by Larry Sloman
Dylan was a familiar sight that summer in the Village, walking down MacDougal Street, sometimes with guitar in hand, usually with a notebook. And he began to make all the music scenes, catching Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, and, one night at the Other End, the rage of punk rockdom, a twenty-eight-year-old rock poet Patti Smith. Patti, a gamine Keith Richards look-alike, had always dreamed of meeting Dylan, and when she heard Dylan was in her audience she began playing the set to him, throwing him lines like, “Don’t you go near my parking meter, Jack.” And afterward, Dylan headed backstage to meet the New Guard. “He just sat there and didn’t say a word the whole show,” Faris Bouhafa, a Columbia Records employee, remembered, “and afterward, he went backstage, opened the door, and Patti was sitting there by herself. And a couple of photographers. It was weird because as soon as he walked in, she looked up, they were introduced, and suddenly this weird ballet started taking place. The participants were the two photographers, Dylan, and Patti. They were just circling, almost like slow motion. Nobody was saying, ‘Hey I want you to take my picture,’ they were all trying to avoid the cameras. And the photographers were trying to line them up, and they were all sort of dancing around the room, with a shy kind of smile, almost bashful. Finally Patti said, ‘Fuck it, Bob, let’s take a picture,’ and she grabbed his shoulder and that broke the ice, they started talking. They didn’t seem to have that much to say to each other. She was happy and he was smashed so it all worked out very well.”
One of the people that Dylan bumped into that summer was Jacques Levy, an affable, fortyish, off-off Broadway director, who gave up a promising career as a clinical psychologist to direct avant-garde plays like Oh! Calcutta! But in his music circles, Levy gained recognition as Roger McGuinn’s lyricist, penning numerous songs over the years with the ex-Byrd. And as Dylan and Levy renewed their friendship at the Other End, a collaboration was discussed. So the two trekked over to Levy’s loft, just around the corner from the club, and Dylan began performing some of the songs he was working on. “We were just sitting, just talking, then he sang something and then he went to the piano, sat down, and he started to play ‘Isis,’” Levy recalled later. “But it was a very different style of ‘Isis’ than you hear now, it was almost a dirge, slow, unlike anything I’d ever heard before, slow, obviously setting you up for a long story. So the two of us started working on that together. I started writing words, then he would say, ‘Well, no, how about this, what about that,’ a totally cooperative venture. It was just extraordinary, the two of us started to get hot together. And we began to work on this thing and we just kept going with it, and we’d stop and we didn’t know where the story was gonna go next.”
“It’s impossible to remember now who did what, it’s like we’d push each other in the sense that he’ll have an idea, then I’ll have an idea, then he’ll have an idea until finally we get to a point where we both recognize what the right idea is and what the right words are and whether it comes from him or from me it doesn’t make a difference. I knew I had found it amazing, he found it amazing. Well, he has written a few songs with other people before, but I don’t think it’s been this kind of way. This was really a thing of both of us trying to find the right word.”
“Whose songs were whose?” I asked Levy.
“Well, it’s hard to know, it varied with every song, honestly, there are some songs that started out because Bob has a tune. Like ‘Durango’ …”
“Wasn’t ‘Durango’ written during Pat Garrett?”
“The story has nothing to do with that. What happened with ‘Durango’ was that he had a kind of Mexican melody and we were talking about ‘Durango’ but the first thing that came was an image I had from a postcard that was once sent to me by Jack Gelber, the playwright. He sent me a postcard with a picture of a Mexican hacienda or something, some Mexican shack not a hacienda, a shack with a bunch of chili peppers on the roof in the sun. So the first line was ‘Hot chili peppers in the sun,’ and I remember saying, ‘No, blistering sun,’ so we got the first line. And then there was this escape.”
“You know what Dylan told me? He told me he was eating chili peppers every morning,” I laughed.
“He was eating chili peppers, that was when we were staying out in East Hampton, but I should go back to the story I was telling you before about how we started to write. What happened was that we finished Isis that one night, up all night till the next morning, not the final version, we redid some stuff, but the basic story was there and I would write this stuff down and then type it up and we would go over the stuff. And we went down to the Other End and Bob read the lyrics to a bunch of people sitting around the bar, just read them, and everybody responded to the thing because everyone gets hooked in that story, apparently. The two of us didn’t know that at that time, I mean we were getting hooked.”
