Album Reviews

Whether the release of this album or Dylan's "plugging in" at Newport in 1965 enraged fans more is debatable, but whichever way you see it, everyone agrees that this record was reviled when first released back in the Spring of 1969.

Gone was the angry, sarcastic, rebellious Dylan. In his place was a new, mellow homebody. Dylan's 1966 motorcycle accident woke him up to a feeling of having been exploited and a realization that he no longer wished to be a generation's spokesperson.

He devoted himself to his family and then entered his "Basement tapes" phase at "Big Pink," writing and recording with The Band. Many of the songs recorded there ended up being covered by others before he had a chance to record them in the studio himself.

Dylan went to Nashville in the fall of 1967 and backed by just the late Kenny Buttrey on drums, Charlie McCoy on bass and Pete Drake on pedal steel, recorded his first post-motorcycle accident album John Wesley Harding, a spare, atmospheric effort filled with religious overtones and including, among other Dylan classics, "All Along the Watchtower."

While its dark, somber tone marked a new sound for Dylan, fans were more than accepting, figuring their hero, with the accident well behind him, was working his way back up the emotional and physical ladder to his former stature.

Then came this shit-kicker, with a new, even mellower Dylan, singing in a style that was almost a caricature of a commercial country crooner.

Fans were outraged and even confused, especially by the inclusion of Johnny Cash, who at the time was mistaken for some kind of establishment right-winger.

But, the short album was a commercial success spawning a few hit singles. The happy, self-satisfied Dylan may have lost part of his core constituency but he gained a larger mainstream one.

Backed again by the core of Buttrey, Drake and McCoy, producer Bob Johnston added fiddler Charlie Daniels, multi-instrumentalist flat-picker Norman Blake and on keyboards Bob Wilson, Dylan contentedly croons romantically "To Be Alone With You," "Lay Lady Lay" and "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You," and with no ulterior motive or agenda, catches a wave in the 1969 Nixon landslide.

Even the recording reflects the new Dylan softness. It's almost "pillow-smothered" muffled and while it sounded dead back then, today, on a high resolution system, the sonic choices made work to great effect.

Sundazed's reissue smartly doesn't aim to re-write history by whitening or brightening the muffled atmospherics, instead it does a great job of re-creating the original's warmth and depth. In fact, it's actually warmer and darker than the original, in part perhaps because of high frequency loss on the tape itself.

A short, sweet, career detour before Dylan veered off into years of genuine dreck and face-painted self-doubt, Nashville Skyline has only gotten better with age, like all of us!