John Wesley Harding by Bob Dylan

John Wesley Harding came out on Columbia on December 27, 1967, and after three albums of electric, hallucinatory blues-rock, Bob Dylan has stripped the whole thing back to bone. Bob Johnston produced it, the instruments are mostly acoustic, and the songs read like spare, plainspoken parables from a man who'd rather whisper than shout. The title nods to the Texas outlaw John Wesley Hardin, with the spelling gone slightly astray.

It was made in the same stretch as the home recordings with the Band that became The Basement Tapes, after the 1966 motorcycle crash took Dylan off the road, and it opened the rural, country-leaning run that followed. "All Along the Watchtower" is the one that got away from him: once Jimi Hendrix's version landed in the autumn of 1968, the song became one of the most loved things Dylan ever wrote. The album itself sold well and pleased the critics, going gold in under three months.

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