John Wesley Harding (album) - Aftermath

Aftermath

"I asked Columbia to release it with no publicity and no hype, because this was the season of hype," Dylan said. Clive Davis urged Dylan to pull a single, but even then Dylan refused, preferring to maintain the album's low-key profile.

In a year when psychedelia dominated popular culture, the agrarian John Wesley Harding was seen as reactionary. Critic Jon Landau wrote in Crawdaddy Magazine, "For an album of this kind to be released amidst Sgt. Pepper, Their Satanic Majesties Request, After Bathing at Baxter's, somebody must have had a lot of confidence in what he was doing ... Dylan seems to feel no need to respond to the predominate trends in pop music at all. And he is the only major pop artist about whom this can be said."

The critical stature of John Wesley Harding has continued to grow. As late as 2000, Clinton Heylin wrote, "John Wesley Harding remains one of Dylan's most enduring albums. Never had Dylan constructed an album-as-an-album so self-consciously. Not tempted to incorporate even later basement visions like 'Going to Acapulco' and 'Clothesline Saga,' Dylan managed in less than six weeks to construct his most perfectly executed official collection."

The album was remastered and re-released in 2003 using a new technology, SACD.

While legend has it that Dylan recorded John Wesley Harding after finishing The Basement Tapes sessions with members of The Band, several biographers and discographers have argued that the final reel of basement recordings actually postdates the first John Wesley Harding session.

Regardless of when this session actually occurred, The Band did accompany Dylan for at least one performance in the months following John Wesley Harding. After hearing of Woody Guthrie's passing (two weeks before John Wesley Harding's first session), Dylan contacted Harold Leventhal, Guthrie's longtime friend and manager, and extended an early acceptance to any invitation for any memorial show that might be planned. The memorial came on January 20, 1968, with a pair of shows at New York's Carnegie Hall. Sharing the bill with his folk contemporaries like Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, and Guthrie's son, Arlo, Dylan gave his first public performances in twenty months, backed by The Band (billed then as The Crackers). They played only three songs ("Grand Coulee Dam", "Dear Mrs. Roosevelt", and "I Ain't Got No Home"), and it would be another eighteen months before Dylan would again perform in concert.

As 1967 came to a close, Dylan's lifestyle became more stable. His wife, Sara, had given birth to their daughter, Anna, earlier that summer. He had reconciled with his estranged parents. A long contract negotiation ended in a lucrative new deal, allowing Dylan to stay with Columbia Records. While the media would never lose interest, Dylan maintained a low enough profile that kept him out of the spotlight.

After his appearance at Woody Guthrie's memorial concert, 1968 would see little, if any, musical activity from Bob Dylan. His songs continued to be a major presence, appearing on landmark albums by Jimi Hendrix, The Byrds, and The Band, but Dylan himself would not release or perform any additional music. There was very little songwriting activity, as well.

"One day I was half-stepping, and the lights went out," Dylan would recall ten years later. "And since that point, I more or less had amnesia ... It took me a long time to get to do consciously what I used to be able to do unconsciously."

There were major changes in his private life: Dylan's father died from a heart attack, prompting Dylan to return to Hibbing to attend the funeral. Shortly afterwards, Sara gave birth to their third child.

John Wesley Harding would prove to be the end of a long, influential run of prolific, groundbreaking work. Though in retrospect Harding already hinted of the country-pop sound of his next album, the seemingly sudden change in his musical style once again would prove dramatic and baffling to the press and his fans.