The classic track Bob Dylan said meant nothing to him: “I got tired”
Bob Dylan was as much a reporter in his songs as a poet. No matter what era he found himself working in, the folk icon always infused pieces of modern history into whatever he was making, whether that was the fight for civil rights in the early 1960s or working out the details of his personal life when making albums like Blood on the Tracks. With that many songs, though, some do fall through the cracks, and Dylan thought that the song ‘John Wesley Harding’ didn’t have any emotional resonance for him.
Then again, almost everything Dylan said normally had a different meaning, depending on the listener. Sometimes, you would hear him speaking about the world’s injustices, and within just two lines, he would say something that would come off more than a little bit flippant, as if he was mocking the idea of people hanging on his every word.
If anything, an album like John Wesley Harding was supposed to be a way for him to recuperate after becoming such an icon. He had been through a horrific motorcycle accident, and moving out to the country and playing a bunch of country-infused folk songs was about as far away from the pinup take on a rock star that he was becoming on records like Blonde on Blonde.
That didn’t stop people from trying to analyse his songs anyway, though. A piece like ‘The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest’ would eventually give the heavy metal juggernauts their name, and anyone who has been within three feet of a classic rock station probably knows ‘All Along the Watchtower’ for the immortal version played by Jimi Hendrix just a few years after Dylan debuted it.
As for the title track, Dylan thought there were much better songs that he had written, telling Jann Wenner, “It didn’t mean anything to me. It started out as a long ballad, like maybe one of those old cowboy ballads. But in the middle of the second verse, I got tired. I had a tune and didn’t want to waste the tune, it was a nice little melody, so I just wrote a quick third verse, and I recorded that.”
Then again, the third verse might arguably be the best verse in the song. We had already gotten to know Harding as a Robin Hood-like figure who gives to the poor, but hearing the final lines about people spreading his values and no one being able to track him down feels like it’s ripped out of some unwritten American folktale.
And while it’s far from the best verse that he’s ever written, there’s probably a little bit of Dylan’s soul laced throughout that verse. Since he had become one of the biggest names in music, it’s easy to picture Dylan trying to imagine what other people think of him, with his name still on everyone’s lips even when he’s vanished without a trace.
This was supposed to be Dylan falling back down to Earth, but by making a song that’s this folksy, he actually ended up adding to his own mythology that much more. He might not have been comfortable with the attention, but when someone writes at this calibre all their lives, it will be picked apart whether they like it or not.
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