I recall Abby Hoffman's Steal This Book at a shopping center book store that my brother and I visited each weekend. I remember being as much repelled as intrigued by counter culture sensibilities. The Last Whole Earth Catalog. Fritz the Cat. Jesus Freaks. But all this was coming to a close.

And it was some years afterwards, when Happy Days was fresh on the air and Farrah Fawcett was demonstrating how girls needed to fashion their hair that I bought Nashville Skyline.

So I missed out being appalled by the album. But I knew there was reason to be. Anyone who had followed Dylan as a counter culture guru just a few years earlier would be appalled! And I knew and saw evidence of this disgust.

National Lampoon, the new style humor magazine of the day was reaching its peak. And before it colonized TV as the original Saturday Night Live, it released an album (and stage show), Lemmings, that parodied that watershed moment of the late 60's, the Woodstock festival.

"Lemmings"

Lemmings featured the unknown John Belushi as Joe Cocker and Christopher Guest as Bob Dylan. This "Bob" being much chased by "the Announcer" and making his presence known to the audience only by hooting into a harmonica ala Harpo Marx, finally takes the stage to begin singing in the famous 60's Dylan drone and lugubrious styled melody:

"Ya say I was yer leader. Ya say I turned ya on. But yer startin' to suspect now...it wuz all a con! But I don't give a darn, noooooo...out behind the barn!".

Where then the band begins playing country licks and the new voiced nasaled baritone Dylan merrily wheezes:

"Oh, out behind the barn, I'm chewin' on a piece of hay! I'm up to my knees in cow SHIT! I'm shuvellin' my bluues awaay...".

This was Nashville Skyline.

Nashville Skyline was an atrocity! A betrayal of loyalties in a land just divided by Pigs and Yippies. On one side, the Woodstock Generation. On the other side, John Wayne, Merle Haggard, Joe Friday, and now, Bob Dylan. And who had welcomed him to this land of conservative rednecks but Johnny Cash! Johnny Cash with his boy named Sue! Johnny Cash, who, as explained by my high school anti-social hippieish friend, was popular with these rednecks because he couldn't sing in key and that was how rednecks liked it.

Because they were stupid.

Goober Pyle?

And with them stood Dylan, grinning like Goober Pyle, tipping his hat, looking down and greeting us, where we must be on the ground, the sun flashing behind him through the deep blue of the sky. And on the back cover, the bromide, "a new collection of songs featuring the voice and guitar of Bob Dylan", as if Dylan was a new addition to the cronies at the Grand Ol' Opry.

"I'm up to my knees in cow SHIT! I'm shuvellin' my bluues awaay...".

No wonder Dylan-garbage-inspector A. J. Weberman needed to conclude from the album that Dylan must be on heroin...

"A new collection of songs..."

With the release of Time Out Of Mind, Bob Dylan stated that to him country music is "Johnnie and Jack, guitars but no drums or piano." But that was not country music the 1960's nor is it the music that got Nashville called Music City, USA. The city had come to the country and while country artists might have grown up in a "holler', they didn't play in barns or fields but in cocktail lounges and night clubs. A new wave had hit country music and a skyline of high rises and glass towers surrounded it. 

Rockabilly had divided from Rock'n'Roll and performers like Charlie Rich smoothly paved the way to the new country sound. Jerry Lee Lewis put on the country music disguise, wearing it very well, but found he himself hung by his bouffant haired background singers. George Jones and Tammy Wynette presided over this new wave, belting out the pressures of new respectability and new money.

While Mick  Jagger and Paul Simon found this respectability weak and loathsome, singing of mothers taking "a little yellow pill" because domestic life "is such a drag" or Mrs. Robinson lingering in a faded past, Tammy Wynette took on these new anxieties without condescension and from an adult point of view.

Singing D-I-V-O-R-C-E, Wynette portrays a mother trying the keep the hard truth from her children. A later song of George Jones', demonstrative of his style, "He Stopped Loving Her Today" releases a ghost of pain from a heartache never even considered in the music of the "younger generation". 

Where I grew up in Texas, the formula seemed clear: Rock music was for kids, Country Music was for adults.

Nashville Skyline reflects this code but emerges as a strange combination of the sincere and artificial, so inextricably woven to appear cohesive, compact, but almost incomprehensible.

Jacob Dylan

Jacob Dylan recalls Nashville Skyline as the voice of his parents and therefore unlistenable. He does not elaborate from his unique point of view but his meaning seems clear. This is the music of marriage and family, specifically the marriage and family of Bob Dylan, even if the songs themselves have nothing specifically to do with that. And it seems unlikely that Jacob is recalling the merry times his parents spent crooning "I Threw It All Away" but rather the echos of strife and arguments, stated or silent, and the concessions of love between two people married and raising a family.

