A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Song 173: “All Along the Watchtower”, Part One: “He’s Not the Messiah”

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the first of a two-episode look at the song “All Along the Watchtower”. This one is on the original version by Bob Dylan, while part two will be on Jimi Hendrix’s cover version. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” by Arlo Guthrie. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs By Andre Huck. Song 173 All Along the Watchtower Part 1 He's not the Messiah A note before we begin With hugely unfortunate timing

I have now come to an episode In which I have to mention, at least in passing, The Six Day War and the resultant Israeli occupation of the West Bank. This is, sadly, not only still a live issue, but one which is arguably more politically salient than at any time in the last 50 years. Like all thinking people,

I have very strong feelings about the situation as it's unfolding at the moment, and like most people who aren't directly affected, my thoughts on the issue are likely assinine and uninformed. This podcast is not the place for me to discuss those views, though, and I would ask that nobody take a handful of sentences describing Western perceptions of events in 1967 as being any kind of statement of my own thoughts on the current situation, and that any comments on the episode on Patreon and so on refrain from derailing the discussion.

There's also one musical clip containing an offensive term for sex workers, which will be flagged at the appropriate moment. Back in episode 150, at the start of the run of huge episodes dealing with records from 1967 to 1968, I started by talking about the prisoner,

a narrative that is, among many other things, about being trapped in one place for a long time,

about stasis, and about eternity. It's a narrative that has a beginning and an end of sorts,

but is really a loop, an extended middle that could go on forever. I chose to talk about that for many reasons.

Partly it's because I knew then that we would be spending a long time in late 1967 and 1968, and that it would feel like we were there for an eternity, that we would have to keep cycling back to look at the same events from different angles.

But partly it's also because, even at the time, as 1967 turned into 1968, a lot of artists were starting to feel like, as a song from the next year would put it, were caught in a trap, I can't walk out, and that's reflected in a lot of the work that was created in the long, long hangover from the summer of love. Over and over again in this period, in artists as different as the monkeys and Bob Dylan, we see the same things reflected. Circular narratives in which, when you see the end in sight,

the beginning may arrive, and you focus on religion. And a sense that even though it feels like you're trapped in a cycle, the cycle is somehow going to come to a violent end, and something will change somehow. And eventually it will. Eventually there'll be some kind of way out of here. But not yet. Not yet.

One of the things that's most difficult when it comes to writing about Bob Dylan is actually one of his most admirable qualities. Dylan has always been an intensely private person and has kept most aspects of his private life actually private, unlike almost all of his contemporaries. This is something that has required a great deal of effort on his part by all accounts, especially given his phenomenal levels of fame, and it's understandable why other artists of his stature

have chosen instead to live their lives in public. But it does mean that we're at a disadvantage when it comes to interpreting Dylan's art. where a contemporary like John Lennon would write straight forward the autobiographical work and then say explicitly in interviews that there was a one-to-one correspondence between his life and the lyrics. Dylan will write a bleak metaphor that seems to be linked to events in his own life, but then deny any interpretation placed upon the lyrics. This means that the whole edifice of Dylanology,

the tens of millions of words spent talking about Dylan's work, is a tower made of matchsticks with a sandcastle for a foundation. The whole thing could come tumbling down at any minute and some supposition about Dylan's motives, belief or home life is proved false. But still, building such towers has its fascinations and there are things that can be figured out by examining his work and by knowing the few details about his life that he shares.

We know, for example, that Dylan had been turning towards country music for a while before his motorbike accident. Blonde on Blonde, the album he recorded just before the accident, had largely been recorded in Nashville with 18 players like Kenny Buttery, Charlie McCoy and Henry Straslake and Dylan's producer in the mid-60s, Bob Johnston, was for a time Columbia's head of country music in Nashville. So it's unsurprising that during the basement tape sessions,

Dylan had recorded a lot of country songs. One of the artists whose work he covered during those sessions was Bobby Bear, who had, among other hits, been the first artist to record Streets of Baltimore, made famous later by Graham Parsons. Dylan actually recorded Bear's first hit, which had been released under the name Bill Parsons, All-American Boy.