“You know what I thought, I read a story by D. H. Lawrence called ‘The Man Who Died,’ the story about Christ meeting Isis …”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with that, it doesn’t have anything to do with the Egyptian goddess either. The only thing it has to do with the Egyptian goddess is that at some point we threw in the pyramids instead of the Grand Teton Mountains, which is probably really what it’s about. Going up into the hills somewhere in Wyoming or something.”
“Where does the story come from?”
“I don’t know the story of that. I don’t know how that story came about and Bob doesn’t either. It came about through the two of us, just a kind of unconscious connection we were making.”
“Who wrote ‘One More Cup of Coffee’?”
“Bob had written that before we got together in the summer. He had written a couple of songs ….”
“‘Sara’?”
“No, he had not written ‘Sara.’ Bob wrote that during the time that we were out in East Hampton. You see what happened is that we finished ‘Isis’ then we wrote a couple of other songs, but what was happening was that we were going out and hanging out late at night and we were getting together the next afternoon and there were lots and lots of distractions. So we said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ and suddenly it became serious that we were really going to do some serious work together, so we went out to a place out in the Hamptons. Nobody was around, and the two of us were just there for like three weeks together, that summer. We had already written a couple of songs so there was a feeling of confidence that we both had that we could really do it. Some of the songs that we’ve been doing, one of the things about them that’s so wonderful is that they give him a chance to do some acting. Some of the things that happened with us over that period in the summertime was that feeling that Bob had is that he was really open, ready to come out, ready to express how he felt about things, and as far as I was concerned I couldn’t have been happier. I know I was spurring him and he was spurring me.”
“That’s what he needed, I think.”
“He was doing all right without me,” Jacques chuckled.
“That’s true, Blood on the Tracks was a great album. Did you ever hear the original takes? They’re chilling, really down to the bone …”
“I’ll tell ya, I had never listened to Blood on the Tracks. I had heard of Jack of Hearts on the radio and Bob sang a couple of love songs from the album to me because I’d never heard them before. He played ‘Idiot Wind’ and ‘Simple Twist of Fate’ and I thought they could be better than they were and he’s gone ahead now and changed ‘Simple Twist,’ he’s gotten more into the plot, there’s much more of a plot now. Well, I love stories and plots, I think they’re just great, there’s nothing like ’em. They may be window dressing, you know, because they’re really not what’s really important, but even—”
“Even ‘Sara,’ a song about his wife, has a plot. Like a fucking movie, with flashbacks.”
“You know, that takes place because Bob was in East Hampton at the time. And he was writing all during the time that we were working on these other songs. And he was out on the beach and the place out there
was a place that he and Sara had stayed at. But calling it ‘Sara’ isn’t that amazing. He’s been fooling around with that idea for years, he told me.”
“So what was it like out in the Hamptons? Were you just wood-shedding, writing the whole thing …”
“Yeah, right, we were doing that, going out at night shooting eight-ball once in a while, but not too much.”
“Any people visit?”
“No, nobody at all. We went out a couple of nights; one night we went to a bar and Bob sang a couple of the songs and we hung out with some people that night just to get away from things. The pressure was tremendous and intense on both of us, and we’d stop in the middle of a song and go shoot a game of eight-ball.”
They returned to the city in late July and Dylan immediately began preparing to record the tunes that he and Levy had just crafted. And by the night of the first session, Monday, July 28, Dylan had assembled a cast of musicians that was Felliniesque in its scope. Crammed into Columbia’s studio that night were superstar guitarist Eric Clapton, his backup vocalist Yvonne Elliman, Kokomo—an eight-member English rhythm-and-blues funk band, Emmylou Harris, a country-rock singer, studio musicians like Hugh McCracken and Vinnie Bell. Then there were the Village stalwarts, people like bassist Rob Stoner, who was currently backing long-time Dylan pal Bobby Neuwirth, Eric Frandsen, who’d been picking his folk guitar around the Village for years, and even Sugar Blue, whose regular gig was blowing harp out on Eighth Street for spare change. And thrown in for good measure, Scarlett and Sheena. It was like a total madhouse, musicians wandering around in the studio, with no charts to aid them, only the very haphazard directions from Dylan, who also didn’t seem to know what he really wanted in terms of a sound. “No one in that room had heard the material and I’m pretty sure Bob didn’t know what he was gonna do,” one observer recalled, “so everybody was improvising and you could tell that on the tapes. Sometimes it sounds too slick, because all these musicians were used to doing studio work, and sometimes it sounds like two different songs recorded at the same time.”