The perils and joys of adult love

But these subjects were the province of country music in the late 1960's: the perils and joys of adult love. And if the predominate themes in country music were the broken heart and simple pleasures, Dylan did not stray far from those that in his own song writing for this album. What was remarkable, or repugnant, depending on one's point of view, about these songs is that they sounded nothing like anything Dylan had written before.

While it is easy to imagine that the writer of "Visions of Johanna" (from Blonde on Blonde) is the same writer of "Chimes of Freedom" (from Another Side of Bob Dylan), or even "The Times, They Are A'changin'" (from the likewise named album), nothing could have quite prepared the listener of these songs by this singer for "Peggy Day" On Nashville Skyline. Simultaneous to this disorienting style was the even more apparent change of Dylan's voice. Once described early in his career as "a dog caught in a barbed wire fence", this voice was low and sweet, absolutely crooning.

That voice

There was no apparent precedent for this voice. Even Dylan's most stunning change of direction, moving from acoustic to electric accompaniment on Bringing It All Back Home, featured on that album one side devoted to each approach. While John Wesley Hardin, released previously to Nashville Skyline had included pedal guitars on its final cut, and in a sense hints at the sound full blossomed on Nashville Skyline, there is no hint of the voice at all!

Of course, almost thirty years later, today, and numerous shockwaves intervening in the continuing career of Bob Dylan, this voice change hardly holds the surprise impact felt at the time. But it is worth considering on several levels. Perhaps most revealing is the idea that this so-called "new voice" is the bona fide voice of Bob Dylan, before his self education and study of folk music recordings.

Bonnie Beecher

According to Bonnie Beecher, a close friend to Dylan in the early 1960's, during his short stay at the University of Minneapolis, "Do you know his voice on Nashville Skyline?...Well, Dylan's early voice sounded like that. I was startled when I heard him again on Nashville Skyline. He got this bronchial cough that lasted almost a year, and he wouldn't take care of it because he thought the rougher his voice sounded, the more [it was] like Woody Guthrie. I thought he had lost...that sweet voice altogether, until [Nashville Skyline]."

But Bonnie Beecher was not the last to have heard this voice.

In 1967, between the releases of Blonde on Blonde, Dylan's towering achievement of electrified synthesis of the traditional American folk tradition with western poetics, rocked by the sounds of Salvation Army bands and the blues, and the release of John Wesley Hardin, his subsequently muted consideration of mortality and his soul, (both albums featuring members of the band that would reappear in the Nashville Skyline sessions), Dylan holed up in Woodstock, in a house called Big Pink.

Accompanied by his touring musicians, combatants-in-arms and friends, a group later known as The Band, they created a set of legendary recordings, many unofficially released, of hanging out and to hell with it songs, now known to Dylanania as The Genuine Basement Tapes.

"All You Have To Do Is Dream"

"All You Have To Do Is Dream" begins volume one of this multi-CD bootleg set. With its thumping country guitars sound, it is not typical of the Basement Tapes, but there is little typical about any of the songs here. But while many songs on the Basement Tapes offer strange echoes of some older tradition, this one seems to begin a tradition of its own. The song plays like a rough draft of Nashville Skyline.

Not only in the twisted optimism of the lyrics, not only in the studied rhythms and cowboy sound of the accompaniment, but in the voice itself. While not as intact as the voice heard on Nashville Skyline, it comes to it so closely that one becomes sure that the discrepancy is only from Dylan's lack of practice. A second take of the same song exhibits a voice even closer.

"See That My Grave Is Kept Clean"

And 54 songs later it happens: the boys have managed to get an autoharp this day and (presumably) to test it have whirled through a version of the Carter Family's "Wildwood Flower". Then Dylan turns to the Blind Lemon Jefferson classic (one he had previously recorded on his debut album), "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean". This time the voice is
unmistakable.

This IS the voice of Nashville Skyline. Low and sweet even to the last note of the autoharp hanging, as softly rolling as a country creek moving to the slow eddies of an invisible wind and perhaps as treacherously deep. It is a remarkable performance.

And through it, the voice itself becomes an idea, a way of being, a philosophy.

Singing like Caruso

Dylan's own comments about his voice change, expressed contemporaneous to the release of the album, hark back to memory of Bonnie Beecher. Dylan stated simply that since he had stopped smoking, he could now sing like the operatic Caruso. But this comment, half joking, half defensive seems typical of the Dylan hesitant to tell all. Far from accidental, and practiced in private with close friends, Dylan appears to have sought in this voice, his secret voice, a
solution to a secret of himself, mysterious even to himself.

