337. Bob Dylan, "John Wesley Harding"

 

By 1966, Bob Dylan had been on tour more or less continuously for about five years.  He had moved into a rollicking kind of folk-rock that reached its peak with Blonde on Blonde, an album we shall surely see down the road a ways, and angered audiences by playing electric.  How fucking quaint, you know?  Anyway, later that year he had a mysterious "motorcycle accident" that no ambulance was called for and required no hospitalization, giving rise to the theory that it was just an excuse to pull back from the pressures of fame and touring and drugs and god knows what else.

Then one day in 1967 he took a two-day train trip to Nashville with a bunch of songs no one even knew he had written and recorded this absolute gem of an album in about three days with Nashville studio musicians like Charlie McCoy. The album is sparse and eerie and is mostly just Dylan singing and harmonica and his weird strumming on acoustic, with a little bass and drums in the background and occasionally some pedal steel.  

The songs are about spirituality, maybe? And definitely about the American West and the characters who inhabited it.  From the title track:

It was down in Chaynee County
A time they talk about
With his lady by his side
He took a stand
And soon the situation there
Was all but straightened out
For he was always known
To lend a helping hand

And then, of course, there's "All Along the Watchtower," an iconic song made much more famous by Jimi Hendrix's cover the following year.  

So listen, if you like Dylan, you'll like this album, maybe a lot.  If Dylan bugs you - and there's a lot to be bugged by - you will not particularly like it.  But if you're Dylan-curious, and you like albums like Nebraska by Springsteen or any early Iron & Wine or, fuck, even In the Aeroplane Over the Sea you should check this out because this is the source material for all that, fuck, maybe for all singer-songwritery stuff.  

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Absolutely.