That song, in its original version, was meant to satirize the rise of Elvis Presley and also his relationship with Colonel Parker. The version that Dylan recorded with the band features some changes to the lyric, and it's worth considering in this context that Albert Grossman, Dylan's manager at the time,

was compared by many people to Parker. Indeed, Dylan himself, in the Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home, says of Grossman, he was kind of like a Colonel Tom Parker figure. Well, come in to have a time of your life, just picking the gum, picking up a star,

breaking up going and gone to the ball, you and your mother. manager you'll be a fine a few you'll be a fine drummer you'll be a fine drummer

Indeed While Dullin's retreat from the public eye in 1966 had definitely been brought on by the very real problems caused by his motorcycle accident. There were also other factors at play. Dylan's relationship with Grossman started deteriorating not long after the two became neighbours,

as Dylan started to realise that the contracts he had with Grossman gave his manager a far higher share of his royalties than he felt was warranted. To be fair to Grossman, he would likely argue himself that yes, he took a greater share of Dylan's income than other marriages took, but he also made him more money than other managers would. and certainly while Dylan wasn't recording or touring, Grossman was manoeuvring to boost his income. He was doing this in two ways.

The first was, as we heard in the episode on the band, that he was encouraging Dylan to write songs that other people could cover. The reason the basement tapes ever became legendary is that a 14-song acetate of new songs from the sessions, songs that Dylan later talked about having been pushed into writing somewhat against his will, was sent out by dwarf music to get successful acts to his own. record the songs from it. Dwarf Music, incidentally, was a publishing company that was owned by Dylan and Albert Grossman, who both had equal shares in it, but which Dylan believed until late 1968 he was sole owner of. The songs for the dwarf music ascitate, like the other songs Dylan wrote in 1967, seemed to be evidence of something unusual.

1967 was one of Dylan's most productive years, but that very productivity seems to have come from something like writer's block. Up until the motorcycle crash, Dylan had mostly written songs more or less instinctively, and the music and lyrics had come as a piece, or the music had even come first. To this day, he seems to get annoyed that people focus on his lyrics

without paying attention to the music. He is, after all, a songwriter, not a poet. He says in his autobiography of sorts, Chronicles, For sure, my lyrics had struck nerves that had never been struck before, but if my songs were just about the words, then what was Dwayne Eddy, the great rock and roll guitarist, during recording an album full of instrumental melodies of my songs?

Musicians have always known that my songs were about more than just words, but most people are not musicians. But the songs he wrote in 1967 were primarily written lyrics first, writing at a typewriter, occasionally getting members of the band to come up with music for lyrics he'd already written. From piecing together various statements Dylan has made over the years, It seems like part of the reason he went back to country and folk music, and for the whole basement tape project,

was to teach himself how to write songs when he no longer had any inspiration. The songs on the dwarf music acetate, including some of his most loved songs like, You ain't going nowhere and I shall be released, seemed to have been written to order, Dylan teaching himself how to do mechanically what he previously done instinctively, and in the process teaching himself how to write lyrics first rather than music first.

The resulting lyrics are often very different. They use plainer language in the work that Dylan had been doing prior to his accident, though the ideas being expressed were often even more obscure. As well as being intended for cover versions to make some money for dwarf, there has been suggestion that there was another reason for the basement tapes turn to new songs.

According to Dylan's biographer Clinton Halin, the acetate of new songs was also put together to help Grossman in his negotiations for a new record. deal with another label, proving that Dylan was still producing commercial new material. Halen's timeline doesn't really make sense, given what we know of the dates at the basement tapes sessions took place. Indeed, it seems that they didn't start recording new material in earnest until after Dylan's contractual situation was resolved. But it is true that Grossman was trying to negotiate a new deal for Dylan in late 1966 and early 1967, as Dylan's contract with Columbia

was due to expire soon. Interestingly, the label that Grossman chose to negotiate with was MGM, the same label that Dylan's old producer Tom Wilson had moved to. MGM had initially offered Dylan a ludicrously high royalty rate for the time, but those negotiations had run into problems. The first was that Alan Klein, who was at the time in negotiations to buy MGM, though it was later bought up by another company, and who was as legendary a hard negotiator as Grossman,

thought that giving Dylan a high royalty rate would set a dangerous precedent. The other was that Clive Davis, at the time the head of Columbia, wanted to keep Dylan and was willing to fight dirty. First he released Dylan's actual sales figures decline. Dylan had a dedicated fan base who bought his records as soon as they were released, which meant they went up to the top of the charts straight away, but it also meant that they didn't keep selling for as long as other pop acts. And so his overall sales were lower than other acts who charted,

which in retrospect is a very weird thing to think about, as Dylan is probably the artist other than the Beatles, who has had the most consistent sales of his mid-60s album catalogue over the ensuing 60 years. As well as putting MGM off by revealing Dylan's actual sales figures, they also put Dylan and Grossman off, first by pointing out that Dylan still owed them 14 tracks on his contract. And also by saying that if Dylan did leave Columbia,

