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52 years ago today Bob Dylan started recording “John Wesley Harding”.

Some background from wikipedia:

Dylan went to work on John Wesley Harding in the fall of 1967. By then, 18 months had passed since the completion of Blonde on Blonde. After recovering from the worst of the results of his motorcycle accident, Dylan spent a substantial amount of time recording the informal basement sessions at West Saugerties, New York; little was heard from him throughout 1967. During that time, he stockpiled a large number of recordings, including many new compositions. He eventually submitted nearly all of them for copyright, but declined to include any of them in his next studio release (Dylan would not release any of those recordings to the commercial market until 1975’s The Basement Tapes; and by then, some of those recordings had been bootlegged, usually sourced from an easy-to-find set of publisher’s demos). Instead, Dylan used a different set of songs for John Wesley Harding.

It is not clear when these songs were actually written, but none of them has turned up in the dozens of basement recordings that have since surfaced. According to Robbie Robertson, “As I recall it was just on a kind of whim that Bob went down to Nashville. And there, with just a couple of guys, he put those songs down on tape.” 

Those sessions took place in the autumn of 1967, requiring less than twelve hours over three stints in the studio.

Dylan brought to Nashville a set of songs similar to the feverish yet pithy compositions that came out of the Basement Tapes sessions. They would be given an austere sound sympathetic to their content. When Dylan arrived in Nashville, producer Bob Johnston:

“he was staying in the Ramada Inn down there, and he played me his songs and he suggested we just use bass and guitar and drums on the record. I said fine, but also suggested we add a steel guitar, which is how Pete Drake came to be on that record.”

Dylan was once again recording with a band, but the instrumentation was very sparse. During most of the recording, the rhythm section of drummer Kenneth A. Buttrey and bassist Charlie McCoy were the only ones supporting Dylan, who handled all harmonica, guitar, piano, and vocal parts.

“I didn’t intentionally come out with some kind of mellow sound……. I would have liked … more steel guitar, more piano. More music … I didn’t sit down and plan that sound.”
~Bob Dylan 1971

The first session, held on October 17 at Columbia’s Studio A, lasted only three hours, with Dylan recording master takes of “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”, “Drifter’s Escape”, and “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest”.

Studio A
Columbia Recording Studios
Nashville, Tennessee
October 17, 1967, 9 pm – 12 midnight.

 Produced by Bob Johnston

Songs:

1. Drifter’s Escape
2. Drifter’s Escape – JWH
   
   “Dylan once again demonstrated his distaste for the legal process, preferring to leave Judgment to Him on high. Reversing “Percy’s Song” and “Seven Curses,” he makes the judge compassionate but powerless. He also sets the drifter free, not at the whim of the judge, but via that most traditional of devices, the deus ex machina. A bolt of lightning causes everyone else to pray, allowing the (presumably faithless) drifter to escape.
   Dylan had found a way to tell a five-act story in just three verses.
   Enthused by what he had achieved, he began writing a whole set of
   songs along similar lines.”
   ~Clinton Heylin (Revolution in the Air) –
   
3. Drifter’s Escape
4. Drifter’s Escape
5. Drifter’s Escape
6. I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine
7. I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine
8. I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine
9. I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine – JWH
   The song .. is a work of art, extremely moving, totally original.
   ~Paul Williams (Performing Artist – 60-73)
   –
   Not only is “St. Augustine” a eulogy of sorts, it is exquisitely sung
   (even if Dylan and his fellow Americans don’t know how to pronounce the saint’s name, rhyming it with “mean,” not “sin”).
   ~Clinton Heylin (Revolution in the air)
   –
   
10. The Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest – JWH
    Unusually for a Dylan song, “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest” ends with a moral, telling the listener “the moral of this story, the moral of this song, is simply that one should never be where one does not belong”, to help one’s neighbor with his load, and “don’t go mistaking Paradise/for that home across the road.
    (from wikipedia – read more here)
    
    
    
    –

Personnel:

• Bob Dylan (vocal, guitar & harmonica),
• Charlie McCoy (bass),
• Kenneth Buttrey (drums).

Notes:

• 3, 4 are false starts.
• 6 is interrupted
• Only released tracks are in circulation.

–

Related articles @ alldylan:

• Bob Dylan recording sessions

References:

• Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions – Part Two – by Michael Krogsgaard
• Still On The Road – Olof Björner

-Egil