Hank Williams and Woody Guthrie

In the jacket notes to Joan Baez in Concert, Part 2 (reprinted in Writings and Drawings by Bob Dylan, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, New York, 1973), Dylan writes:
 

In later times my idols fell

For I learned that they were only men

An' had reasons for their deeds

'F which weren't mine not mine at all

Woody Guthrie was my last idol

he was the last idol because he was the first idol

I'd ever met

that taught me

face t' face

that men are men

shatterin' even himself

as an idol

an' that men have reasons

for what they do

In 1968 and 1969, the years ultimately unimportant in terms of fashion or style, Bob Dylan, a man, wrote the songs to Nashville Skyline for a reason. In terms of his career, others may believe that he was following some sort of momentum from John Wesley Hardin, and perhaps he was. But if anything seems clear from the point of view of hindsight, Dylan left the career track beginning with John Wesley Hardin and now began to exclusively follow his own preoccupations. While this course had previously kept in tune with the temper of the times, within a few years, not even Clive Davis at Columbia Records could rescue Dylan from himself.

The preoccupations of Dylan had not changed. This man, a gifted musician with a passion for lived in or get the hell out of here songs, continued to deal with life through art which he conceived as eternal, matching mass production with imagination, and tradition with innovation, asking the same question with the ever changing answer, "Who Am I?"

Who Am I?

The Bob Dylan that acknowledged Hank Williams as his first idol had gone through enormous changes in his life and by the young age of twenty eight had experienced a dizzying climb in world popularity, not without personal cost or fierce opposition. Perceived as a sort of king to the hipsters (or hippies) by the media and therefore subject to the scorn and revulsion towards a generation as well as himself, Dylan had rallied that generation by his cool sarcasm and confrontive interviewee style. Perceived as a traitor to folk traditionists who saw their rising star as selling out to commercial greed, Dylan had performed some of his most powerful work to boos and catcalls, with boxing ring intensity.

And undergirding his stamina came the endless supply of amphetamines, LSD, pot, alcohol, ad infinitum. If this was not enough of brushing with death, a motorcycle accident reportedly placed Dylan in critical condition. Following his recuperation, Dylan emerged as more quiet, more cautious, though no less innovative. In John Wesley Hardin, Dylan sings in Wicked Messenger, "If you cannot bring good news, than don't bring any."

As a young man, Dylan was more prone to dismiss his earlier albums as a new one was released. It was as if with each new answer to the continuing question, "Who Am I" required that earlier answers must necessarily have been false or artificial. Or at least, that is how he would present his observations, perhaps in reaction to expectations that he must remain as he had been. His folk career was dismissed by Dylan as a collection of songs written simply because he lived in New York and trying to fit in with the crowd he was with. John Wesley Hardin was dismissed as deliberately poetic because that is how people expected him to be.

In interviews contemporary to Nashville Skyline, Dylan completely presents himself as a professional song writer only. Or possibly a business man.

Carving Woody

With Nashville Skyline, Dylan carves away Woody Guthrie, City Lights beat poets (with whoever else that THEY liked in literature), and anything else resembling poetry (including the court of King James which had wandered through the weirdly Biblical John Wesley Hardin). Leaving Dylan with his first idol: Hank Williams. And with Hank, the other singers and songwriters that Dylan liked before all this adventure and fame, before all these travels and all these lies about circus tents and whore houses (told early in his career).

It is not difficult to imagine Hank Williams as an idol to the boyhood Dylan. Hank's songs took his own world and tied them around his finger, condensing brawls, bars, bad luck and better women into three minute descriptions so precise that anyone could sing them and they would ring true. Hank had done a lot of hard living in a short amount of time and he had turned it all into songs so real, one could listen to them and imagine that they knew from them all one really
had to know about, say, circus tents and whore houses.

And Williams wrote a lot of songs, singing them with a razor in the pocket and gun in the boot intensity even as he might be praising the Lord after seeing the light. His songs were written in written in simple language with tight rhythms, quick rhymes, symmetrical line patterns, and solid images. He could make a wooden Indian cry and be laughing at the same time. Hank Williams songs became country standards and the standard of country music.

Country standards from another world

The songs on Nashville Skyline sound like country standards from another world. They are exquisitely crafted, using the same kind of sensibility of Hank Williams: tight, simple, precise, solid. They reflect the new urbane country sound of the 1960's and are filled with the pleasure of a tired man coming home from work, jacket slung over his shoulder in jaunty way, content to bemuse himself with the differences between Peggy Day and Peggy Night.

But the narrator in the songs is a curious "mannish-boy" (as Muddy Waters might put it), romantic enough to walk under the moon, to have mountains in his hands, smoky enough to burnish the colors in a woman's mind, but almost coy in his affections; he has, after all, only lost "the best pal" he ever had (in "One More Night).

