John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville (The Songs Of Bob Dylan) by Jochen Markhorst

The Summer Of Love passes Dylan by. While Sergeant Pepper converts the rest of the music scene to sitar, trumpets, sound experiments, strings, studio effects and psychedelics at all, Dylan and The Band spend months in the countryside, playing antique folk songs and country songs in the basement of the Big Pink, and tinkering with some seventy of his own songs that sound fresh and old-fashioned at the same the legendary Basement Tapes. In October and November '67, Dylan interrupted his months of playing three times, for three short recording sessions in Nashville. Dylan takes the scanty instrumentation and the old-fashioned, simple song structures of The Basement Tapes with him. The big difference lies in the lyrics. In the basement, the songs are often made on the spot, are nonsensical ("Quinn The Eskimo"), funny, stately ("I Shall Be Released"), cheerful and even childish. For the lyrics of John Wesley Harding, Dylan has taken his time - they were already written well before the recordings - an unusual way of working for the bard. Just as on Blonde On Blonde, the texts are still suggestive and elusive, but also much more precise.. “What I'm trying to do now is not use too many words,” says Dylan in an interview in 1968, “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.” Dylan now avoids the decorations from songs like "Visions Of Johanna" and "Desolation Row" - every metaphor, every image, according to him, is functional. But even though the poetry is precise, concise, finished - it remains ambiguous.It is Kafka.In his eleventh Dylan book Jochen Markhorst leads the reader through Bob Dylan’s lonely masterpiece John Wesley Harding, highlighting the backgrounds, history and impact of the songs on this legendary album, the album with immortal classics like "All Along The Watchtower" and "I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight".