Time Capsule: Bob Dylan, 'Nashville Skyline'

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Nashville Skyline is, depending on the day, Bob Dylan’s greatest feat. Here is the best songwriter of his generation, barely four years removed from turning the folk world inside out with his “going electric” performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, yet again transforming on tape. Putting out the Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde triplicate in a two-year span remains one of the most important three-album runs in the history of popular music, but Dylan turned his focus towards a rootsy, agrarian, anti-trend record in John Wesley Harding in 1967—releasing it in a year met by a reverie of psychedelic, audacious material from the Beatles (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), Jimi Hendrix (Are You Experienced?) and the Doors (Strange Days), Cream (Disraeli Gears) and Love (Forever Changes). John Wesley Harding was experimental, sure, but the album was placid and swiftly disinterested in existing in the context of whatever counterculture had become the world’s precedent.

Dylan had spoken about making a country album in Nashville as early as 1965 in a conversation with Johnny Cash. The thought was that Cash would produce the album and capture his friend ensconced in the “Nashville Sound” that had grabbed country music a decade earlier, defining the likes of Chet Atkins, Patsy Cline, Don Gibson, Jim Reeves and the Anita Kerr Quartet. The 1960s in the South were not immune to the British Invasion’s influence, as country music reckoned with the deaths of Reeves and Cline by adopting a pop-inspired, “countrypolitan” get-up that rivaled the Bakersfield Sound spilling out of California. But the sessions between Cash and Dylan never materialized; Dylan was fully immersed in making Highway 61 Revisited and “Like a Rolling Stone,” an album and song both so generational that they remain immovable, tectonic pieces of an American landscape mid-identity crisis.

Nashville Skyline is the antithesis of the Bob Dylan we’ve long considered to be the “Voice of Protest.” It’s nothing like The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan or The Times They Are A-Changin’ or Another Side of Bob Dylan. In the year leading up to its release, the political climate in America had unraveled into a dystopia: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both assassinated; the Vietnam War, under the guidance of the recently elected Richard Nixon, entered an unfathomably bleak and inescapable period; riots broke out at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Dylan, once a laureate of political folk song, had all but abandoned his hot-button, finger-on-the-pulse commentary and embraced something far more idyllic and cliché. Instead, it’s an “I’m in love!” record that exists perpendicular to the hellish mortality colored in multitudes on the Nashville Skyline predecessors.

I wouldn’t say that Nashville Skyline is a radical album, because I don’t measure the merits of dissent by stylistic changes. Bob Dylan quitting smoking and re-emerging with a softer, crooning tenor is not some remarkable act—especially not now, as we have lived through about five or six of his different vocal epochs. But what I will say about Nashville Skyline is that it is simple—basic, I’d even argue—domestic and deeply, deeply humane. It is a record full of love songs and utopian advances. And, for somebody like Dylan, whose mystery precedes his own vernacular, he sounds alien on Nashville Skyline. He sounds happy and, perhaps, at rest on songs that demand nothing of their listeners beyond holding and being held. He may not be gospelizing American strife, the Civil Rights Movement or impending nuclear war here, but his lyricism remains profound; “Whatever colors you have in your mind, I’ll show them to you and you’ll see them shine” is one of his greatest images, yet it comes and goes like a crack of wind.

And that’s because these 10 songs rarely linger. It takes 27 minutes to digest the album, and its longest entry is its opener—the Johnny Cash-assisted re-recording of the Freewheelin’ cut “Girl from the North Country,” clocking in at three minutes and 41 seconds. Five tracks are less than two-and-a-half-minutes long. Yet the decor of Nashville Skyline is anything but minimal; the band Dylan assembled for the sessions—Norman Blake, Fred Carter Jr., Charlie McCoy, Charlie Daniels, Bob Wilson, Kenneth A. Buttrey and Pete Drake—was a tight collective of country music’s then-finest making some of the genre’s handsomest textures, and Bob Wootton, Marshall Grant and W.S. Holland made one-off appearances on “Girl from the North Country” to complete the outfit.

