Word: songful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...round up everyone that knows more than they do." The raid could have happened in the past--Dylan could have read it in the letter or just remembered it. Or it could happen in Dylan's imagined future. But it could not be happening in the moment of the song, when Dylan is remembering the letter he received. Dylan sings it in the present, though, and we understand unquestioningly because that's where the raid's reality and meaning...
...know," said Joe, "I used to really dig Dylan and what he was doing. The new album, I'm not really sure. That hillbilly stuff just isn't our kind of scene. You know, all those Okies." I figured he just missed the whole album. There is only one song, the last one, where the message is the Okie sound. Though that one really threw people because Dylan had never put anything like it on his albums before. When you think about it, his records just before the last one were almost restricted in the way he stuck to hard...
...Albert Grossman, his manager, told the publishers that Dylan had decided not to release it. The cover of his new album was photographed in Woodstock with, upon Dylan's insistence, a Polaroid. For the last year Dylan is said to have been working very hard producing up to ten songs a week. Rolling Stone magazine printed a list of song titles early last fall that the magazine had heard would be on the new album; only a few made it. He got out John Wesley Harding by the beginning of this year...
Remember that in the beginning of his movie Dylan is flashing the words to Subterranian Homesick Blues on the screen. In the middle, he throws in "Dig Yourself." That's what Dylan is always trying to tell us, and the song is about what a hard time he has trying to help other people he's responsible for Saint Augustine on the new album is responsible for everyone. Staying alive is the struggle of the necessary cooperation of people to provide for themselves. You've got to work with other people. Saint Augustine expands the common struggle people share...
...album represents a stylistic change in his expression. Dylan's earlier efforts to find truth as an object is replaced by songs that try to identify a truthful process. This change in what Dylan is doing I think explains why John Wesley Harding is the title song. The hero is a cowboy (your standard American mythology) who is always trying to do right (read: seeking truth). The song doesn't complete a story; we never learn what he wants or what happens. Dylan has just identified his character to be the spirit of the album--the truth seeker...