In most of the selections, whether he is giving up his train ticket to be with the one he loves or contemplating the elusive Peggy Day, who he'd love to spend the night with, his sense of carnal pleasure seems to barely extend past the idea of winking. And then the lights go out! The song, "Country Pie" may aim at some kind of sensuality, and if the foods listed are to double as sexual metaphors, they are not remembered as such. Don't call this man late for dinner!

Whoever the narrator is on Nashville Skyline, he sounds responsible, if a little boring. And good husband and father material. Sexy in a cute way but hardly dangerous. As pedestrian as this sounds, it is this quality that makes Nashville Skyline so other worldly.

The Mystery Dream

The songs on Nashville Skyline tell a story of redemption from a dark fate. They are sung with the exhalation that follows surviving a close call. As if a new lease on life has been offered and one can afford one last look at the pit that was avoided. But the darkness of that pit still swirls around the narrator's heart and head, to be dismissed, discounted, discontinued.

In the mystery dream of Nashville Skyline, woes are countered by true love and loss just requires a little understanding to be overcome.

Although often criticized for having "filler" material, second rate songs too simple to take seriously, written hastily in hotel rooms, actually Nashville Skyline has no filler at all. That some songs were written quickly is simply a continuing testimony of Bob Dylan's prolific abilities. That  the songs are simple minded merely reflects the revulsion by some towards Bob Dylan writing these kinds of songs at all.

The structure of the album is as precise as the Kenneth Buttrey's drum work that punctuates the album. And what is the secret to life in this mystery dream? Good friends, good company, good work, good love.

The album begins with the reunion of good friends, long apart but close together. Johnny Cash had shared the Newport Folk Festival stage when Bob Dylan went electric. In "Girl From The North Country", they are back together, able to openly swirl this mystery between them.

"Nashville Skyline Rag" evokes the comfort of a country porch, good company and good musicians chopping wood simply for the sound of it. The instrumental leads us through the musical matrix that is to comprise all of Nashville Skyline.

Even when Dylan takes the lead in "To Be Alone With You", he is in good company. The song begins with spoken words to producer Bob Johnson, kindly, cooperatively, no prima donna here: "Is it rolling, Bob?"

A Tale of Midnight told in the Light

The songs themselves tell a larger story than any of them alone. The mystery dream unfolds as a tale of midnight told in the light. (See Song Listings).

But perhaps it is in the yearning of the voice, even in the harmonica in the instrumental, "Nashville Skyline Rag". Perhaps it is in the effort of his voice heard when he mimics an effortless raise in octave at the end of "One More Night". Perhaps it is in the cuddling of the time worn dramatics in all of Dylan's vocals here, as if precision could make fact. Underneath all these songs lies a tension and anxiety.

Just who is the politely sensitive dream man in Nashville Skyline and whose dream is he anyway?

Johnny Cash

There was a young man who had grown up listening to the Sun Record recordings of Johnny Cash, among many others, who became a recording artist in his own right. By his second album, The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, quite out of the blue, he received a fan letter from Johnny Cash himself. The letter stated that Cash considered the young man to be one of the finest country singers in the USA at that time. Dylan replied, in a manner that Cash later recalled as "flabbergasted".

The two began a correspondence. They met several times over the intervening years and by the time that Nashville Skyline was recorded, Cash and his wife, June Carter Cash, opened up their home to the married Dylan, his wife and their children.

Johnny Cash had begun at career at Sun Records with Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and Charlie Rich, when the label exemplified southern Rock'n'Roll, or Rockabilly, or simply Rock'n'Roll, in the 1950's. When that sound became regionally divided in the 1960's, Cash fell on the side of country music. His wife, June Carter Cash was heiress to the famous Carter Family band, daughter of "Mother" Maybelle Carter. Johnny Cash had exploited his short stint in prison to gain the image of the eternal convict in life's penitentiary and half of his career was devoted to prison concerts. The other half was spent as a devoted family man.

"I Walk The Line"

A song exemplary of this dual reputation is "I Walk The Line", with its title that conjures up "the last mile" walked by prisoners to be executed. It is actually a song about marriage. The narrator keeps a close watch on his heart, his eyes open all the time, keeping together the "ties that bind" against temptation towards infidelity or careless behavior. The song may sound as though it is listing conditions of parole but it is clear that this man's heart does so voluntarily because his wife is most important to him in life.

It is not hard to imagine Bob Dylan seeking Johnny Cash at this time of his life a kind of role model of a contented, but hard driving, husband. It is not hard to imagine the married Dylan's seeking married friends. It may not be true, but it is the sound of Nashville Skyline that makes it easy to imagine.