They ran through about seven tunes that first night, a take of “Durango” with Eric Clapton on guitar that ultimately was used on the LP; two songs, “Wiretappin’” (“Wiretapping, it can happen”) and “Money Blues,” that never were released; “Catfish,” Dylan and Levy’s ode to Catfish Hunter; “Mozambique,” and “Oh Sister.” But there was no focus, and Dylan was unhappy with the results. “That was amazing,” Clapton later told a Rolling Stone interviewer. “He was trying to find a situation, you see, where he could make music with new people. He was just driving around, picking musicians up and bringing them back to the sessions. It ended up with something like twenty-four musicians in the studio, all playing these incredibly incongruous instruments. Accordion, violin—and it didn’t really work. He was after a large sound but the songs were so personal that he wasn’t comfortable with all the people around. He even wrote on the spot. All in one night. It was very hard to keep up with him. He wasn’t sure what he wanted. He was really looking, racing from song to song. I had to get out in the fresh air ’cause it was just madness in there.”
Mad enough to cut a long, nearly disco version of “Hurricane,” Bob’s song about boxer Rubin Carter, complete with backup singers chanting, “Hurricane, Hurricane.” And Tuesday wasn’t much better. Clapton and his entourage had gone but the elements were still too disparate and the session petered out to an early end. Afterward, Stoner, who as bassist had become the de facto bandleader by watching Dylan’s fingers and communicating the changes to the rest of the musicians, met with Dylan and DeVito and they decided to try to record with a smaller group. Since Kokomo was departing, a drummer was needed and frantic calls were put in to Jim Gordon and Kenny Buttrey, two studio musicians who had previously worked with Dylan. No luck. Then Stoner suggested his drummer, Howie Wyeth, and on Wednesday night, it was a skeletal crew that tromped into the studios.
Emmylou Harris was still around to sing backup, Stoner and Wyeth would function as the rhythm section, Scarlett would play the lead instrument, violin, and Sheena could kick in on whatever percussive instrument she could fathom. Dylan himself alternated between piano and guitar. And it worked. By now Stoner and Scarlett were semifamiliar with the chord changes, Wyeth fit right in, and the atmosphere was no longer like a rock ’n roll circus. Dylan started by warming up with some Little Richard tunes, then Emmylou got loose with some country standards. Then Dylan went straight into a slow version of “Isis” and the magic began.
Sheena remembered that day: “Wednesday night, that was the album. I thought it was very special, like when those who were really chosen to come will be there to make the candle shine. Dylan had called me that afternoon and he told me that he couldn’t sleep much because the energy was so high, so intense, all this commotion, and magic, and trying to do this art form. Like you get all these vibrations. But it all sifted out. By Wednesday, he felt very comfortable and very relaxed, it was three women, and three men, that was number six, a good number. It was very balanced.”
For journeyman bassist Stoner the explanation was a bit less mystical: “Right away that version of ‘Isis’ was a take because it was a small group, there was no confusion, and the first time that Bob got through a tune, it was a take, it was right there. That’s the way he likes it and that’s the way the whole album ended up. Right after we finished ‘Isis’ Bob came over to me and said, ‘Your drummer’s great, it sounds great,’ and we all felt great because it was intimate. It had the sound that you can hear on Desire, just a bunch of people playing in a room with no overdubs, all live, happening right before your ears, and we could get that first-take spontaneity because we didn’t have to keep going over and over things to show them to all these musicians who were faking it. Because nobody was faking it, except Scarlett and myself who were good at that sort of thing.