they'd pay him all his back royalties in one go, which sounds like something you'd want to happen, but in fact if they paid him in one lump sum rather than in installments, most of the money would have gone in taxes. Not only that, but if he went off to another label, they'd just keep releasing albums of all the outtakes they had in their vaults, to compete with his records for the new label. So eventually, Dylan Rees signed to Columbia,

on new terms suggested by Grossman. No advances but a 10% royalty. and in October 1967 he headed down to Nashville to record a new album rather surprisingly given he'd just spent months working with the band not only did he not bring any of them down to Nashville with him by all accounts he didn't even tell them he was going and even more oddly rather than record any of the songs he'd worked up with them he wrote a whole new set of songs those songs seemed to be inspired by one of his earliest

influences. As we heard in the episode on the Wait, Dylan was already starting to move back towards the country and folk music he played as a younger man, partly as a response to what he saw as the excesses of the psychedelic movement, and partly as a conscious decision to try to remove himself from the position he'd unwittingly found himself in, of spokesman for a generation and leader of the counterculture, a counterculture whose values he found himself very far from sharing. He was now a settled family man with several young children, who was regularly reading the Bible

and who was seemingly more interested in reconnecting with his Jewish heritage and spirituality than in leading protest movements and who was increasingly getting annoyed at people making assumptions about his political views on subjects he'd never spoken out about. There's a report of a friend asking him why he wasn't out leading marches against the Vietnam War and Dylan responding,

How do you know I'm not for the war? But he turned even further to these old forms after October 3rd, 1967. when Woody Guthrie died. As we heard in our first episode on Dylan, Guthrie was an idle in inspiration to him, and the two men had become friendly when Dylan had moved to New York.

By the time Dylan had got to know Guthrie, the older man's health was so bad that his death could not have been unexpected. He died of Huntington's disease, a truly awful hereditary degenerative condition which robs people of their faculties, and when Dylan had got to know Guthrie some six years earlier, he had already been in a hospital and requiring full-time care. But even as Guthrie had been unable to perform himself for more than a decade,

he had had an outsized influence on the entire folk movement through Dylan's mentor Pete Seeger and through his son Arlo Guthrie, whose record Alice's Restaurants, Guthrie apparently got to hear an acetate form before his death. You can get anything you want at Alice's restaurant. You can get anything you want. At Alice's restaurant Walk right in it's around the back

Just a half a mile from the railroad track And you can get anything you want At Alice's restaurant That was horrible Dylan was devastated by Guthrie's death And it seems to have inspired him to write a new series of songs That took their inspiration from Guthrie's work In particular, Guthrie had written many outlaw songs,

in which he portrayed people like the bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd and the train robber Jesse James as heroes in the vein of Robin Hood. So for the title track of his new album, Dylan did something similar, writing about John Wasley Hardin, a man we would probably now refer to as a serial killer given his claims of having murdered more than 40 people,

though Dylan added an extra G to Hardin's name, turning him into Harding, as some wags had it to make up for the G he dropped in songs like Blowing in the Wind. Like his previous album, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding was recorded in Nashville with 18 session musicians, but the sessions were otherwise very different.

Where the Blonde on Blonde sessions had featured a lot of musicians and had stretched out into the small hours as musicians jammed and noodled while Dylan finished writing songs he hadn't completed before the session started and kept searching for a sound he couldn't quite find. On ten of the twelve tracks on John Wesley Harding,

there were only two musicians accompanying Dylan, all around Nashville utility player Charlie McCoy on bass, and Kenny Butry on drums. For the two remaining tracks, Pete Drake came in on pedal steel as well, but no track features more than four people. And where, in the session for Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, Dylan had spent ten hours of studio time writing the song,

while the musicians played cards before starting to record. Here the entire album was cut in 12-hour studio time spread over three sessions. Some have questioned why Dylan didn't use the band on these sessions, given how long he'd been working with them, and Robbie Robertson said later that Dylan had talked about Garth Hudson and himself, adding overdubs to the Nashville tracks, before deciding that the sparse sound of the recordings didn't need overdubs. But it seems to make sense that Dylan thought of the band as being his live backing band,

and not his studio band, given that he had blamed trying to use them for the collapse of the initial sessions for Blonde on Blonde. Dylan has also said that he specifically wanted to get the sound of another album on which Buttery and McCoy had played, The Way I Feel by Gordon Lightfoot, and other client of Albert Grossman.

The lamp is burning low upon my tabletop. The snow is softly falling. The air is still. in the silence of my room I hear your voice softly calling If I could only have you near To breathe a sigh or two I would be happy just to hold the hands I love

So over three days in the studio in Nashville Dylan recorded a dozen songs that combined the influence of Woody Guthrie and the wider folk ballet tradition with Dylan's own new thoughts about his career and about religion. Dylan was coming up with songs like I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, inspired by the folk ballad Joe Hill about a martyed union organizer.

