“Words are always filled with historical meanings, and that
makes language a shifting medium through which we see the world. The songs on
John Wesley Harding have shifting meanings, too. They’re so layered in terms of
intertextual references that the words are less about objectivity and more
about being enmeshed in history. When we’re in this language, we don’t own it
or use it to signify. We’re just borrowing this system of significance for our
time on earth.”
Robert Reginio
“To live outside the law, you must be honest.”
“Absolutely Sweet
Marie,” Bob Dylan
"There must be some way out of here / Said the Joker to
the thief / There's too much confusion / I can't get any relief".
"All Along the Watchtower
I pity the poor immigrant/who wishes he would’ve stayed home’
Who uses all his power to do evil,/But in the end is always
left so alone
I Pity the Poor Immigrant
"No martyr is among you now / Whom you can call your
own / So go on your way accordingly / And know you're not alone".
I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine"
Bob Dylan Outside the Law: The Poetics of John Wesley
Harding by Robert Reginio argues that the 1967 album is a sophisticated,
critical response to the social turmoil of the 1960s in America rather than a
retreat by Dylan to his folk roots. It shows that John Wesley Harding is not merely
a record but a pedagogical tool that, if studied properly and with clarity, can
reveal how art, politics, and class formation interact with the kind of
political organisation the working-class needs.
Reginio’s book, according to Dr Barry Faulk (Florida State
University), is a "pathbreaking study" and a "necessary
corrective" to existing scholarship.": Reginio opposes the common assumption
that John Wesley Harding was a simple, acoustic retreat because of his 1966
motorcycle accident. Instead, he argues the songs use "archaic
tonality" to mask a complex, biting commentary on American politics and
the myth of the "Summer of Love".
A word of caution is needed, as the reader should know that Reginio
takes a “Post Structuralist Approach” to Dylan, drawing on theories by figures
such as Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. Both are similar in their
philosophical outlooks, with Jacques Derrida advancing “deconstruction, to
explain that there is nothing outside the text, he elevated language and
textual play above an independent, objective social reality. This move
dissolves stable reference, undermines the possibility of objective truth and
relativises the relation between thought and material conditions. As for Julia
Kristeva, drawing on psychoanalysis and semiotics, emphasizes the semiotic and
the subject’s internal, linguistic drives. While opposing the philosophical
outlook of both Derrida and Kristeva
By 1967, Dylan had broken with the role assigned to him by
the folk-liberal milieu. As David Walsh notes in his long appraisal of Dylan’s
trajectory, the artist “rejected the role that had been prepared for him by the
‘left’ folk music world” and moved across social and cultural circles rather
than forging a consistent political line. John Wesley Harding should be read in
the wake of that rupture: it follows the electric period and his motorcycle
accident, and it arrives amid the radicalisation and disillusionment of the
late 1960s. The record’s pared-down sound and biblical/shadow-play imagery mark
both withdrawal and renewed moral interrogation.
John Wesley Harding is one of my favourite Bob Dylan albums
and is one of the most important records for anyone studying culture and
politics from the 1960s. It marks a decisive stylistic and ethical shift from
the electric confrontations of 1965–66 and the explicit protest songs of
1962–64 to a leaner, quieter, quasi-biblical mode. To understand its
significance for Marxist study, we must situate the album within Dylan’s
trajectory and the wider political context.
After the electrified breakthrough and the controversial
Newport performance in 1965, and following his 1966 motorcycle crash, Dylan’s
public persona retreated while his songwriting changed. Critics and historians
have noted that his move away from the role of “people’s troubadour” combined
personal, musical and commercial factors, producing work that was
inward-looking and allegorical rather than the direct indictment of power of
earlier songs. Musically, John Wesley Harding strips arrangements to the essentials;
lyrically, it draws on folk, country, and biblical imagery, producing ambiguous
parables rather than straightforward protest.
Reginio correctly situates the album (1967) within the political
convulsions of the 1960s. As James Brewer writes, “Anyone old enough by the
summer of 1968 to be conscious of events will remember the upheavals rocking
the political landscape. Younger people with a historical awareness will surely
have some knowledge of them as well. On March 31, 1968, US President Lyndon B.
Johnson, in the face of mounting anti-war sentiment, shocked the country by
announcing he would not seek re-election. Only weeks before the release of
Music From Big Pink, Robert F. Kennedy, by then a leading candidate for the
Democratic Party presidential nomination, was assassinated. Dr Martin Luther
King, who had come out strongly against US intervention in Indochina, was in
Memphis, Tennessee, in support of the sanitation workers' strike when he was
assassinated in early April. Inner city rebellions exploded in major US cities
after King’s murder, as they had the year before, dubbed the “Long Hot Summer
of 1967.”
