John Wesley Harding

Bob Dylan | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (October 25, 1990)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Sony
• ASIN: B0000024TZ
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  Vinyl
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #157,611 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. John Wesley Harding

2. As I Went Out One Morning

3. I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine

4. All Along the Watchtower

5. The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest

6. Drifter's Escape

7. Dear Landlord

8. I Am a Lonesome Hobo

9. I Pity the Poor Immigrant

10. The Wicked Messenger

11. Down Along the Cove

12. I'll Be Your Baby Tonight

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dylan Comes Back Quietly, October 5, 2000

By 

Thomas Magnum (NJ, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: John Wesley Harding (Audio CD)

After Bob Dylan had a severe motorcycle accident in Woodstock, 1966, he spent almost two years recouperating. During that time only his first Greatest Hits album was released. When he did finally release an album of new material in late 1968, it moved away from the electrified sounds of Bringing It Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde and returned to his quieter folk roots. On John Wesley Harding, there is no electric guitar, just Dylan's acoustic guitar and harmonica backed with bass, drums and piano. The accident probably made Dylan more reflective on life and death and those themes lyrically permeate this great work. Of course everyone is familiar with "All Along The Watchtower", but there are other songs that deserve high standing in the expansive Dylan catalog. "The Ballad Of Frankie Lee & Judas Priest" has a classic Dylan narrative with cryptic lyrics and is one of his best. "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" finds him in fine vocal form and "I Pity The Poor Immigrant", "I Am A Lonesome Hobo" & "Dear Landlord" has him again singing about the trouble and travails of the little man. There is a country music feel running through the album and it laid the groundwork for his next release, the full blown country album Nashville Skyline.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Simple Album, October 30, 2000

By 

"porkspam" (San Diego) - See all my reviews

This review is from: John Wesley Harding (Audio CD)

JWH's draw is its simplicity: just three or four guys playing simple instruments simply while Dylan sings simple, powerful, moral tunes evoking Old Testament judgment and irony. Released in 1968 it was thought by some to be a response to the technological one-upmanship of the endless tape-loops of the just-then released Beatles' Sergeant Pepper and the Stones' Satanic Majesty's Request. In truth, Dylan's 1966 near-death experience - which resulted in an almost two-year absence from the recording scene - seems to have caused Bob to "bring it all back home" to both his rural and Jewish roots. (The evidence of Dylan's slowdown first appear in his [and the Band's] 1975 release, The Basement Tapes, which was actually recorded immediately after the motorcycle accident, bootlegged for years, and then released by Columbia.) The result of Dylan's introspection is stark background music with Dylan's voice leading the way through stories with lessons such as "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest's'" "If you see your neighbor carrying something, help him with his load/and don't go mistaking Paradise for that home across the road." While the album is not more or less concerned with morality than any othe Dylan work, it is profund in its concern for personal repentance; there is a noticeable absence of Dylan's "You got a lot of nerve" finger-pointing. Indeed, "The Drifter's Escape" is a warning to the self-righteousness of a narrow society, a reminder that personal repentance does not include Puritanical purges of own's neighbor's conscience. JWH, while musically simple, does not suffer the way Springsteen's Nebraska does from its spare arrangements. Unfortunately, Springsteen's successful imitation of the dusty monotony of life on the plains does not make for interesting music; JWH, on the other hand, is a great piece of work because simplicity is inherently valuable while boring is, well, boring. Evocative of the Biblical books of Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, JWH is one of rock's great works, a moral retreat set to music, something to make one close the Wall Street Journal and consider the lilies of the field, the mate and children of one's heart and home.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Best, in a Way, October 26, 2001

By 

Fred Enderby (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: John Wesley Harding (Audio CD)

Look at it in the right light, and you could say that John Wesley Harding is Dylan's best album: maybe nowhere else did the intimacy & the style or the mysterious lyrics & the powerful meaning come together so well. The songs are typically enigmatic, but they obey their own internal logic (a real rarity, actually, in the work of Dylan or anyone else who aspires to surrealism). The songs are all short, and almost all are three stanzas with barebones rhyme schemes and no chorus. The effect achieved is something like weird, understated, powerful dreams. "I Dreamed I saw St. Augustine": a brief and harrowing vision, unclear in meaning but, "I awoke in anger / So alone and terrified. / I put my fingers against the glass / And bowed my head and cried."

The album is all the weirder for coming out of nowhere and vanishing just as fast: before was Blonde on Blonde, after was Nashville Skyline. The Basement Tapes are supposed to offer a sort of transition, but the styles are really quite different. Even when you listen to the five-album original basement tapes, there is very little that presages John Wesley Harding--maybe songs like Bonnie Ship the Diamond and Too Much of Nothing.

In a way, of course, it's silly to compare JWH to Highway 61, Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks, Freewheelin', etc. and try to figure out which is the best. All have a exquisitely realized style. What can I say? I like this album. It's one of the best. Hendrix is supposed to have recorded "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine," but pulled off releasing it because he felt it was too intimate a song to publicly cover, opting instead for "All Along the Watchtower." Man, it sure would be great to have his version of "St. Augustine."

My candidates for the perfect tracks on the album: Dear Landlord, I Pity the Poor Immigrant, Frankie Lee & Judas Priest, As I Went Out One Morning, Wicked Messenger, I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, All Along the Watchtower.