Nashville Skyline features some of Dylan’s greatest distribution. Side One and Side Two are equally perfect and arrive without a hiccup. “Girl from the North Country” may very well be one of his strongest opening licks—it’s not as ubiquitous as “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “Hurricane,” but it’s as meaningful as “Changing of the Guards,” “Love Sick” and “If Not For You.” It’s gentle and reverent, rivaling most of Cash’s duets with his wife June Carter, as his stentorian baritone never stifles in the context of Dylan’s poetry; the way their voices divert from one another in the “where the winds hit heavy on the borderline” line glows with sincerity. Even the album’s weakest point—the instrumental “Nashville Skyline Rag”—isn’t a default skip, as its placement after “Girl from the North Country” makes it a palatable, extended bed of rustic tones and jaunts.

“Is it rolling, Bob?” Dylan calls out to his producer, Bob Johnston, at the dawn of “To Be Alone With You” before careening right into an enmeshment of Wilson’s piano and Blake’s Dobro. Recorded in eight takes, Dylan does a Jerry Lee Lewis imitation through carnal, spiritual lyrics (“Got my heart in my mouth, my eyes are still blue, my mortal bliss is to be alone with you”) and a rough, affecting vocal. Dylan then plucks his way through the remorseful reckoning of “I Threw It All Away,” a lost-love song backed by Buttrey’s snare drum and Wilson’s weeping, Highway 61-summoning organ. The track contrasts with Dylan’s previous failed-romance laments, like “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” with him adopting accountability for his failures, and its endearing, peace-be-with-you thesis is the centerpiece of Nashville Skyline’s affections: “Love is all there is, it makes the world go ‘round.”

“I Threw It All Away” segues into the quirky, Pete Drake-aided “Peggy Day,” a song so whimsical and brief it sometimes gets lost in the shadow of the song that succeeds it, “Lay Lady Lay.” But “Lay Lady Lay” lives up to its own legacy, written originally for the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack but not submitted for consideration in time. Joel Whitburn once said that Dylan wrote the song for his wife Sarah Lowndes, but Dylan himself said in 1971 that it was written for Barbra Streisand. Buttrey plays bongos and cowbells, both instruments held by the late Kris Kristofferson (who was working as a janitor at Columbia Studio A, where the record was made), before switching back to his drum kit on the song’s chorus.

The three-song sequence of “One More Night,” “Tell Me That It Isn’t True” and “Country Pie” are very woe-is-me yet totally rid of bitterness. Dylan calls one of his muses his “best pal” and couples it with lines like “tonight, no light will shine on me.” It’s a gentle nuance, as the biting, vindictive Dylan we once heard sing without consequence on “Positively 4th Street” is now spitting “Darling, I’m counting on you / Tell me that it isn’t true” with a dose of tenuity on his tongue. “Peggy Day” and “Country Day” are siblings—terse, transitional compositions placing sugar-sweet country ballads in the pockets of Nashville Skyline’s two strongest songs, “Lay Lady Lay” and “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You.”

“Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” was written by Dylan at the Ramada Inn he was staying at in town during the making of Nashville Skyline, and you can hear the way it shares a cord with a John Wesley Harding cut like “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” It’s a tune about devotion, one not so shattered by the unsettled, imperfect love that so often plagued Dylan’s earliest love songs—like “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and “Boots of Spanish Leather.” It’s homely yet glacial, rolling in on the tail of a piano run and full of train imagery and subtle, implicating marks of sorcery: “Is it really any wonder,” Dylan sings, “the love that a stranger might receive? You cast your spell and I went under, I find it so difficult to leave.” The lyrics aren’t as baroque as the cinematic, herculean efforts on “Visions of Johanna” or “Mr. Tambourine Man,” but they gnaw at the universal truths of vacancy that Dylan has so impressively regaled in much of his work. And it is on “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” where he conjures the symphony of Nashville Skyline, connecting the galaxies from the giants of America’s greatest music town.

When speaking about Nashville Skyline, Kristofferson declared that his generation owed Bob Dylan their artistic lives, “because he opened all the doors in Nashville” when he made that record. “The country scene was so conservative until he arrived,” Kristofferson furthered. “He brought in a whole new audience. He changed the way people thought about it—even the Grand Ole Opry was never the same again.” Nashville Skyline’s barometer of success does not rest on the shoulders of complexity, nor does its themes grow heavy in the hand. Sometimes, it’s okay to embrace the cavalcade of laughing, cluttered, absurd platitudes on fame found within “Desolation Row.” Sometimes, it’s okay to want to spend the night with Peggy Day. Dylan puts it best on “Lay Lady Lay”: “You can have your cake and eat it, too.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.