It took me a while to really appreciate it as initially it seems such a departure from the previous trilogy, but this is a beautiful album with some brilliant song writing, most notably All Along the Watchtower. Plenty of food for thought.

You want bizarre, you want real, you want magic, it's all right here waiting for you to uncover.

Alot of people didn't get what this album was all about when it came out, they were still so hung up on discovering secret meanings [or so they thought] from “Blonde On Blonde.” Bob delivers this release with a new set of eyes and ears, he’s got a new vision and a new direction. Bob has always been a restless soul, looking toward a new horizon, and this release required and ‘Ah Ha’ from most people before they got it.

It wasn’t difficult, Bob was drawing from the roots of American music, looking for a new sound. Hendrix got it for sure, many others did as well. The album wasn’t about a new direction for music in general, it was just a stepping stone, a place to reinvent something new, from something old and then add an interpretation. After all, this album was Bob’s interpretation of traditional American music.

If you take the time, you still hear the twisted, bending, train of thought lyrics that have always been the signature of Bob’s music; it was just a new context with this album. I can’t tell you what an impact this record had on the world of Dylan fans with its release. This was 180 degrees from where he had ever been, that being the amplified rock and roll of previous records; but in the same context, it’s the same place he’s always been. Dylan has just returned to the nature of his acoustic roots with ‘John Wesley Harding’ and the album was recorded at almost the same time as his legendary basement tapes, which wouldn’t be released in any fashion until 1975 or ‘76. The amount of time it took to complete these songs for the studio sessions is reflected in the striped down nature of the music, requiring less then twenty hours to complete. Bob is more direct on this record, both in musical style and lyrically, he gets right to the point. Actually Bob did get more striped down, and he did it with the same group of guys when he recorded 'Nashville Skyline,' though it was not recorded at break neck speed. Once, when I was discussing this with Levon Helm [of The Band], he lightly kicked the toe of my boot and said, "Ya' know, the last song on 'John Wesley Harding' could have easily been the first song on 'Nashville Skyline' ... what a smooth and flawless transition that was." I discreetly rubbed the toe of my boot on the back of my jeans, man those were new boots.

THE RUMOR verses THE TRUTH, WHO KNOWS ... The cover of this record was supposed to be in the spirit of The Beatles ‘Sgt. Pepper’ and The Rolling Stones, ‘Satanic Majesty’ with hidden images and meanings. Man, people just look too deeply sometimes for things that aren’t there in the music of Bob ... or perhaps these clues are there. I can tell you one thing, you are going to have to get yourself a real record, because you aren’t going to see anything on a CD cover. It is rumored that images of the Beatles are hidden in the knots on the trees trunks. Talk is, that before the album went to pressing, these knots were brushed over, leaving very dark spots on the trees where the detail of the knots would have been. Bob is wearing the same coat he wore on ‘Blonde On Blonde’ and the people behind him are two of the Bengali Bauls [South Asian musicians, who were supposed to have had huge chunks of Finger Hash with them, which they smoked nonstop], and Charlie Joy a local carpenter and stone cutter from the Woodstock area. Coming on the heals of his motorcycle accident and the rumors of his death [as with the Beatles ‘Abbey Road’] the musicians were to ferry his spirit, and Charlie Joy would have constructed Bob’s coffin and headstone [even the picture is in the shape of a headstone]. And the album, the album would have been out takes or things Bob had done right before his death, perhaps even in the hospital, where this record was made in twelve short hours. Does anyone else hear “I BURIED BOB” and the end of Frankie Lee & Judas Priest????

This is a very enjoyable record, full of surprises and unexpected tunes. Bob took a breath of fresh air here and groups like The Eagles, The James Gang, The Byrds, The Band, Jimi Hendrix and The Grateful Dead had a field day drawing deeply from American music and thought, developing story telling music, music redefined by Dylan, that would be such a fine mainstay for years to come.

Dig it or don’t, but this record has continued to make an impact on the music scene ever since it’s release.

And now, before the hours draws too late, a short lecture of ed facts ...

Hey friends, let’s revisit Dylan’s ‘John Wesley Harding,’ ... Forty some years ago on Dec. 27, 1967, Columbia Records released the Bob Johnston-produced Bob Dylan John Wesley Harding LP. In January, 1968, it was one of the most-tracked albums on countless FM radio stations in the U.S. and all over the world.

Dylan titled the album after an outlaw ballad he’d just written, “John Wesley Harding,” actually based on a true character: John Wesley Hardin, born in Texas in 1853.

Author Clinton Heylin, in his book “Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions 1960-1994,” describes John Wesley Harding as “Dylan’s most perfectly executed album; that austerity [in sound and lyric] is, frankly, a key element. The fact that Dylan wrote ‘John Wesley Harding’ self-consciously as ‘an album of songs’ in a month and a day, and recorded it in just three afternoons, gives the album a unity all its own.”