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night alive as you, but Joe you're 10. I never died, said he. I never died. Dylan's song has him dreaming of St. Augustine, though the St. Augustine of the song has little to do with St. Augustine of Hippo, the Christian philosopher.

Rather, this St. Augustine is a martyr, unlike the real one, and the song seems to deal with feelings of guilt over being in the mob that caused that martyrdom. As with many of the songs on the album, it's oblique but not in the same way that some of Dylan's earlier works are. where something like visions of Johanna has lines like The Ghost of Electricity Hulls in the Bones of Her Face which have some meaning but not on the literal level

they're either just sound good or there's a metaphorical meaning there The lyrics to songs like I dreamed I saw St Augustine are difficult in other ways They seem to be telling stories that are missing key parts And inviting the listener to figure out what those parts might actually be It's as if there's a single key which, if found, would unlock the whole lyric and make it all make sense, in a way that there notably isn't in Dylan's pre-accident writing.

It was in the second session for the album that the album's best-known song was recorded. All along the Watchtower is a song that's very difficult to talk. talk about in the present moment, because it's a song that's seemingly inspired by a number of things, religious, political, and personal, and the religious and political aspects of it will seem to have a greater impact at the moment than they have in most of the last 56 years. Like many Dylan's songs, it seems to be inspired by passages from the Bible. Dylan's level of religious observance, and even what faith he belongs to, have changed on several occasions over the decades. But the Bible, like Shakespeare and the child ballads and the songs of

Woody Guthrie and the Rockabilly of the late 50s, has always been a touchstone reference for him. In this case the song seems inspired by a passage from the book of Isaiah. Prepare the table, watch in the watchman, eat, drink, arise ye princes and prepare the shield. For thus hath the Lord said to 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 the watchman shouted, Day after day, my lord, I stand on the watchtower. Every night I stay at my post, and behold, here cometh a chariot of men with a couple of horsemen, and he answered and said,

Babylon is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground. Isaiah is one that has historically been very important both to Jewish people and to evangelical Christians, both of those being identities that Dylan has claimed at different points. Without getting too into the weeds of biblical exegesis, it's apparently written at least partly during the Babylonian captivity, when a lot of Jewish people were enslaved in Babylon after a war between Babylon and Judea, in which the temple in Jerusalem was destroyed for the first time. The book talks, in essence, about how the people of Judea are currently in captivity. But one day God will bring a king, a Messiah, to them,

who will bring them home and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, and the temple will then be the centre of God's rule over the whole world. This book has traditionally been a source of hope for members of the Jewish diaspora in the centuries since the temple fell for the second time, in the year 70C, when the Romans drove the Jewish people from Israel. Many Christians, meanwhile, have seen it as a prophecy. of the return of Jesus Christ, and indeed a lot of the support

that American evangelical Christians give to the state of Israel is because they believe that the temple needs to be rebuilt before Jesus can return. And to any person with an interest in the Bible, which Dullan certainly was at this point, the Book of Isaiah

will have come to mind in summer 1967 after the Six Day War. Jerusalem is a holy city to all the Abrahamic religions. The Alaksa Mosque compound which sits on Temple Mount, the mountain where the temple was originally cited, is the third holiest site in Islam,

and so when the state of Israel was originally created after the Second World War, the city of Jerusalem was originally intended to be a neutral, stateless area, not part of any country. But when Israel was created, the plan was to partition the former Palestinian territory into an Arab country, a Jewish country, and the neutral areas of Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Some of you may remember what I said in the episode on Last Train to Conradition.

Clarksville about partition. But if you don't, here's what I said then. Splitting a formally occupied country into two at an arbitrary dividing line, a tactic which was notably successful in securing peace everywhere it was tried, apart from Ireland, India, Korea and a few other places. But surely it wouldn't be a problem in Vietnam, right? This process had been exactly as successful in the Middle East as it had in those other places, and literally the day that Israel's existence was declared, the first war between the country and its Arab neighbors had started, which had ended with Israel controlling a large chunk of the land that was originally designated for Palestinian Arabs,

and with Jerusalem split in two, with Israel controlling West Jerusalem, while Jordan controlled East Jerusalem. Although legally, neither country controlled either, but that was the de facto state. That situation I can't get no relief businessmen

