Bob Dylan (29 page)

NASHVILLE SKYLINE

There would be another protracted delay, of some 16 months, before Dylan's next album, and if
John Wesley Harding
had seemed light years away from
Blonde On Blonde, Nashville Skyline
was off the map of what fans had previously considered to be Dylan territory. Even the reflective
John Wesley Harding
, for all its musical diffidence, had contained plenty of lyrical food for thought, but
Nashville Skyline
found pop's greatest poet apparently abandoning allusion, allegory and anything approaching deep meaning or mystery in favor of trite blandishments like “Love is all there is, it makes the world go round.” The music, too, was at best efficient, and mostly perfunctory; a series of routine country arrangements that wouldn't have sounded out of place on a Merle Haggard or Charley Pride record. What on earth had happened to Bob Dylan?

Following the release of
John Wesley Harding
, Dylan made a public appearance in January 1968—his first public performance since his accident. He and the Band appeared at two memorial concerts held at Carnegie Hall in honor of Woody Guthrie, who had finally succumbed to the ravages of Parkinson's disease the previous October. In the good-spirited, boisterous manner of
The Basement Tapes
, Dylan and the Band celebrated Guthrie's life with rousing rock versions of Woody's ‘Grand Coulee Dam' and ‘I Ain't Got No Home', and a more somber run through ‘Dear Mrs. Roosevelt'.

With his surrogate father-figure gone, Dylan was further hit by the death of his real father, Abraham, in June 1968. Shortly after, Sara gave birth to another son, who was named Seth Abraham Isaac Dylan, after Bob's late father.

The rest of the year passed in an uneventful fashion, with Dylan spending time with his family and writing a few songs for his next album. In February 1969, he flew to Nashville once again
to record with a slightly larger pool of musicians than before, the core rhythm section of Charlie McCoy and Kenny Buttrey was joined by pianist Bob Wilson and guitarists Charlie Daniels and Norman Blake; Pete Drake again took the pedal steel seat.

The new material was straight country-pop, quite unlike his previous work apart from ‘I'll Be Your Baby Tonight'. This came as a shock to fans, although Dylan's interest in country music actually dated back to his teen years in Hibbing, when he had pored over Echo Helstrom's mother's collection of old country 78s from the Forties and Fifties, painstakingly teaching himself the songs as he sat on the Helstroms' front steps. Visitors to the convalescent Dylan's Woodstock home in 1967/8 had also noted that, as well as the Bible which furnished much of the inspiration for
John Wesley Harding
, his study also contained a volume of Hank Williams songs, which were clearly a strong influence on his new direction. Indeed, in 1967, as a bargaining chip in his attempt to sign Dylan to his label, MGM chief Mortimer Nasatir had dangled the prospect of Bob's being able to add music to a sheaf of recently discovered Hank Williams lyrics, in a kind of posthumous collaboration. Dylan was, by all accounts, very interested, having been a Williams fan since his youth, and it's not inconceivable that it was this which prompted the notion of doing a country album.

It was, nevertheless perhaps, a strange time to be going country. If a generation ever needed a spokesman, they needed one in 1968. The social and political unrest that had been building throughout the Sixties reached critical mass that year, with the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and widespread protests against American involvement in Vietnam sparking violent demonstrations in Paris, London and Chicago. The civilized world appeared to be falling apart at the seams, just as Dylan had “predicted” in songs like ‘Desolation Row' and ‘Gates Of Eden', yet Dylan was nowhere to be seen—and on the strength of
John Wesley Harding
was retreating into religious moralism, not exactly the kind of thing needed to rally the troops at that juncture.

Released in May 1969,
Nashville Skyline
suggested that his time spent in rustic seclusion had alienated him from the world outside the gates of his own personal Eden. In an interview with
Rolling Stone
Dylan claimed, “These are the types of songs that I always felt like writing when I've been alone to do so. [They] reflect more of the inner me than the songs of the past.” Which, considering there was scant evidence of any inner life in the songs, offered serious pause for thought.

