While other musical trailblazers were releasing albums that employed over-the-top production, exotic instruments and flowery lyrical imagery, Bob Dylan emerged from an eighteen month period of seclusion, introspection and recuperation and flipped the music world the proverbial bird in D-Minor, releasing an album that took just nine hours to record and utilized barely more than the "record" button to produce. While his peers sang about "marmalade skies" and asked us to "remember what the door mouse said", Dylan spoke of Saints and sinners, salvation and damnation, and an assortment of outlaws, disenfranchised souls, hobos and drifters. During a period when albums like The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's" and Jefferson Airplane's "Surrealistic Pillow" were racing up the charts and heralding the beginning of a new wave of musical experimentation, making legends of their creators along the way, Bob Dylan capped off the year that brought us the "Summer Of Love" and responded with "John Wesley Harding" in December 1967. An unambiguous slight to the Psychedelian environment of the times, it is a stark and simple rebuff to the overindulgence of his colleagues. Bare and raw, certainly out of place yet equally as important and entertaining, JWH remains as powerful and poignant a musical statement as it did more than thirty years ago when it first achieved Gold Record status in March 1968, a mere three months after its release. Let's take a closer look at this album and both the boldness and genius of Bob Dylan. MORE