Wicked Messenger

by Mike Marqusee

  Like the Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding painted a timeless landscape, saturated in historical suffering. But in place of the Basement Tapes’ wealth of personal idiosyncrasy, the figures that occupy this landscape are abstract, universal, isolated. “I put myself out of the songs,” Dylan insisted, “I’m not in the songs anymore.”19 He has left the theater of his own consciousness to fashion images and tales that stand on their own, as self-contained vehicles for home truths about the human condition. The songs seem carved in granite. Yet they are also edgy, abrupt, incomplete—and very much enmeshed in the experiences and dilemmas Dylan shared with others on the eve of the world-splitting events of 1968.

  In John Wesley Harding, social reality seems much more solid than in the kaleidoscopic mid-sixties songs. It also seems less changeable, its features permanent and elemental: poverty, homelessness, loneliness, the arbitrary cruelty of the mob or the state. In some ways, it’s a return to the territory of “Hollis Brown” or “North Country Blues”—a territory largely shunned in the psychedelic era. It should have but didn’t strike commentators at the time just how political this album was. There was no mention of Vietnam or civil rights, but there were immigrants, hobos, drifters, rich and poor people, landlords, outlaws. That this territory did not strike many as “political” is an indication of just how insensitive sections of the American New Left had become to the class issues that preoccupied their predecessors. Dylan himself seemed aware of the paradox. When John Cohen said to him, “your songs aren’t as socially and politically applicable as they were earlier,” Dylan snapped: “As they were earlier? Could it be that they are just as social and political, only that no one cares to . . . let’s start that question again.” After Cohen repeated the point, Dylan gave a more tight-lipped reply: “Probably that is because no one cares to see it the way I’m seeing it now, whereas before I saw it the way they saw it.”20

  In one respect, John Wesley Harding was in keeping with musical fashion. It was a concept album, a coherent and distinctive vision, and as such a worthy successor to the string of visions Dylan had etched on vinyl since 1962. But John Wesley Harding was also an accident. Initially, Dylan had intended to enrich the Nashville tracks with guitar and organ. Robbie Robertson had dissuaded him, and thus the strikingly bare sound was sent out into the world. Similarly, Dylan left the lyrics of the title track unfinished. He meant to write another stanza but it wouldn’t come—there was an ambiguity here he could not resolve. It’s not the only song on the album that seems truncated. Dylan himself explained that, despite appearances, these songs were not really ballads; they “lack this traditional sense of time,” the narrative patience and scope that Dylan associated with the folk genre.

  Woody Guthrie had died in October, shortly before Dylan recorded John Wesley Harding. He had been Dylan’s starting point as a singer-songwriter, stylistically and politically, and Dylan had never wavered in his devotion to Guthrie’s music. It’s not surprising that the title track, like other songs on the album, revisits a Guthrie archetype. The song begins as a celebration of a modern-day Robin Hood, the outlaw who was “a friend to the poor” and “never known to hurt an honest man,” a successor to Guthrie’s Pretty Boy Floyd. But in the song’s cursory narrative, the notes of ambivalence—the suggestions of violence, guilt, and opportunism—pile up. “All along this countryside, He opened a many a door . . . with a gun in every hand,” “he was never known / To make a foolish move.” In reality John Wesley Hardin (Dylan added the g) was an assassin with some forty killings to his name and at one time a member of an anti-Reconstruction vigilante gang in Texas. He served seventeen years in jail, where he qualified as a lawyer, only to be gunned down by an aggrieved business partner soon after his release. Dylan may or may not have been aware of the historical background (he may just have liked the resoundingly Protestant name) but the evasive formulations of the song certainly undercut any suggestions of noble heroism. “All across the telegraph / His name it did resound.” All that’s left is the published account, and that could be a lie or it could be the truth—or more likely a compound of the two. There’s something of John Ford’s ambiguous endorsement of legend over truth here, but with an additional bleakness: history offers no bittersweet vindication.ar

  Dylan’s portrait of the “poor immigrant” is even less heroic. This isn’t one of Guthrie’s deportees, but a cold and selfish man who lies and cheats. Driven by insecurity and acquisitiveness, he “passionately hates his life / And likewise, fears his death.” Lost in an alien land of competitive individuals, the immigrant’s very efforts to survive and thrive dehumanize him. He “eats but is not satisfied,” “hears but does not see,” and “falls in love with wealth itself.” It’s a form of lifelessness, Dylan’s long-standing enemy, but now it is pitied rather than scorned. Like other songs on the album, it deromanticizes the oppressed, but also disdains cynicism. The immigrant is a victim of history.

  The song also restates Dylan’s critique of money-power, the suspicion of Mammon that persists through all his metamorphoses. The incompatibility between wealth and human solidarity is made explicit in “I Am a Lonesome Hobo.” At first, the hobo presents himself in isolation, an individual cut off from the human family. “Where another man’s life might begin, / That’s exactly where mine ends.” Then he reveals how and why he has fallen from grace:Well, once I was rather prosperous,

  There was nothing I did lack.

  I had fourteen-karat gold in my mouth

  And silk upon my back.