That situation remained the case until 1967, when the Six Day War happened. The Egyptian government, who were allied with Syria, received false reports from the Soviet Union that Israel was mobilizing its army on the Syrian border to prepare for attack. The Arab states, as a result,

started massing their armies on the borders with Israel to defend themselves. Israel took that as a result. sign that they were preparing to attack, and decided to attack first. The resulting war, with Israel on one side, and Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon on the other, lasted only six days, but ended with Israel victorious and having occupied a further chunk of Palestinian Arab land, including, crucially, the rest of Jerusalem, including Temple Mount. This created an unstable political situation which continues to this day, and is largely the

of the current humanitarian catastrophe that is unfolding as I speak, and which is seeing tens of thousands of innocent people die. But that couldn't have been foreseen by anyone in 1967. And while Bob Dern's political views have mostly remained private, and he was being even more protective of his privacy in 1967 than he would later, in 1967 he was becoming more interested in his Jewish heritage. And one of his few unambiguous political songs after his early protest period, of his 1983's Neighbourhood Bulley,

a very strongly pro-Israel song. So one can assume that he, like almost all American Jews of his generation, saw Israel's victory in the war and the occupation of Jerusalem as an unambiguous good, and that this may have inspired him to think about his own liberation. Because all along the Watchtower,

the most cryptic of the songs on John Wesley Harding, is about many things and resists easy allegorical interpretation. The song is in some ways about the Book of Isaiah and how the hour is getting late. It's also about its own circular structure. It ends with two riders were approaching the wind began to howl, a line which seemed to lead back into its opening line where the two riders are conversing.

And indeed, in more recent live performances, Dylan has repeated the first verse after the last one. But one thing everyone seems agreed on is that the joke from the thief in the opening verses a Dylan and his manager Albert Grossman and that the song is in part about Dylan the Joker complaining about the businessman he felt were exploiting him while Grossman the thief was telling him to relax and not worry about it

and this interpretation is backed up somewhat by several of the other songs on the album. The ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest for example is a story about two close friends who have a falling out over money with one saying my loss will be your gain before one of them dies and then there's Dear Landlord, a song about which Dylan later said,

Grossman wasn't in my mind when I wrote it, only later when people pointed out that the song may have been written for Grossman I thought it could have been. It's an abstract song, but which seems almost to beg for that interpretation. It's clear that Dylan was the... It's clear that Dylan was...

dissatisfied with the music business, even if he wasn't dissatisfied with music itself. Dylan asked that John Wesley Harding be released with no publicity at all, and refused to allow a single to be released from it, much to the consternation of Clive Davis. And the album got a mixed reception at the time, being the first sign of the turn towards country rock that would soon take over, and wrong-footing a lot of people who are expecting Dylan to do something as psychedelic as Sergeant Pepper, though it's now considered one of his greatest album. But that wrong footing was part of what Dylan intended. He wanted to continue making music, but he absolutely didn't want to be anyone's leader or guru, and the best way to avoid that

was to comprehensively destroy his own image by doing the precise opposite of what was expected of him, until the audience eventually had no expectations at all. And so, in the whole year in 1968, after the release of John Wesley Harding, he did almost nothing in the music business. He did make a single live appearance, and that was notable in itself. Between his motorcycle crash in 1966 and his return to touring in 1974,

Dylan's only live appearances were at the Isle of White Festival in 1969, the concert for Bangladesh in 1971, and this, a tribute to Woody Guthrie in January 1968. Dylan was a major part in instigating the Woody Guthrie tribute show which also featured Guthrie's son Arlo, Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins Odetta and others. Dylan appeared back by the band, who at this point were calling themselves the Crackers, and performed a few Guthrie songs, including one which was a clear inspiration for dear Landlord.

Leave on Helm later spoke about how, at that show, he noticed that Dylan and Grossman weren't speaking to each other at all. While Grossman would remain Dylan's manager on paper until 1971, he was no longer involved in Dylan's day-to-day life. And without Grossman's input, Dylan seemed happy to just continue living his life and not be involved. Possibly he was trying to do the minimum possible until his contract with Grossman ran out. For more than a year after that January 1916, show, Dylan made no studio recordings and no live performances, choosing to devote his time

to his family life. He had a newborn son, his fourth child, and he also had to deal with the death of his father, which, coming so quickly after the death of Woody Guthrie must have shaken him even more. There are no details about Dylan's life in that period, and as always we should not expect there to be. As F. said, he quite reasonably guards his privacy, and especially the privacy of his children. The only real output we have from him for most of that year is a song he co-wrote with his friend George Harrison when Harrison visited him. But Dylan did, of course, eventually come back, and he came back as a country singer. The change in my country pie, I won't throw it up in anybody's face.