The sound of the album is wholesome. It is not littered with strange women, all nighters, and Texas Gin. It is not even filled with strange wanderings and drifter's escapes. It attempts to convey the pleasures and pleasant woes of a simple man. One who keeps a close watch on his heart so as not to stray too far.

Whose dream is he anyway?

To return to the question: Who is the politely sensitive dream man in Nashville Skyline and whose dream is he anyway? Dylan has hinted at the answer. As he stated to Anthony Scaduto in 1971, regarding Nashville Skyline, "There's no attempt there to reach anybody but me."

And in 1978, Dylan looks back: "On Nashville Skyline, you had to read between the lines. I was trying to grasp [for] something that would lead me on to where I thought I should be, and it didn't go nowhere -- it just went down, down, down."

It is on Blood On The Tracks, in 1975, that Dylan begins to openly speak in song and interview of delusions that people live through and by in life.

Nashville Skyline may be Dylan's most successful delusion. But delusion nonetheless.

The Dylan/Cash Sessions

Dylan extended his stay in Nashville to complete the duet with Johnny Cash that begins the album, Nashville Skyline. The ballad, "Girl From The North Country", by Dylan, had been originally released on The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, the album that had captured Cash's attention. It was not the only song performed by the duo.

According to Clinton Heylin, various accounts indicate that Dylan had suggested recording an album with Johnny Cash. The prospect seems unlikely given the nature of the sessions recorded (although words to that effect could certainly have been exchanged).

The Dylan/Cash Sessions [Spank Records SP-106] are a curious mess of mutual affection with an even more curious mixture of intimidation among the players. The musicians are the same as those on Nashville Skyline with the notable exception of Carl Perkins.

It is unlikely that Perkins entered the band as a disinterested party or simply as a studio musician. It is more likely that Cash had invited him to see this spectacle of Bob Dylan, world infamous counter cultural rock musician now trying his hand at a country sound. Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash were peers (and Perkins was on the payroll of Cash) and close associates to Rock'n'Roll's most infamous son of all, Elvis Presley.

The Anti-Elvis

While Cash may have regarded Dylan as a friend, Perkins may well have wanted to size up this enfant terrible who many believed as formidable as Elvis. And those who believed this of Dylan had generally rejected Elvis, therefore making Dylan a sort of anti-Elvis.

The opportunity to evaluate Dylan by Perkin's own standards as pioneer rock'n'roller and country musician certainly must have figured into Perkin's decision to pack his guitar.

The sessions have Dylan and Cash trading greatest hits, each singing the other's songs, Jimmie Rodgers standards, Elvis hits, and miscellaneous requests from each other. Dylan requests a hymn from Cash, "A Closer Walk With Thee". Afterwards, Cash gently chides Dylan, "Whut's one you know, Bob?". Dylan (apparently) demurs.

"Careless Love"

Perhaps the most interesting song from the sessions is "Careless Love" that functions as an extemporaneous lyrics contest, Cash and Dylan trading made up verses with the rule that the end rhyme must be of some sort of a gun. As Dylan gets into it (initially he has to ask Cash for a opening line to get him started), on his third try, he proceeds with an oddball concept:
 

You can pass my nest, and you can pass my hive

Cash snorts, "Mah whut?" 

Dylan sings very precisely:

You can pass by my NEST, you can pass my HIVE!

But you won't pass my 45!

The Anti-Basement Tape

Although Cash made a rash comparison of these recording to the famous "Mystery Sessions" of the Sun Records artists, these sessions make a better, odd companion to Dylan's Basement Tapes but with a striking difference. Cash is in charge of these Nashville sessions, calling out to Dylan to yodel on cue, prodding Dylan, outshining Dylan at every turn. Dylan finally states, at the end of a repeated version of Jimmie Rodger's Blue Yodel # 5, "I'm not going to do it another time". Cash agrees, with a generous chuckle.

In both the Basement Tapes and the Dylan/Cash Sessions, a primer of musical roots is presented. In the Basement Tapes, Dylan is clearly the leader, coaching the band, guiding them if only with inflections, halfway astonishing them with his seemingly endless supply of songs. The band members, The Band, knew what Dylan could withstand and who he was in the clinch. He had long ago earned their respect and friendship.

In the Dylan/Cash Sessions, Dylan seems to be caught with half memories of his childhood, hesitant to take much risk, although likely enjoying himself. It may be that it was risk enough indulge in the session. The hired musicians may not have marked a challenge. But to pair with both Cash and Perkins (and later, Earl Scruggs) demonstrates more than a tourist outing in Nashville.

Dylan may have survived the testing of the Rock'n'Roll pioneers. But it is not likely that Perkins left too impressed.