  But I did not trust my brother,

  I carried him to blame,

  Which led me to my fatal doom,

  To wander off in shame.

  It seems that the hobo’s isolation began not with his loss of wealth but with the effect of wealth upon him in the first place. The last stanza is the hobo’s warning, and it’s as explicit a statement of values as anything in Dylan’s protest phase:Stay free from petty jealousies,

  Live by no man’s code,

  And hold your judgment for yourself

  Lest you wind up on this road.

  Some might find this statement of values not only explicit but banal. And at times on John Wesley Harding there is a Polonius-like quality in the way “the moral of the story, the moral of this song” is so flatly drawn. However, Dylan routinely undercuts the complacency—frequently, as in the last line of “I Am a Lonesome Hobo,” by a brisk reminder that the losses stand unrecouped. And the advice to “hold your judgment for yourself ” is more than a world-weary expedient. One respect in which John Wesley Harding does break from the Dylan of the mid-sixties is its repudiation of self-righteousness. The need for a more tempered and understanding engagement with a hostile world fills “Dear Landlord,” usually read as Dylan’s message to Albert Grossman, the manager with whom he had recently quarreled. The song’s marvelous opening salvo—“Please don’t put a price on my soul”—is the eternal plea of the creative artist to the moneyman. Though the artist’s “burden is heavy” and his “dreams are beyond control,” he vows to “give you all I got to give;” he knows that he remains dependent on the moneyman’s whims:And I do hope you receive it well,

  Dependin’ on the way you feel that you live.

  Dylan sees the moneyman himself as a victim of his wealth:All of us, at times, we might work too hard

  To have it too fast and too much,

  And anyone can fill his life up

  With things he can see but he just cannot touch.

  The plaintive blues moves toward a cautious plea for negotiation based on mutual respect. “Each of us has his own special gift” and therefore: “if you don’t underestimate me, / I won’t underestimate you.” It’s one of several songs on the album that end in blank irresolution. In “Dear Landlord,” the social nexus is a demanding one. Salvaging a measure of dignity and autonomy requires patience and compromise.

  In the compact “Drifter’s Escape,” Dylan returns to “the courtroom of honor” he’d exposed in “Hat
tie Carroll.” Now it’s a broader theater of injustice, and what takes place within its walls is altogether less dignified. From his dramatic opening cry: “Oh, help me in my weakness,” the drifter appears as Everyman, exhausted and bewildered by his fate, persecuted by the state for no reason. The song depicts the public domain as a shameless charade. The judge casts his robe aside and sheds a conspicuous tear:Outside, the crowd was stirring,

  You could hear it from the door.

  Inside, the judge was stepping down,

  While the jury cried for more.

  For both judge and jury, authority and the mob, justice is nothing but self-indulgent performance and spectacle. The individual is powerless, and can only be delivered by a deus ex machina:Just then a bolt of lightning

  Struck the courthouse out of shape,

  And while ev’rybody knelt to pray

  The drifter did escape.

  The sudden ending is cold comfort. These aren’t the chimes of freedom flashing. The rupture between institutions and individuals that had fueled Dylan’s work since the first protest songs is here chiseled in granite, presented as an immutable fact of life.

  If the drifter is a passive everyman, the Wicked Messenger is a more complicated figure, and his fate is more enigmatic than the drifter’s. The song title appears to be derived from Proverbs 13:17: “A wicked messenger falleth into mischief: but a faithful ambassador is health.” In Dylan’s song, the wicked messenger first appears in public, unbidden, as an obsessive (“a mind that multiplied the smallest matter”) with a compulsion to flatter his audience. He makes a bed for himself “behind the assembly hall.” One day he brings forth a note to the world reading “The soles of my feet, I swear they’re burning.” The public response to this personal declaration carries a sting in the tail:Oh, the leaves began to fallin’

  And the seas began to part,

  And the people that confronted him were many.

  And he was told but these few words,

  Which opened up his heart,

  “If ye cannot bring good news, then don’t bring

  any.”

  Dylan explained that this third and final verse “opens it up and then the time schedule takes a jump and soon the song becomes wider.” That’s a device typical of John Wesley Harding’s unfinished parables, as is the abrupt finale.

  The wicked messenger is the artist, the prophet, the protest singer, seeking public approval and being told in starkly unequivocal terms the price of that approval—he forfeiture of integrity and autonomy. As for the “faithful ambassadors,” Dylan tells their saga in “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” an adaptation of “Joe Hill,” a popular-front favorite, which opens:I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night

  Alive as you and me

  Says I, “But Joe, you’re ten years dead,”

  “I never died,” says he, “I never died,” says he.

  Hill, the labor organizer and songwriter executed in Utah in 1915, assures the dreamer that he still lives through the movement he served:“From San Diego up to Maine

  In every mine and mill

  Where workers strike and organize,”

  Says he, “You’ll find Joe Hill,” says he, “You’ll find

  Joe Hill.”

