PODCAST: Bob Dylan: A Headful of Ideas Season Three 3) NASHVILLE SKYLINE: ONE HELL OF A POET (Part One)

Hi there y’all!

This is the first part of my take on Dylan’s NASHVILLE SKYLINE, much criticised in its day but now looked on as a crucial part of Dylan’s development.  

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This is an adapted audio version of a previous blog

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Extract:

To say that the opening song on 1969’s Nashville Skyline was something of a shock for many Dylan fans is in itself an understatement. Although the adoption of country stylings on much of 1967’s John Wesley Harding had to some extent prepared them, here he was utilising the full-on Nashville sound for songs which conveyed (at least on the surface) simplistic, even trite sentiments and used cliché in an unabashed way. This led many of those who viewed Dylan as a leader of the counter culture to believe that he had ‘sold out’ to commercial interests.

But Dylan seemed to want to prove to the world that he could, if he turned his hand to it, write conventional romantic songs and that he had the ability to adopt a completely different voice to the ‘authentic’ one that listeners were accustomed to. But despite their brevity and straightforwardness, the songs on Nashville Skyline do not abandon poetic song writing.

As Johnny Cash says in his award winning sleeve notes: …Herein is one hell of a poet…

Dylan found the highly experienced studio session musicians who worked in the Nashville studios to be ideal for his own recording methods. Prominent among them were Kenny Buttrey (drums), Pete Blake (pedal steel) and Charlie McCoy (guitar and harmonica), who had all backed Dylan on John Wesley Harding, along with Charlie Daniels (bass), Bob Wilson (keyboards), Fred Carter and Norman Blake (guitars). With their great experience of backing so many artists and playing so many different styles of music, they were capable of picking up his musical ideas very quickly and of supplying the kind of spontaneously inspired playing which Dylan required. If he inspired them, they also seem to have inspired him, as many of the songs on the album were written in the studio.