John Wesley Harding

Harvey Kubernik celebrates the release – exactly 40 years ago – of the mysterious Bob Dylan album which gave us All Along The Watchtower

On December 27, 1967, Columbia Records released Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding long player. In January of 1968 it was one of the most tracked LPs on countless FM radio stations in America and all over the world.

In Los Angeles, California, in the first week of January 1968, as a Pisces teenager, I walked to my parent’s home on positively 5th Street clutching my factory sealed $3.98 mono LP copy of JWH from the Frigate record shop on 3rd and Crescent Heights in the Miracle Mile district. A week later I was also able to buy it in stereo as well at The Infinite Mind head shop on Fairfax Ave.

Dylan named the album after an outlaw ballad he’d just written, JWH, actually based upon a true character: John Wesley Hardin, who in 1853 was born in Texas.

Author Clinton Heylin in his book Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions 1960-1994 describes JWH as “Dylan’s most perfectly executed album, that austerity (in sound and lyric) is, frankly, a key element. The fact that Dylan wrote JWH self-consciously as ‘an album of songs’ in a month and a day, and recorded it in just three afternoons, gives the album a unity all its own.”

“The first thing a friend said when we first heard the album, on the radio, late one night on KSAN-FM was: ‘I think …

by Harvey Kubernik
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