The Legacy of Nashville Skyline

Nashville Skyline sold well. For probably all the right reasons. It had a contemporary sound. It was easy to listen to. The songs were well written. Dylan had also anticipated a general move among rock performers to try out the country sound. Some months after the album was released, the Rolling Stones released their own take on country music, "Honky Tonk Woman".

In the decade that followed, the 1970's, country and rock became so intermingled that the mainstay players on the rock charts at the time are now currently identified with today's country music. Some claim that Dylan recording in Nashville contributed to the creation of Music City, USA.

Nonetheless, Nashville Skyline today is regarded by Dylan listeners as fairly obscure, an oddity, and a faint embarrassment. (In fact, if anyone has read this far, let me know!) Still, it is a remarkable moment. A time when Dylan apparently divested himself of himself, seeking something more true, more real, and more authentic of himself. At a moment he seemed convinced in both his personal life and musical career to have truly found himself, he apparently
was as far out in the  woods as could be.

A delusion on record, a dream of who he could be that only went "down, down, down". And it is this, as much as the authentic achievements of feeling and art that Dylan has produced that make this album special and important. And part of a body of work that will one day be seen as a complete and engrossing account of this artist's experience of his world.

And ours too.

Girl From The North County (with Johnny Cash)

Please Say Hello...

The album opens with a heart felt if somewhat awkward duet between Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. Sometimes described as verging on self parody, the song nonetheless begins to swirl a mystery between the two artists.

Dylan stated later that he was unable to write songs like "Girl From The North Country" and seemed somewhat perplexed by this. The song, of course, is a rewriting of the traditional ballad, "Scarborough Fair". The recording is taken from the sessions between Dylan and Cash that included Carl Perkins as a sideman among the other
musicians from Nashville Skyline.

The session is of worthy of discussion itself (See The Dylan/Cash Sessions).

This song was the most successful result of the sessions and I am speculating that the song was planned previous to the session for the album release. "Girl From The North Country" was originally released on The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, the album that had first captured Cash's attention, prompting his first contact with Bob Dylan.

It may well be that "Girl From The North Country" was a favorite song of Cash's and one that could be shared by the two musicians.

That it enters the song list of the sessions somewhere in the middle is not surprising. The session itself was probably planned as a general jam where the two could feel comfortable enough and practiced enough to deliver the chosen song. There is considerable disagreement about this and some believe the sessions were intended to result is an actual album.

Notice how Cash unexpectedly changes the lyrics on Dylan. Johnny Cash simplified the archaic "remember me..." refrain (taken from "Scarborough Fair"), to a more contemporary sounding, "Please say hello to the one who lives there". Dylan is still in mid "remember" and he fades out to let Cash carry the line.

This is typical of the Dylan/Cash Sessions, where Johnny Cash feels free to out-Dylan Dylan in terms of surprises. 

Nashville Skyline Rag

Hoedown

Sometimes described as filler, this instrumental features Dylan and his musicians delivering a tight, little number. It is probably dismissed as filler simply because it is an instrumental. Yet it is part of the cohesiveness of the album.

It truly introduces the sounds that are to follow and establishes a sense of comradery and community that is implicit in all the album. Nashville Skyline celebrates Dylan at terms with himself, no longer self absorbed but among many, and happy to be there. If these terms with himself ultimately were false, they are part of the mystery dream of Nashville
Skyline.

For Dylan to use the instrumental to convey meaning was unusual for one of his albums but there is so much unusual about Nashville Skyline that it fits right in. Nor is it unusual among Dylan's favored artists to demonstate musical accomplishment. Of course, Dylan may not have shared the prejudice of his listeners that a Bob Dylan record
required Bob Dylan lyrics.

Oddly, the piece reminds me of "Only A Tomato", performed by The Band on the Genuine Basement Tapes. Probably because, despite the musical differences, the theme is the same: We are here and we like each other. 

To Be Alone With You

"Is It Rolling, Bob?"

All formalities aside, (important formalities nonetheless for the new cordial Bob Dylan), the album begins in earnest. The musicians seem to leap from the previous cut of "Nashville Skyline Rag" while the new laid back Bob Dylan inquires if the tape is rolling. He then sets into the first song in this "new collection" (as identified on the album cover), confident and cool. He is playing the professional songwriter here as well, the role he identified himself as in contemporaneous interviews.

Obviously the song is celebrating good love and he sings with the exaltation of a rescued man.

But creeping in the corners is a curious darkness, as if the light cannot exist without it. The song introduces (for the album) the image of the night. Although caressed as the moment of intimacy when he is alone with the one he loves, the image recurs often in Nashville Skyline and spills beyond its structured metaphor.