Check me up that old beat's tree. The change in Dylan's music to straight-ahead country should probably not have come as a shock, even though it did. Dylan had already recorded his last few albums with Nashville session players, and his regular producer, Bob Johnston, was based in Nashville and was working with country musicians. He had, for example, just produced Change in Times for the Bluegrass Duo Flat and Scruggs. on which they had covered 10 folk and singer-songwriter songs, five of them by Dylan. Well, the high tide's rising,

Mama, don't you let me down. Pack up your suitcase, Mama, don't you make a sound. Now it's king for king, it's queen for queen. This are going to be the meanest blood that anybody seen. But, oh, ain't you going to miss your best friend now?

Change in Times was actually titled, change in times featuring Foggy Mountain Breakdown, because the duo's famous instrumental had just had a new lease of life after being used in the film Bonnie and Clyde, a massive hit, part of the same new Hollywood wave that also included Easy Rider. That film was, much like Dylan's John Wesley Harding,

a fictionalised version of the lives of real-life outlaws whose actual behaviour had been monstrous, and was part of the same general cultural turn that not only Dylan, but also the band and people like the Grateful Dead were taking, creating art set in a fictionalised, compressed, old America that somehow encompassed the whole period from the Old West through to the Depression. But more importantly, Johnston had produced the album which had revitalised Johnny Cash's image. I put that very carefully because a lot of people talk about the At Falson Prison album,

bringing Cash's career back from the dead. But in fact, Cash had been consistently having top ten country albums, hit country singles, and the odd pop crossover record. But he was selling primarily to an older, more conservative country music audience, even as his personal life was deteriorating due to his problems with drugs and alcohol abuse. But in 1968, after Cash had got his addictions under control, and just weeks before his marriage to June Carter, the second generation member of the Carter family who had written Cash's big hit Ring of Fire,

and was one of his backing vocalists. He recorded what would be his most important album, at least until his American trilogy 30 years later. Cash had been performing shows at prisons on a regular basis for a decade at this point, and had always wanted to record a live album at one, but had been turned down by his previous producers at Columbia Records. But Bob Johnston, as Cash's new producer,

was used to working with more idiosyncratic artists and enthusiastically agreed to Cash's idea. At Folsom Prison was a massive hit. Hello, I'm Johnny Cash. That's the train are coming, it's rolling around a bend, and I ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when I'm stuck in Folsom Prison, and time keeps dragging on, but that train keeps rolling all down the sign.

That album, even though it was mostly made up of the same kind of material that Cash had been recording on his recent albums, gave Cash the same kind of outlaw image that was becoming popular among the younger generation, and the album is, in retrospect, looked upon as an early precursor of the Outlaw Country movement of the 70s. Dylan and Cash had always been huge fans of each other. By many accounts, Cash encouraged Columbia to keep Dylan signed when his early records were unsuccessful, while during the basement tape sessions Dylan performed cover versions of several of Cash's songs. And he has always mentioned Cash's song Big River in particular, as one of his greatest inspirations.

And so there seems to have been a plan in the works in early 1969 for the two of them to record an album together. Over a couple of days, Cash and Dylan recorded duets on songs from both men's repertoire. A mixture of old folk, country, gospel and rockabilly songs. Like a medley of two songs we covered very early in this podcast, This Train and Mystery Train, Cash's old hits like Big River and I Walk the Line,

and a couple of Dylan's old songs, one of which was the only thing that got released at the time, Girl from the North Country, which became the opening track to Dylan's next album. The Sessions were scrapped, as it turns out that two singers were idiosyncratic phrasing who could never sing a song the same way twice, and neither of whom are known for their perfect pitch,

don't make ideal duet partners, no matter how great they sound on their own. But there were some interesting ideas workshopped in those sessions, like a simultaneous performance of Dylan's don't think twice it's all right, and Cashers Understand Your Man, a song that one could consider either plagiarism or homage to Dylan's song, depending on your attitude,

but which Dylan clearly took as a compliment. At the time, Cash's live band, who backed the two on these sessions, featured Carl Perkins on the guitar. Perkins had taken over when Cash's old guitarist, the unrelated Luther Perkins, had died. And Perkins' old drummer Flew Collin. So, unsurprisingly, they had a go at one of Perkins' songs, Matchbox, which had been the first song Dylan had ever recorded, or so he told Perkins. While the Cash Sessions only produced one track that got a release at the time,

they led to two further recordings. Dylan had a half-written song called Champagne, Illinois, which he gave to Perkins, who finished it off and released it on his own next album, on top. And not, as the liner notes to Dylan's bootleg series Volume 15 have it, on the album after, his collaboration with NRBQ, buffing the blues. Morocco, I got a woman that Stun stole my pain, I say, Shathe Illinois, to enjoy champagne. Illinois.

