he's offering, and not before time too, because, as the singer acknowledges, “I ain't gonna hear it said no more”—so seemingly impenetrable are such folk remedies, old wives' tales and rural wisdoms becoming, that we're losing the ability to even understand them, let alone question their efficacy.

A funky blues extension (no pun intended) of Chuck Berry's ‘Memphis Tennessee' in the Chicago blues style, with Robbie Robertson's strangulated
guitar fills piercing the song's fabric like arrows through the heart. Richard Manuel takes lead vocals, yearning to hear his baby's voice down the wire, and wailing awhile on harmonica.

Simple and strident, ‘Long Distance Operator' is half an idea fleshed out to a riff, but none the worse for that.

(Dylan/Danko)

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 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…”