There is a slight chill heard when only she is in view ,"while the evening slips away" that reminds us "that life's pleasures are few". But only one can be had?! And don't "they say the night time is the right time to be with the one you love"?

Dylan seems to be struggling beneath the merriment of the song. He clearly wants to  conform to the expectations of the they. The song seems written to conform to these expectations. But even so, there is a struggle in this conformity, a constant need for affirmation. The song offers a question in its opening lines, conjuring the image of the lovers alone for each other:

"Ain't that the way it's s'posed to be?" 

I Threw It All Away

"Take A Tip From One Who's Tried"

"Love is all there is" laments Bob Dylan and he is not going to let go this time. This song is one of the most anxious on the album and he appears to be offering himself as a witness to himself. Look at the young man that once was. See at what he did with his cruelty and callowness. Don't let this happen again. Respect love, it is bigger than all of us. Why, "it makes the world go ‘round."

The song is anxious because it is so cautious. While Jerry Lee Lewis may have sung, "I used to laugh at love ‘cause I though it was funny. Then you came along and moved me, honey!" in "Great Balls Of Fire", there was no injunction against cruelty here, and still a self serving reason for love. The married Bob Dylan cannot afford this carefree attitude.

"I Threw It All Away" is a woeful song, a cautionary tale. Wisely, (and the song is pitched with wisdom), the narrator does not suggest that one must fall in love with the one who loves. Rather, to respect the love itself. One takes the love, "it", to "your heart", not to let it stray. But this cautiousness hedges the song, and undermines the solution. If she gives you all of her love, how can you not reciprocate but not throw it all away or be cruel?

Both injunctions, to respect love but not fall in love foolishly are wise and at odds with one another. No, it is not good to be cruel. No, it is not good to give yourself away. But the fusing of the two in this song makes the conundrum appear insurmountable.

Perhaps Johnny Cash could have offered Bob Dylan a solution: that a married man must "keep a close watch on the heart of mine" while telling his love that it is "very, very easy to be true". "I Threw It All Away" appears to be the testimony that convicts the voluntary parolee in Cash's "I Walk The Line". 

Peggy Day

Night and Day

Bob Dylan takes a Buddy Holly like perspective of the mystery of the woman in this light hearted tune. There is no weighing of the costs of here, just the different aspects of a woman he loves. He appears carefree in his pleasurable assessment. This is Bob Dylan being clever, using the motif of day and night to illustrate the woman. Of course, every
woman is two women. One that a man understands and the other that a man does not.

 But the day and night exist in his mind too, as she turns his sky to blue from gray. The use of the night enters again in the lyrics but the voice betrays no concern. The song is pitched in contrasts, like the cover of Nashville Skyline itself. Backlit, blue sky, Bob Dylan smiling down, but it is he in black, it is he that stops the sun. When the midnight is gone, there is only light. But the midnight is never really gone.

And would he want to spend the night with Peggy Night? Or could that be a little too frightening? 

Lay Lady Lay

Midnight Cowboy

Originally written for the movie, Midnight Cowboy, the song "Lay, Lady, Lay" comprises the core around which Nashville Skyline is formed. This song holds the purest emotion found on the album. The pleading heard here seems truly pleading, not masked by any false hopes or hidden anxieties.

Curiously, the movie, Midnight Cowboy, makes an interesting appendix to the album. Midnight Cowboy, the first widely released X rated movie, (anything but pornography), featured Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight. The movie details the downward spiral of a country boy, entering the city to wind down as a male prostitute. It is a kind of Nashville Skyline in reverse: wherein the Bob Dylan album features the successful rock star (with attendant decadence) finding peace in the country.

But both album and movie are pregnant with hesitance and uncertainty despite the apparent self confidence of their players. The narrator in Nashville Skyline might catch the reflection of the Jon Voight character sideways in the mirror.

"Lay, Lady, Lay" offers a bona fide sensuality that transcends the courting rituals that comprise much of the album. Dylan's voice loses its "Aw, Shucks" quality while retaining the emotional force secretly promised in the Basement Tape recording of "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean". In a later interview, drummer Kenneth Buttrey recalls with
astonishment how unexpectedly good the bongo drums and cowbells sound in the song.

The song is an achievement, apparently despite all odds. The lyrics themselves point to this transcendent perfect stranger, at the same time close and yet far away. The pronouns shift from "my" to "he" to "I", all of them referring to the same one. And when Dylan sings "his clothes are dirty but his hands are clean" we know that despite his
previous travails that the heart is pure for this love he craves.

This working man metaphor is so precise as to almost elude description and be simply felt. 