The reviews were “mixed,” with some critics admiring the craft and polish, while others damned the craven lack of ambition. Making matters
worse, at a mere 27 minutes,
Nashville Skyline
was little more than half the length of albums like
Bringing It All Back Home
and
Highway 61 Revisited
—it was rubbish, and there wasn't enough of it!

Not that this affected sales much: after ‘Lay Lady Lay' became a hit single,
Nashville Skyline
topped the album charts on both sides of the Atlantic, going on to become the biggest-selling album of Dylan's career. However, it's remembered less for its music than its uncanny prescience: for in its wake came a flood of crossover country-rock albums by rock artists, starting with the Byrds'
Sweetheart Of The Rodeo
a few months later to the point where the Eagles could become the most commercially successful act of the Seventies. Just as he had done many times before, Bob Dylan had instinctively tapped into a widespread disaffection with the direction of popular music, and suggested the way forward.

With hindsight, Dylan recognized the album's limitations. In a 1978 interview, he admitted it was necessary to read between the lines. “I was trying to grasp something that would lead me on to where I thought I should be,” he explained, “and it didn't go nowhere – it just went down, down, down. I couldn't be anybody but myself, and at that point I didn't know it or want to know it.”

The album's opener was actually the last track cut, at a session specifically arranged for Dylan and Johnny Cash to lay down a few impromptu duets.

While Cash's appearance surprised some fans, he had actually been one of Bob's earliest supporters, championing Dylan in the uncertain days following his first album, when Dylan was known as “Hammond's Folly.” “I thought he was one of the best country singers I had ever heard,” claimed Cash, who developed a correspondence with Dylan and, when the songwriter was taking flak for his apparent abandonment of protest songs, demanded in the pages of
Broadside
magazine that his critics should “Shut Up! … and let him sing!”. “We just became friends,” he explained later, “like any two songwriters might, you know?”

Their friendship was revived when Dylan made a trip from Woodstock to see Cash's Carnegie Hall show in September 1968, and cemented with the
Nashville Skyline
sessions; Cash even gave his seal of approval to Bob's
work by contributing a sleeve-note poem which compared Dylan's songs to “strong, quick flashes of light,” claiming “This man can rhyme the tick of time/The edge of pain, the what of sane.” Later, in June 1969, Dylan reciprocated by appearing on a Cash ABC-TV special.

Here, the song functions as the first of two overtures or false starts to the album proper, putting off the moment when his new material has to be heard—as if Dylan is, if not embarrassed, then apprehensive about his new songs. It's a strange, stilted performance, with both men struggling to accommodate each other's inflections, and trading absurdly off-key phrases at its conclusion. Yet for all of its imperfections, there's something genuinely moving about the way their incongruent voices suggest the distance in time and place between the singers and the song's subject.

The second of the album's two overtures is another first for Dylan, being his debut recorded instrumental. It's a pukka piece of work in sprightly bluegrass style, with a succession of neat solos on pedal steel guitar, dobro guitar, acoustic guitar and piano; but for fans encountering it for the first time, it served mainly to postpone the resolution of those questions about Dylan's new voice which had been raised by the opening Dylan/Cash duet.

Those questions were answered as soon as Dylan asked producer Bob Johnston, “Is it rolling, Bob?” over the intro vamp of this, the album's first new song proper. Dylan had indeed “grown” a new voice—but while the acid sneer of the electric albums could be traced back to his more bitter protest anthems, there was little precedent for this new, syrupy croon, which encapsulated all that was anodyne and bourgeois about country music.

In
Rolling Stone
Dylan explained the change in his voice, as entirely down to his having given up smoking. Others heard echoes of the young, pre-New York Dylan, when as a student in Minneapolis he had sung in a sweet, smooth tenor, only altering his style to the harsher inflections of his first album when he became obsessed with Woody Guthrie.

While many of
Nashville Skyline's
songs sound as though they were written for Elvis Presley to perform, ‘To Be Alone With You' was composed
specifically with Jerry Lee Lewis in mind. There's a suggestive slant to some of the lines which, with the final verse's drawing-together of the carnal and the religious, would suit Lewis down to the ground, while both arrangement and Dylan's delivery self-consciously ape Lewis's rolling country style.

