John Wesley Harding

There was a post on Facebook the other day asking people to name the album that they listen to in its entirety, never skipping a track. What immediately popped into my head, but that I didn’t get around to posting (way too many Facebook group games) was Dylan’s John Wesley Harding. I’m sure there are plenty of other albums that I listen to—or used to listen to, including other Dylan albums—in their entirety, but that’s what came to mind.

Then, a few days later, I was going through Mark’s notebooks as part of my project to set aside a repository of his things for Jakob and Max and found a short entry talking about the first time he heard John Wesley Harding.

“He’d recently recovered from the motorcycle accident that almost killed him and hadn’t recorded anything for over a year after the incredible string of masterpieces: Bringing It All Back Home; Highway 61 Revisited; and Blonde on Blonde. There was an incredible amount of expectation after the long silence and the near death experience. A friend was living in a beautiful 19th century carriage house behind a stately mansion in downtown Buffalo. It was late November and chilly. The six of us huddled around the fireplace, which was the only light flickering on the dark wood paneled walls. We passed around a couple of potent joints and drank a bottle of wine. The album was a complete surprise coming after that succession of electrified dark nights of the soul. It was acoustic, folksy, countrified, mystical, and completely enigmatic. “Don’t go mistaking paradise for that home across the road.” “And if you don’t underestimate me I won’t underestimate you.” “Nothing is revealed.””

I Googled the release date of the album: December of 1967, so maybe he got the month wrong. This was a year before I graduated from high school. Mark, two years older, was already married and attending the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he grew up. Those years of hearing new releases from Dylan and all the 60s and 70s artists who defined our youth were themselves magical (especially when accompanied by drugs and alcohol). In a previous blog post called “Play That Rock Guitar” from 2014 I told of my “first” listens: “I was walking down the corridor to the common room in North Hall at Antioch College when I first heard the opening guitar strain of "Gimme Shelter" and I thought, “Oh my god, what is this music?” Years later, Mark and I were driving down the highway in northern California when “The Sultans of Swing” came on the radio and we said to each other, “Who is this, is this Dylan?” and then we heard Mark Knoefler’s guitar riff and we said, “This is not Dylan.”

Music was such a big part of our lives, and still is, although I’m in shock that I know so little about what is currently being produced. We inculcated the kids with our music and I get exposed to some of theirs—from Jakob, Leon Bridges and Black Pumas, from Max, Chris Stapleton—but my ignorance and lack of curiosity is astounding. That same blog post was essentially a rant about how once the years of rock and roll and R & B segued into pop, I gave up.

I found another entry in Mark’s journals about music that this time pertained to me. He said the fact that I worked as a fire lookout and brought the Mary Wells Sings My Girl album into the relationship sealed the deal for him. All the rest of it, from rock and roll and R & B and jazz and reggae kept us going for 36 years.