“All Along the
Watchtower”
The album’s sparse arrangements—on these two songs, acoustic
guitars, organ, restrained rhythm—force attention onto language and narrative.
This austerity is not retreat into solipsism but a formal device that
foregrounds moral judgment and parable.
Songs like “All Along the Watchtower” (though released on
later singles/performances) and many tracks on the record use legal, outlaw,
and prophetic imagery—figures “outside the law,” testimonies, judgments. The
album’s title itself evokes the frontier judge and a biblical outlaw archetype,
blending American folk law and biblical registry to question authority and
culpability.
Dylan deploys ambiguous narrators and compressed, elliptical
lines. This resists facile appropriation by liberal managers of culture who
wanted a single “voice of a generation.” As Elijah Wald’s account of Dylan’s
musical path shows, Dylan was always a musical sponge whose form choices
shifted with social circles and aims.
All Along the Watchtower is one of Bob Dylan’s most
enigmatic and influential songs. The three-stanza lyric compresses a
parable-like scene—watchmen, a joker and a thief, a princess in a tower—into a
terse, prophetic tableau. The song’s spare, elliptical language and biblical
cadence mark a shift from Dylan’s mid‑60s surrealism and topical songs
toward a more aphoristic, mythic idiom. Its meaning has been variously read as
an existential fable, a critique of social order, or a poetic expression of
historical rupture. The most famous reinterpretation is Jimi Hendrix’s 1968
electric cover, which transformed the song’s sound and popular resonance. Numerous
artists have since covered the song.
In I Pity the Poor Immigrant Dylan’s figure of the
immigrant—vulnerable, suspect, morally ambivalent—maps onto real processes
under capitalism: forced migration, precarious labour, and social exclusion. Such
conditions are not isolated misfortunes but structural consequences of
capitalist accumulation and imperialism.
One thing worth noting about the album's title is the figure
of John Wesley Harding. As Tony Attwood from the website Untold Dylan writes, “Dylan’s
preoccupation with outlaws does intrigue. And especially his tendency to
upgrade certified nutcases to well-behaved, humane role models. Jesse James
gets a single, friendly name check (in “Outlaw Blues”), and in “Absolutely
Sweet Marie”, he plants the paradox that to live outside the law, you must be
honest. A first standard-bearer, then, of that motto is John Wesley Harding.
The half-beatification of Billy the Kid (1973) may be attributed to Peckinpah
or to the angelic aura of the protagonist, Kris Kristofferson, but with
“Hurricane” (1975), Dylan rather breaks his neck when he passionately defends a
repeatedly convicted murderer and declares him a hero. A low point came with
“Joey” (1975), the epic hymn to the immoral Mafia killer Joey Gallo.
It should be noted that Hurricane Carter was exonerated and released.
Dylan’s preoccupation with rescuing ruffians from historical
obscurity aside for serious readers and students, John Wesley Harding provides
a useful case study in the relation of artist to class struggle — Dylan’s shift
underscores that cultural figures do not automatically translate artistic
dissidence into political leadership. As David Walsh in his article (Does Bob
Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize?) Dylan’s career shows the danger of
individualistic detachment and the absorption into celebrity culture, which can
dilute oppositional potential. There are limits to Dylan's cultural reformism; the
album’s parabolic language can obscure material causes and class relations.
This reinforces why Marxist cultural analysis insists on linking aesthetics to
social forces and political organisation.
As David Walsh points out, “Bob Dylan was neither the first
nor the last American popular artist, or artist of any kind, to imagine he
could outwit historical and social processes–which threatened to 'slow down' or
even block his rise–by avoiding their most vexing questions and problems. What
he didn’t realise was that in turning his back on social life and softening his
attitude toward the existing order, he was at the same time cutting himself off
from the source of artistic inspiration, that he was surrendering forever what
was best in him.”
About the Author
Robert Reginio is Professor of English at Alfred University,
where he currently serves as the Margaret and Barbara Hagar Professor of the
Humanities. He has published widely on Bob Dylan, including essays in The
Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances: Play a Song for Me
(Routledge, 2023) and Multitudes: Teaching Bob Dylan (Bloomsbury, 2024). He has
presented his work on Bob Dylan at several international conferences and
symposia and serves on the editorial board of the journal The Dylan Review.
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