Nashville Skyline - Bob Dylan (1969)
I’m soft-launching into my love of Bob Dylan’s catalog with a week of Dylan posts
Dylan’s first run as a rock star was as big as any rock star had ever been. A single year, from mid 1965 to mid 1966, saw all three of his massively successful rock albums and came with non-stop touring, recording, drug use, and legend-making. It was clearly taking a toll on the man, and it was clearly unsustainable.
On July 29, 1966, Dylan suffered a serious crash while riding his motorcycle in upstate New York. That is, at any rate, what he said happened. Bob has said a lot of things over the years, and some of them are even roughly true. There’s little evidence of the accident or its seriousness, but the event was the perfect excuse to slow life down. He retired to his new home in Woodstock and started writing and home-recording a ton of material, referred to as The Basement Tapes, that wouldn’t see the light of day for years but served as a cocoon for another reinvention. He emerged with a new persona: a country crooner with a golden tenor voice, music that sprawled more broadly into American roots traditions, and subjects less surreal but just as emotionally im
(When I first started reading and caring about Dylan in the late 80s, this country-style interregnum was referred to as his “middle period.” By modern reckoning, that “middle period” came in barely the second of his seven decades as a performer, so that’s a patently ridiculous term now.)
Nashville Skyline fits conceptually into this framework. By 1969 he was moving freely around the country again, and recorded this in Nashville. While his previous major release had been spare and simple, here he took the inspiration of Music City to add a lot of mainstream country flavor to his always excellent songwriting.
There are straight old-school country and western ballads like I Threw It All Away and one of his signature tunes, Lay Lady Lay. Peggy Day is a western swing tune, while Country Pie and To Be Alone With You feature a honky tonk sort of sound.
Also notable is the lead track, re-rendering his Greenwich-Village-era tune Girl From The North Country as a gorgeous duet with Johnny Cash. Dylan booked a full day of studio time to jam with Cash and his band, but for decades this was the only track from that day that had been officially released. That would be remedied in 2019 on volume 15 of the Bootleg Series, although I don’t think you can stream the whole thing anywhere without paying for it.
