Two riders were approaching

Time and dimensions stretching out over a landscape that just might a Georgia O’Keefe.

Ai Along the Watchtower — Bob Dylan at a desk writing.

Bob Dylan was a master songwriter by 1967. He’d taken words to places few had been. His songs could be cool, hard, factual; they could be epic, sprawling and nagging. They could be gentle, funny, loving. He’d pulled songs straight out of newspaper reports, plucked chord changes from ancient ballads, dipped into the symbolist poets, greased the wheels with speed and weed and possibly some way heavier stuff. But eventually it had to come to a standstill and while the comedown faded, dreamlike sketches of a remembered past, the blinding light of new culture, the images of ‘the now’ competing on the TV screens, psychedelia, the war, the haunting of the past swirled around him like smoke, seeping through the tired and torn American flag finding their way into basement songs. Meanwhile down the road from the basement, another kind of magic was happening. Dylan was also writing these stark, prosaic, parablesque ditties. They were cold, h…