There's some debate as to whether Wanted Man is a solo Dylan song, or a Dylan Cash collaboration, as Cash introduced it when he performed it live. But Dylan is the only credited writer. Wanted Man became the opening track to Cash's live. follow-up to the Folsom album, recorded at San Quentin Prison, which made number one on both the country and pop album chart, though it's now regarded by most as slightly inferior to the Folsom album. Johnson wanted man in this text town While the collaboration with a full country album in 1969

recorded earlier the same week in two sessions This one had a fuller band as well as Butry, Drake and McCoy it also featured keyboard player Bob Wilson and guitarists Arthur Hurston, Norman Blake, Wayne Moss and Charlie Daniels. Dylan was particularly pleased to be working with Daniels, of whom he later said,

I felt I had a lot in common with Charlie. The kind of phrases he'd use, his sense of humour, his relationship to work, his tolerance for certain things, felt like we had dreamed the same dream with all the same distant places. A lot of his recollections seemed,

to coincide with mine, Charlie would fiddle with stuff and make sense of it. I had no band at the time and relied on the A&R man or producer to throw one together. When Charlie was around, something good would usually come out of the sessions. Daniels would of course later become a country rock star in his own right, with hits like The Devil Went Down to Georgia. The Devil went down to Georgia, he was looking for a soul to steal. He was in a bang, because he was way behind and he was willing to make a deal. When he came across this young man sawing on a fiddle and playing it hot, and the devil jumped up on a hickory stump and said, boy, let me tell you what.

I guess you didn't know it, but I'm a fiddle player too. And if you'd care to take a dare, I'll make a bet with you. Now you play pretty good fiddle, boy, but give the devil as due. I bet a fiddle of gold against your soul because I think I'm better than you. The boy said, my name's Johnny and it might be a sin, but I'll take your bet, you're going to... The Nashville's Skyline album was one of Dylan's most confounding. The lyrics were among the simplest he'd ever written, and were mostly seen. straightforward country songs of love and loss,

sung in a new voice totally unlike anything Dylan had used previously, a more melodic, lighter, crooning style, which showed, if it hadn't been obvious before, that the vocal sound that some found unpleasant was a very deliberate choice on his part. I once held her in my arms, she says she would always stay, but I was cruel.

Despite being her like a fool I threw it all away Once I hit mountain Despite being deliberately Precisely the album Dylan's fans didn't want The album still made the top five on the charts And outsold John Wesley Harding Partly because of the presence of a big hit single

Lay Lady Lay Lay My Big Grassbed Lay across my big breastbed Whatever colors you have There are various stories about the new Hollywood film Midnight Cowboy, but it's also been claimed that it was written for Barbara Streisand and for the Everly Brothers. The song caused some problems in the recording.

Dylan was never someone who directed the musicians particularly closely, just telling them to play what fit the song, and the first versions of the song, while perfectly fine, didn't quite have the right arrangement. Kenny Butry got frustrated at the lack of direction. He asked Dylan what he should play on the song, and Dylan suggested maybe bongos.

This was originally, ridiculous idea, so he then asked Bob Johnston, who suggested Carobel. Buttery decided to call their bluff and make them be serious. He got the studio janitor, as he put it, the guy who emptied the ashtrays, to hold the cowbell and bongos for him so he could play them both at the same time on the verses, switching back to the regular kit for the Bridgers, just to show them how daft their idea was. But as it turned out, it wasn't a daft idea at all, and it became one of Buttery's best known performances. You can hear how good it is by just isolating the right channel.

That guy who emptied the ashrays incidentally was one Chris Christopherson. Christopherson later said Our generation owes him our artistic lives because he opened all the doors in Nashville when he did blonde on blonde at Nashville skyline The country scene was so conservative until he arrived He brought in a whole new audience He changed the way people thought about it

Even the grand old Loprey was never the same again Dylan's attempt to reinvent himself as a country singer Also involved in making an appearance On the first episode of Cash's new TV series his first TV appearance for many years Since you've been gone I've been walking around With my head bowed down

The Blue Every night without you I don't have to go far To know where you are strangers all give me the news And I've been living the blue The fact that Dylan's return to the public eye Was on a show filmed on the stage of the Riemann Auditorium

the home of the Grand Ole Opry, should theoretically have been enough to be a signal that Dylan was doing everything he could to abdicate from the role he had been forced into with a spokesman for a counterculture he thought facile and actively harmful. But it still wasn't enough. Dylan was still getting pressure to come back and be the leader.

