Bob Dylan’s 1969 album Nashville Skyline is his shortest, about 28 minutes long. That is what I took away from it in the late ’90s, when I saw the CD in my dad’s music collection. A CD’s potential 80-minute run time (as opposed to the maximum 50-minute LP) led bands to record lengthier and lengthier albums during that decade, often to their detriment. But to my teen ears and more importantly my teen wallet, the longer an album the better. Why wouldn’t you want the most? And conversely, why would you bother with something so short? I made several snide adolescent remarks to my dad about this in general and Nashville Skyline in particular, which he laughed off. It was far from the most contentious musical disagreement we had.
I think the cheerful Dylan on the cover and lack of harsher songs (or familiar ones, for that matter) also led me to dismiss the album. Its country turn wasn’t exactly a left turn for Dylan after John Wesley Harding but it was still a big departure from the first decade of his output, and its warmth was a change from the previous years of seclusion following his motorcycle crash (and it would not be the last time he confounded the audience). In a perceptive review at the time, Robert Christgau notes how the previously reclusive and scabrous Dylan worked the media like a pro leading up to the album’s release, including teases of its big musical guest: Johnny Cash.
Cash duets with Dylan on the opening track, a revisit of “Girl From The North Country,” a lovely lament that feels hundreds of years old instead of something Dylan wrote less than a decade earlier (it helps that Dylan borrows from “Scarborough Fair” pretty heavily). Dylan and Cash trade verses before singing together and echoing off each other at the end: they’re both reminiscing about the same girl but there’s no rivalry here, just rueful knowledge that she’s twice as gone. This of course leads into “Nashville Skyline Rag,” the album’s one instrumental. It’s a celebration of itself, jaunty guitar and keys and harmonica stepping up and then stepping back for each other — the track ends with an extended coda of the band consciously drawing out their time just goofing around.
But the rest of the album goes back to words and specifically words about women. Bob Dylan is horny! And sometimes having fun with it, like the casual swing and slide of “Peggy Day” or the outright raunch of “Country Pie” — a critic once described AC/DC as masters of the single entendre and Bon Scott himself would be proud to write “Shake me up that old peach tree/Little Jack Horner got nothin’ on me.” Dylan’s big switch-up musically is not the embrace of country but the decision to use a smooth croon instead of his usual nasal whine or rough growl (quitting smoking surely helped), and it gives these songs a cheerful clarity.
That clarity extends to the less happy songs, sometimes to their detriment. “One More Night” has the uptempo momentum and direct lyrical despair of a Hank Williams tune but without
the aching vocal: it’s a good song that still has a tinge of pastiche. Dylan’s band — Norman Blake, Fred Carter Jr. and Charlie McCoy on guitar, Charlie Daniels on bass, Bob Wilson on keys, Kenny Buttrey on percussion and Pete Drake on pedal steel — is tight but relaxed, not too smooth while still bringing a warm session sound that could stand to be a bit rougher backing lyrics like this on “Night”:
One more night, the moon is shinin’ bright
And the wind blows high above the tree.
Oh I miss that woman so.
I didn’t mean to see her go,
But tonight no light will shine on me.
The smoothness works better on “Tell Me That It Isn’t True,” the jauntiness covering the desperation in Dylan’s voice, hoping that the talk about his woman leaving him is just gossip but fearing it isn’t. On “I Threw It All Away,” he recognizes his own foolishness in letting love go and warns others not to make the same mistake. It’s a simple setup but Dylan’s phrasing here, drawing out an “IIIIIIIIIIII” or jumping up the scale on “away” gives it his own stamp. He sings with a more straightforward emphasis in “Lay Lady Lay,’ the biggest hit to come out of the record with a seductive earworm of a vocal hook and insistent pedal steel helping Dylan make his case to get laid. He hasn’t lost a love but he hasn’t gotten one yet either; the anticipation drives the song — but it ends with a hope for something afterwards, that the lady will stay the night.
Is this part of the come-on? I think not: Dylan is really hoping for something beyond the moment. “To Be Alone With You” is more forthright in its gleeful anticipation: “I always thank the Lord when my working day is through/I get my sweet reward to be alone with you.” But the album’s closer, “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You,” finds a balance living in the moment between the choice and the anticipation of its result. As Dylan describes getting off the train and going back to his love, the band strides forward but without hurry, filling in gaps in the verses where you would expect Dylan to move in. But he’s moving back. “Throw my ticket out the window, throw my suitcase out there too,” he exclaims, telling the stationmaster to give his ticket to a poor boy on the street. “Throw my troubles out the door, I don’t need them anymore/Cause tonight, I’ll be staying here with you.” Staying is the knowledge and the joy, what is to come will come. “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane,” Julie Delpy says to Ethan Hawke at the end of Before Sunset. “I know,” is Hawke’s only response, and the only response he needs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZhLGP5dF2k&list=OLAK5uy_k7RFXzJVIrZJuX3lkezse6UNXE4i1wzN8&index=10
“This man can rhyme the tick of time,” Johnny Cash writes in his weird, poetic (too poetic in my book) liner notes to Nashville Skyline. The album begins mourning the past, moves through anticipation and fear of the future and ends with acceptance in the moment. The ’70s were coming and Dylan would soon move into bloated, gnomic tedium (I am of course referring to Blood On The Tracks), and “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” lasts only three minutes before it ends. Time moves on, and I wish I could tell my dad that I get this album now, its brevity and its simplicity. But you get the time you get, however short or long that may be.