Bob Dylan (27 page)

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.”

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.

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 purely 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.

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.”

It's this position, poised on the cusp of good and evil, which seems most relevant to Dylan's song, in which the ghostly figure of the cleric stands for the singer himself, left weeping against a mirror in the final verse, contemplating his own failings and desire for salvation. He is, perhaps, regretting his own earlier criticisms of religion, in which he may have unjustly condemned individuals of Augustine's nobility and holiness along with the organized church they represented. Alternatively, it may be that he suddenly realizes his own part in luring the righteous from their path through his own brand of the Devil's music.

Augustine is depicted in Dylan's dream as wearing a golden coat and carrying a blanket, signifiers respectively of the worldly excesses of mankind in general and the Catholic Church in particular, and the more ascetic leanings of the prophet. He seeks the “…souls/Whom already have been sold,” the first of several references on the album to the commercialization
of man's inner being, notably in ‘Dear Landlord' and ‘The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest'. There are, he claims, no modern martyrs among humanity's most gifted individuals to lead mankind toward the light, and man is accordingly condemned to seek his own transcendence—though he should be assured that he is not alone in his search.

The inference is clear: Dylan, who had narrowly avoided becoming a martyr of sorts when he survived his motorbike accident, has realized that his youthful attempts to “save” society from itself have come too late—most of American society had already sold its soul to a variety of temptations, the like of which not even Augustine could have imagined (including the pop scene in which Dylan acknowledged his own complicity), and any salvation could henceforth only come through the individual's determined efforts. Ironically, the song's opening couplet directly paraphrases ‘Joe Hill', the tribute to the eponymous union martyr who, as a leading light of the American syndicalist organization The Wobblies (The American Industrial Workers Of The World) would doubtless have disputed such a denial of the efficacy of collective action.

In ‘All Along The Watchtower', the contrasting spirits in Dylan's character, dramatized so evocatively in ‘I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine', are here characterized as the joker and the thief, both trapped in the here and now with little prospect of transcendence.

The joker rues the way that philistine businessmen make free with the profits of his creative work, without according it due respect. This was clearly a heartfelt complaint from Dylan, who had recently been embroiled in contract negotiations with both his record company CBS and his manager, Albert Grossman, both of whom he considered were treating him with less respect than he deserved. His record royalties from CBS were nothing special, and Grossman seemed to consider him simply a cash cow to be milked as quickly and as deeply as possible, piling tour date upon tour date with little regard for his client's physical and emotional well-being or for his creative needs.

And that was just the tip of what appeared to be a particularly venal iceberg. “If it's not the promoter
cheating you, it's the box office cheating you,” he complained to Robert Shelton. “Somebody is always giving you a hard time… Even the record company figures won't be right. Do you know that up to a certain point I made more money on a song I wrote if it were on an album by Carolyn Hester, or anybody, than if I did it myself. That's the contract they gave me. Horrible! Horrible!” Ultimately, after scaring CBS by signing to MGM when his contract was up for renewal (the MGM deal was subsequently nixed by Allan Klein, one of the industry's sharpest money-men), Dylan re-signed with them at double his previous royalty rate.

The thief sympathizes with the joker, adding that he's not the only one who considers the situation absurd, but warns against letting such worldly matters prey upon his mind too heavily, since there are far more pressing matters to be addressed. What these matters are is made clear in the brief outline sketched in the final verse, which draws upon the prophet Isaiah's prediction of the fall of Babylon, in Isaiah 21, 6–9: “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, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed; And he cried, A lion; My Lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower in the daytime, and I am set in my ward whole nights; And behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.” And subsequently (Isaiah 21, 11–12): “Watchman, what of the night? The watchman said, The morning cometh, and also the night; if ye will inquire, inquire ye: return, come.”

In the face of the howling, apocalyptic wind approaching, it is far more important, the thief suggests, to seek remedy for the soul rather than for worldly injustices. Then again, of course, the thief
would
say that, having been responsible, by dint of his underhand trade, for some worldly injustices of his own. In Dylan's version of the song, it's the barrenness of the scenario which grips, the high, haunting harmonica and simple forward motion
of the riff carrying understated intimations of impending cataclysm; as subsequently recorded by Jimi Hendrix in an arrangement so definitive as to be adopted by Dylan himself in later years, that cataclysm is rendered all the more scarily palpable through the virtuoso's dervish whirls of guitar.