Even friends were doing it. George Harrison's collaboration with him, I'd have you any time, had started, let me in here, because Harrison was trying to get Dylan to open up. and in August 1969, Harrison wrote another song which ended up on the same album, behind that locked door, which was aimed at Dylan and almost begging him to go back out and be his old self again. But Dylan wanted to stay behind the locked door, he was quite happy there, he needed to prove that,

and he eventually did with his next album. Rolling Stone, which up to this point had seemed unable to say a negative word about Dylan. started its review of his 1970 double-album self-portrait with possibly the most famous four words to ever open an album review. What is this, and then a four-letter word for feces? And that was the reaction of most people to the album, which remains one of the most unpopular decisions Dylan ever made. Dylan later spoke about his motivations for what is considered a baffling album,

saying, I wish these people would just forget about me, I want to do something they can't possibly like, they can't relate to. They'll see it and they'll listen and they'll say, well, let's go on to the next person. He ain't saying it no more. He ain't giving us what we want, you know? They'll go on to somebody else.

And he succeeded. Self-portrait is a mixture of originals completely outside Dylan's usual style, like all the tired horses, a song sung by a female chorus rather than by Dylan, and with only one line of lyric repeated for three minutes. and cover versions of songs like the Everly Brothers Let It Be Me and Take a Message to Mary, Gordon Lightfoot's early morning rain, and the old standard blue moon.

Some of the choices are rather pointed, like his version of Simon and Garfunkels the Boxer, a song that many people have said was written about Dylan. I'm going to play a clip here, but be warned, this uses a term for sex workers that some will find insulting. I come looking for a job, but I get no offers Just to come on from the horrors on 7th Avenue I do declare there were towns when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there The reason I play la lie that line and to Paul Simon and to Dylan.

799 7th Avenue was the home of Columbia Records main studios, where both Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel had recorded all their music until 1966. And it seems that as well as trying to baffle his audience, Dylan was also trying to confound the business people involved in his career, possibly trying to focus on covers as a way to avoid giving Albert Grossman any more royalties while they were in the process of sorting out the lawsuits to end their business relationship. Self-portrait also included some live recordings from the only full concert that Dylan played between 1966 and 1974. That show itself was in part

You're bound to fall You thought they were all A kid and you That show itself was in part A way for Dylan to avoid his position In the counterculture A widely publicised festival Which will definitely come up in future episodes

Was being held just outside Woodstock The Small Town where Dylan lived In August 1969 The choice of venue was very blatantly An attempt to draw Dylan out of hiding and get him to perform for his followers. So instead, Dylan took up an offer to travel to the Isle of White on the QE2, have a long family holiday,

and played the Isle of White Festival thousands of miles away from his home and the people gathered in partial expectation of seeing him. Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way. One of Dylan's children was injured on the day of the journey and had to go to hospital, and he ended up flying over shortly before the show. Three of the Beatles travelled to the Isle of White to see the show, and this led to rumours that Dylan's great comeback show was going to be the greatest show ever.

The Beatles were going to join him on stage, and they were going to do a three-hour psychedelic freakout, and the rumours only grew more outlandish. Melody Maker had headlined an article with a claim that Dylan, George Harrison, the Rolling Stones, and Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood's new supergroup Blind Faith were all going to play together, while the record maker had said it would be the biggest jam session in history. So when Dylan came on stage several hours late due to technical issues out of his control and then just did a normal show, playing a 17-song set including most of his biggest hits, the crowd were massively disappointed and made their disappointment known.

As John Lennon said of the set, he gave a reasonable, albeit slightly flat performance, but everyone was expecting Godot a Jesus to appear. Between his performance at the Isle of Wight and the self-portrait album, Dylan had finally proved to his followers that he wasn't a Jesus. Self-portrait is actually an album that is full of good and interesting music, and I have a sneaking half suspicion that Dylan's later claims that it was a bad joke aimed at putting off his listeners, or at least half him making excuses for a perceived failure. It's a strange, eccentric work, but very far from a totally bad one,

and one that's due some critical re-evaluation. But if it was, as he's always content, intended, intended to put off those people who thought of him as the new Messiah who would lead the hippie nation to paradise, it definitely worked. He made a lot of excellent music in future decades, some of which we'll look at in a future episode. But never again would he be the person the counterculture would look to for answers. He was free to be a singer and songwriter on his own terms. The Isle of White Festival, 1969, was to be Dylan's last full live show for five years, but the 1970 Isle of White Festival, was to be the second to last ever live show for someone else,

and we'll talk about that in two weeks' time. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week, Patreon backers will get a 10-minute bonus podcast. This week's is on Alice's Restaurant Massacre by Arlo Guthrie. Visit patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey to sign up for as little as a dollar a month.

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