  The song was composed in the summer of 1936 not by workers, organizers or itinerant balladeers but by two educated leftist intellectuals, Earl Robinson and Alfred Hayes, at the CP-organized Camp Unity in upstate New York. By the end of the year, the song had spread across the country and was being sung in Spain by members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.21 As he reveals in Chronicles, Dylan learned about Hill from Izzy Young and knew him as a “messianic figure who wanted to abolish the wage system of capitalism—a mechanic, musician and poet . . . . an organizer for the Wobblies, the fighting section of the American working class.” He also knew the song—and didn’t like it:Protest songs are difficult to write without making

  them come off as preachy and one-dimensional.

  You have to show people a side of themselves that

  they don’t know is there. The song “Joe Hill” doesn’t

  even come close, but if there ever was someone who

  could inspire a song, it was him. Joe had the light in

  his eyes.

  Dylan saw Hill as a “forerunner of Woody Guthrie,” and therefore of himself in an earlier incarnation. But where both Hill and Guthrie were in day-to-day contact with working people and their organizations, Dylan’s relationship with his audience was more estranged, and, increasingly, deeply problematic for him. This disturbing truth is one of the underlying themes of John Wesley Harding.

  Dylan replaces Joe Hill with St. Augustine. There’s no particular significance in the choice; it was enough that it was a saint from long ago. The substitution enabled Dylan to throw his story back into history, and thereby suggest that the tale was eternally recurring. The modern-day secular martyr was being recycled into a type from antiquity. Like Joe Hill, Dylan’s St. Augustine “is alive as you or me,” but he’s not calmly reassuring, he’s frantic: “searching for the very souls / who already have been sold.” In the second verse, the saint, like Joe Hill, steps forward to address his beloved but debauched democracy (“Come out, ye gifted kings and queens”). However, he does not stir the people to action; he merely asks them to “hear my sad complaint.” He then declares, with a lilting finality: No martyrs are among ye now, whom you can call your own. This ringing line repeals the substance of the Hayes-Robinson song. A striking statement from an artist who had mourned Medgar Evers and written poems about JFK, who’d lived through the Birmingham church bombing and the murders of Mississippi summer, not to mention the death of Che Guevara, announced weeks before he wrote the song. It seems the public world is now too inauthentic to sustain anything as morally grand as a martyr. The only consolation is to “go on your way accordingly / and know you’re not alone.” But there’s a further twist in this reconsideration of Joe Hill’s mission and fate. The singer’s dream ends with the realization that he himself is among those who have put the saint to death. (Having declared there are no martyrs, St. Augustine quickly becomes one.) Dylan himself is revealed as one of the distracted mob, one of the persecutors. And this guilt bereaves him of the only consolation St. Augustine has offered, and he finds himself “alone and terrified.”

  This retelling of the legendary martyr-singer’s tale is in part Dylan’s reflection on his own democratic-prophetic vocation. The only prophecy the artist can make with confidence is that he and his message will be rejected by a world that values all the wrong things. The movement’s reassuring dream of redemption through history has been replaced by a nightmare of unqualified bleakness and failure. The true prophets of freedom (not the charlatans in the media) will always be rejected by those who fear freedom. The pathos of the song, however, lies in the admission of mutual complicity—one of the themes that ties John Wesley Harding together. We are all guilty, we all fear the truth, and if we were treated as we deserve, we’d all be damned. The facile dichotomy between them and us, between the hip and the straight, the in-group and the masses, the leader and the pack has been dissolved by humbling experience.

  Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise, ye princes, and anoint the shield. For thus hath the Lord said unto 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 he cried, A lion: My lord, I stand continually upon the watchtower in the daytime, and I am set in my ward whole nights: And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen; and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.

  —Isaiah 21:5-9

  The apocalyptic tone is nowhere stronger on John Wesley Harding than in “All Along the Watchtower.” This startlingly concise and deeply mysterious composition begins in medias res. As Dylan himself noted, it’s a
case of “the cycle of events working in a rather reverse order.” The last verse sets the scene for the first two. And one key to that last verse is the passage in Isaiah quoted above. Here the princes are called to keep watch; the “couple of horsemen” approach from the distance; their message is that a civilization has fallen.

  The first two of the three verses that make up “All Along the Watchtower” comprise a dislocated dialogue between the two biblical horsemen, recast by Dylan as the joker and the thief. The joker opens the song with a declaration of the urgent need to escape from an environment of oppressive incoherence:“There must be some way out of here,” said the

  joker to the thief,

  “There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief.”

  Crucially, it’s not only “confusion” that the joker complains of but also exploitation—businessmen drink his wine and ploughmen dig his earth, but have no idea “what any of it is worth.”

  Where the joker is aggrieved, petulant, panicked, the thief—who replies in the second verse—is calm, “kindly,” but also stern. “No reason to get excited” is not the laid-back counsel it may seem. What is needed now, the thief avers, is steely nerves; it’s precisely because there is cause for panic that this is no time to panic. Where the joker complains about thieves (those who drink his wine and dig his earth), the thief complains about those “who feel that life is but a joke.” It’s a caution against cynicism, and a call to find something deeper in this anxious moment. But the thief offers no “way out of here,” merely the prophetic injunction:So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.