Dylan later admitted that when he went down to Nashville to record
Nashville Skyline
, he only had four complete songs ready, of which the earliest was ‘I Threw It All Away', which he had played for George Harrison on the latter's visit to Bob's Woodstock home the previous November. It's one of the album's few undisputed classics, a tender lament for lost
love which showcases Dylan's new croon to its best advantage. It's also a demonstration of how audacious he had become in his songwriting, following a beautifully-sustained image of ultimate satisfaction (“Once I had mountains in the palm of my hand/ And rivers that ran through every day”) with one of the most ingenuous, faux-naif cliches he ever wrote (“Love is all there is, it makes the world go round”).

Underpinned by the gentle tinting of the organ and finely-picked acoustic guitar, this is a delicate performance whose sentiment finds Dylan, for the first time in his career, taking the blame for a broken relationship. Previously, in songs ranging from ‘Don't Think Twice, It's Alright' to ‘One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)', he had shifted the blame or equivocated over where fault lay, picking apart his relationships in emotional autopsies; but here he does not just accept the blame for the breakup, he makes it a rod for his own back, by punishing himself with his loss. However, since Bob had by then settled into the loviest and doviest of contentment with his wife Sara and their burgeoning brood, it seems unlikely that the lyrics of ‘I Threw It All Away' were ripped from the pages of his own life, as such earlier songs had been.

If ‘I Threw It All Away' features Dylan's lyricism at its most audacious, ‘Peggy Day' finds it at its most inconsequential, lending weight to the suggestion that he only had four finished songs ready. He could easily have knocked this one out the previous evening at the Ramada Inn, and still had enough time left over to eat a hearty dinner, watch a four-hour movie, and sue for world peace. Dylan later claimed, possibly in jest, that he had written the song with The Mills Brothers in mind, though it's hard to imagine their warm harmonies being wasted on a trifle like this.

Little more than a spoonerized joke in which his desire to spend the night with the eponymous Peggy Day is succeeded by his desire to spend the day with, er, Peggy night (the Lyrics 1962-1985 specifies the lowercase “n”, confusingly rendering “Peggy” an adjective), it demonstrates how even the most trivial material can be buffed to an adequate—if not exactly respectable—lustre by the attentions of skilled session musicians, in particular Pete Drake's lazy curlicues of pedal steel guitar in the break before the final verse. But even allowing for the musicians' combined experience playing on a host of country sessions, it's hard to believe they could have
come up against anything quite as trite as ‘Peggy Day'. It sounds like it too—there's a throwaway casualness about the whole performance which exactly matches the material.

Originally commissioned as the theme for the film of
Midnight Cowboy
, but finished too late for inclusion (the producers went with Harry Nilsson's version of Fred Neil's ‘Everybody's Talkin'' instead), ‘Lay Lady Lay' became Dylan's first chart single since ‘Rainy Day Women #12 & 35', despite his initial opposition to its release. It eventually went on to become the biggest-selling single of his career, and was accorded the honor of being the opening track on his retrospective
Biograph
box set.

At the time he was writing the material for
Nashville Skyline
, Dylan told friends and interviewers that though he had previously placed great store on the lyrics in his songs, now he felt that the music was more important. ‘Lay Lady Lay' illustrates the attendant change in his writing
technique: where once he would write a poem first, then set it to music later, in the
Biograph
liner-notes, Dylan recalls coming up with the tune's four-chord progression and then filling it up with “la-la-las,” which quickly transformed into the song's title. “It's the same thing with the tongue, that's all it is really,” he admitted.

Whatever the song's genesis, it's the music, and Dylan's delivery of the lyric (rather than the lyric itself), which makes ‘Lay Lady Lay' a success. Despite the bluntness of its sexual demand, Dylan manages to evoke deep warmth and tender yearning through his delivery of lines as poetically sterile as “And you're the best thing that he's ever seen.” Musically, the song's appeal lies in the tension between the flowing pedal-steel guitar and the staccato cowbell percussion, a combination which surprised even drummer Kenny Buttrey.