“So after we listened to that take of ‘Isis,’ we just went back into the studio and started running through tunes, bam, bam, bam, just getting every complete take, every complete tune was a take. If we got through it all the way, it was a record. Just like that. We were so hot we did ‘Rita Mae,’ which wasn’t on the record, ‘One More Cup of Coffee,’ ‘Joey,’ ‘Mozambique,’ ‘Hurricane,’ ‘Oh Sister,’ ‘Black Diamond Bay,’ we did them all that night. We were just going bam, bam, bam. I think we were still doing takes as late as 5 and 6 A.M. that morning, and we hung out listening to the playbacks until we had to go out to the street to move our cars at 8 so they wouldn’t get towed away. Otherwise, we might have stayed there for another twelve hours.”
The atmosphere was electric that morning, everyone high on the knowledge that the bulk of the album had been completed, after so many false starts. And already Dylan’s mind was racing as he drove back to the Village, dropping off the band. “He felt that he had succeeded, from the playbacks, from the vibrations,” Sheena recollects, “and he immediately started talking about a tour. He said, ‘Oh man, I would really like to take this band out on the road, I’d really like to go on the road with everybody.’ That was what was on his mind. For the road. One more cup of coffee. For the road. For the road. Everything was like getting ready to hit the road. Like he was very enthusiastic, turned on, alive, he became youthful again. It was a whole new phase in his life and like big stars, you get bored, man, you need inspiration. And Dylan, who is such an entertainer in his own right, just loves being entertained himself.”
But the planning for a tour would have to wait because Dylan was due in court that morning to testify as a character witness on behalf of Clive Davis, former president of Columbia Records, who was under indictment for income-tax evasion. So it was a weary troubador who showed up for the Thursday night session, accompanied by his wife Sara, who had the perfect cynical attitude toward the rock world, an almost weary detachment that was evidenced when Sheena bounced over to her and bubbled: “Isn’t this exciting? I’m so excited and I feel so good. How do you like this?” “Well,” Sara shrugged,
“it’s just another one.”
It was a quiet session, a lot of listening to playbacks, a stab at a new song, “Love Copy” that would not make the album. But then, Dylan suddenly turned to his wife and said “This is for you,” and broke into the compelling song he had written for her that summer in the Hamptons. No one had heard it before, but Stoner and Scarlett and Wyeth picked up the tempo, Scarlett playing some exquisite fills, underlining the melancholy of the lyrics. They ran through it in one take, and everyone seemed stunned, there was dead silence. People eyed Sara for a reaction but she seemed impassive. And then Dylan came into the control room and a friend of Sheena’s broke the spell, asking him the name of the song. “Sara,” Dylan shot back, annoyed, “Part One.”
The next night, Friday, was devoted to a listening party. Neuwirth dropped by, the tequila was flowing, the major work was behind. For each song, they had three basic tracks to choose from, one take of Dylan on guitar, one take on piano, and one take from the big-band sessions of Monday and Tuesday. And as they played back, Dylan was constantly badgering Neuwirth, asking how that one sounded, how this other one felt, how a third one might go over. It was as if Dylan trusted Neuwirth more than himself.
But the atmosphere was light, a solid album was under their belts, and a few of the participants decided to reconvene at producer DeVito’s West Side apartment to continue the party and talk about the possibility of a tour. So they left the studio around 6 A.M. and headed uptown, DeVito and his date leading the way in his little sportscar, Dylan, Sara, Neuwirth, and Levy following in their giant rented Buick, and Stoner and Bouhafa picking up the rear. It was Saturday morning, the traffic was light, and Dylan was mischievously feisty, so when DeVito stopped at the first red light, Dylan just came right onto his rear and started pushing DeVito across the intersection. And soon it became clear to DeVito that there wasn’t going to be any such thing as a red light that morning, from 52nd and Madison all the way to 79th and Riverside Drive, through the park, across Central Park West, Columbus, Amsterdam, every time DeVito slowed down, Dylan was on his ass, crashing the sportscar through every light. They finally got to Broadway and 72nd and hit traffic so DeVito relaxed, braked, and stopped at the light, knowing well that Dylan would never … thud. The Buick careened into DeVito’s rear, knocking off the license plate and slowly inching the hapless producer across Broadway.