Dylan's revelatory comeback

Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding is one of the most fascinating albums in the history of rock and roll for one simple reason. Dylan had released five of the most important and influential albums imaginable from 1963 to 1966, and ended up in self-imposed exile after a near-fatal motorcycle accident 40 years ago this month. Instead of dying in the crash; after which his mythologized status would've grown exponentially with the likes of Hendrix, Lennon, Shakur, Cobain, Wallace, Joplin and Morrison; Dylan survived, heading back into the studio less than a year after the crash.\nDylan's voice less harsh, his lyrics less scathing and hallucinatory and the production and arrangements as comfortably folksy as a quiet night on a country front porch with sweet tea in hand, John Wesley Harding marked the first new direction for Bob since he shocked the shit out of diehard folkies by plugging his guitar in and hiring a band two years before. It would not be Dylan's last re-invention, but it may well have been his most startling. Country music overtones, slide guitar and songs about drifters and wicked landlords are about as far from visions of Johanna as Dylan could've ventured in 1967, and it's to his extreme credit that he pulled it off as convincingly as he did.\nJimi Hendrix and Dave Matthews Band may've rocketed it onto an astral plane, but "All Along the Watchtower" is still a Bob Dylan song at heart. Amazingly, it only feels like an afterthought on an album with compositions like "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine," Down Along the Cove" and "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight." There are no lofty lyrical experiments or 10-minute epics on Harding, and it's refreshing to see Dylan enjoying himself after five tiring years of being America's premiere wiseass genius. If "Desolation Row" was his sprawling, literate lament on the current state of America during the beat era, "I Pity the Poor Immigrant" is his return the country's innocent origins; both much needed fresh starts after so much witnessed and lived through.\nHis career would never again reach the heights it saw in the years before this record, and the incessantly fervent lyricism and imagination present in those past classic albums would only resurface briefly in the mid-70's on Blood on the Tracks and Desire, but Dylan proved with John Wesley Harding that a horrific accident could keep his legend temporarily down but never out.