Heylin suggests that John Wesley Harding “is an album full of outlaws, drifters, immigrants, messengers and saints.” Heylin then quotes a 1968 Dylan interview concerning his writing methods for the LP.
“What I’m trying to do now is not use too many words. There’s no line that you can stick your finger through; there’s no hole in any of the stanzas. There’s no blank filler. Each line has something.”

In due time, Jimi Hendrix, K-9, Dave Mason, TSOL, Grateful Dead, Richie Havens, Michael Hedges, U2, Neil Young, Wilton Felder and Eddie Vedder on the Dylan-inspired soundtrack to “I’m Not There” in 2007, all took swings at “All Along The Watchtower.”

Director Mike Nichols’ Christmas 2007 “Charlie Wilson’s War” theatrical release even had the original Hendrix master recording of “All Along The Watchtower” in the movie trailer.

“ ‘All Along The Watchtower’ was always one of my favorite songs to play with Neil (Young),” offers drummer Jim Keltner. “Amazing song. Jimi Hendrix, Neil. Playing it with Neil was always a huge amount of fun, because of the way he plays, his sound. The song just allowed him to soar, completely fly. And it allows for a big, massive wide beat. It has so many powerful elements. Playing it with Bob Dylan was the ultimate, of course,” declares Keltner.

Over the decades, the John Wesley Harding disc yielded renditions of “The Wicked Messenger” by Rod Stewart & The Faces and Patti Smith. Julie Driscoll cut “I Am A Lonesome Hobo.” Fairport Convention, Joe Cocker and, later, Janis Joplin, did “Dear Landlord.” Linda Ronstadt, Marianne Faithfull, Rita Coolidge, Georgie Fame, Emmylou Harris, The Hollies and even Goldie Hawn all sang “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” Joan Baez and Robyn Hitchcock tackled “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” and there is also Judy Collins’ exquisite reading of “I Pity The Poor Immigrant,” also recorded by Gene Clark in melancholic fashion. And Hendrix committed to tape “Drifter’s Escape” — all from Dylan’s biblical and beatific-inspired disc.

Bob Johnston’s breathtaking production resumé includes Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison and San Quentin live LP’s, Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence, Parsley Sage Rosemary & Thyme and Bookends, and the first three enduring albums of Leonard Cohen: Songs From a Room, Songs of Love and Hate and Love Songs. Johnston also composed the music to a Cohen lyric “Come Spend the Morning” that Lee Hazelwood covered.

Johnston’s studio credits include efforts with Moby Grape, Willie Nelson, Tracy Nelson, Carl Perkins, Lindisfarne, Burl Ives, plus additional Bob Dylan long-form studio products: Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde, Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, New Morning.

Fast-forward to 1967, after the notorious motorcycle accident in July 1966 that, among other things, sidelined Dylan (at least in the public eye) for a better part of a year. Johnston met up with Dylan again at a Ramada Inn in Nashville, Tenn., before working on John Wesley Harding together.

“He played me some songs and asked, ‘What do you think about a bass, drum and guitar?’ ‘I think it would be fuckin’ brilliant if you had a steel guitar.’ ‘You know anybody?’ ‘Yeah, Pete Drake.’ He was workin’ with Chet [Atkins], so I got somebody to take his place and brought him over,” Johnston recalls. “Pete said, ‘Can I play some rock ’n’ roll?’ And I told him, ‘That’s what you’re here for.’ Charlie McCoy played a lot of instruments on that album. He played four, five or 20 instruments on every record.

“When I produced Blonde On Blonde and John Wesley Harding, they all knew what I wanted,” Johnston chuckles. “[Drummer] Kenny Buttrey was a genius by being as good as he was and by me fuckin’ with everybody. I used to fuck around to Kenny, and I’d say, ‘Your God damn drum is dragging, and you’re bringing everybody else down... ’ And he’d get pissed off. ‘My drum isn’t dragging!’ He’d be mumbling to himself, and everybody else would be laughing. Then, he’d say, ‘Can I play anything else?’”

Johnston, as he did previously in the Nashville sessions for Blonde On Blonde, took steps to remove the studio bafflers, a floor space dividing device used to prohibit microphone leakage and the instruments of the musicians from bleeding into each other’s separate sound booths during the sessions.

“I would place glass around Dylan for recording,” relates Bob Johnston. “He had a different vocal sound. I didn’t make his different vocal sound. He always had different sounds on. I never wanted to be [Phil] Spector … and while the rest of the world was doing an album as big as Blonde On Blonde, which everybody was — the more musicians they could get, the better it was. [But] we went in with four people … in the middle of a psychedelic world!

“What I did was put a bunch of microphones all over the room and up on the ceiling,” Johnston explains. “I would use echo when everything got through, and I could do that as much as I wanted. I wanted it to sound better than anything else sounded ever, and I wanted it to be where everybody could hear it. And I don’t know what Dylan would have been if he stayed in New York with those people, and been mixed like that. And I know he would have never done that shit like he did in Nashville,” Johnston insists.