One More Night

A Cheerful Song Of Sorrow

Dylan returns to night again in this cheerful song of sorrow. In the mystery dream of Nashville Skyline, no emotion beyond contentment is openly allowed. So while the narrator pines of his lost love, or is that "the best pal he ever had", he is accompanied by a galloping percussion that seems to move faster as the song proceeds. This narrator is happy to be sad as long as he can think about his love.

The song is pictorially evocative and controls wonderfully well the metaphor of the night as anxiety. The moonlight on the ground, the rolling night clouds, the wind moving the trees are so concrete as to be seen and felt, yet they are the shape of the narrator's purported sorrow.

Dylan sings this with apparent virtuosity and ends with a technical leap as he bounds an octave and disappears with the night folding up like a stage set. 

Tell Me That It Isn't True

No Cheating Heart

No country album could be complete without a cheating song. The topics of much of country music in the 1960's, as today, were the joys and perils of adult love. While rock music (in the 60's), made little distinction between love and lust, country music featured prominently the broken heart.

But the fierce, or is it forced, optimism of Nashville Skyline does not allow too much emotion other than contentment. So this cheating song doesn't involve too much cheating. And the narrator in Nashville Skyline would never cheat on his wife! So he sings of rumors of another man, "tall, dark and handsome", holding his true love's hand.

But the possibility of reconciliation is almost immanent. All she need do is tell our narrator that the stories are not true. While the music does suggest a mild frenzy and sense of drama that makes us concerned about the concerns of this nice man, it is almost implicit that reconciliation is near. The simple request of the song suggests that things will work out and perhaps people should not let rumors get in the way of true love.

These two topics of rumors and infidelity will take a more fearsome, truly heartbreaking form on a later Dylan album of adult love, Blood On The Tracks. But the Dylan on Nashville Skyline is content to revel in the song writing technique itself, avoiding the heart break. 

Country Pie

Yum! Yum!

For some, this may be the most obnoxious song on Nashville Skyline. At its worst it may be summarized as one full minute and thirty five seconds of shouting "Yum! Yum!". At its best, it is perhaps a vulgar affirmation that a man's heart may by found through his stomach.

There is a curiously sexual attitude to the song, but even that is overwhelmed by the voluminous listing of flavors (in such a short time!) and the sheer boyishness of the enthusiastic vocals. It is possible that Jerry Lee Lewis may have made make something of this song, but Dylan never quite gets to Fleet Street and stays in the corner with Little Jack Horner. That is probably not fair. The song on Nashville Skyline comprises the biggest wink on the album.

All that said, this song may be the most "Dylanish" song on Nashville Skyline. Despite its structural similarities to Hank Williams' "Jambalaya", and its listing of foods, "Country Pie" sounds shot from the Basement Tapes. Beginning with the peculiar Saxophone Joe (T-Bone Frank's showbiz brother?), the song proceeds with a weird array of imagery and bizarre wordplay as the narrator saddles on a big white goose, turns himself on and turns loose the goose! Even A. J. Weberman could be forgiven for finding something at work in this line.

But when the narrator promises not to "throw it up in anybody's face", does he mean regurgitating or a slapstick pie fight? Like in the Basement Tapes, it may be either, neither or both. 

Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You

A Promise And A Sacrifice

The final song of Nashville Skyline presents the final acquiescence, the ultimate rule of marriage: settling down and staying home. The song is almost a promise and a sacrifice. The imagery quickly pulls together so many of the motifs Dylan had based his songwriting existence on, only now they are thrown out the window.

Dylan has always occupied walking shoes in his songwriting, whether as the itinerant migrant or world troubadour. In his first officially released self written song, "Song To Woody", (for, of course, Woody Guthrie), Dylan hesitates to say that he has been doing some hard travelin' too. But this is because he is singing to the king of hard traveling himself and Dylan's travels are only beginning. From "One Too Many Mornings" and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right", the imperative of the Dylan character (presumably something like Dylan himself), is that he must be moving on.

In "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You", Dylan anonymously offers his ticket to a poor boy on the street. The poor boy on the street could be the younger Dylan himself, so preoccupied by the whistles blowing and station masters that the Nashville Skyline narrator now relinquishes.

In this song, Dylan jumps the train.

The song is sung with an authentic sincerity and the narrator, and perhaps Dylan himself, divests himself of himself with the hope for something better. The troubles that had dominated the narrator, if he were Dylan, had forced him to write hundreds of songs decrying trouble, call them protest music, folk music, blues, or hymns. But these woes are
to hit the door.

But like the song that begins the narrator's mystery dream of Nashville Skyline, "To Be Alone With You", there is some hesitancy. If these hopes aren't real, what can be real?

The Dylan narrator pretends the solution is obvious but cannot help but to phrase it as a question: "Is it really any wonder? The love that a stranger can reveal?"