by Bob Dylan
It was autumn in New Orleans and I was staying at the Marie Antoinette Hotel, sitting around by the pool in the courtyard with G. E. Smith, the guitar player in my band. I was waiting for the arrival of Daniel Lanois. The air was sticky humid. Branches of trees hung overhead near a wooden trellis that climbed a garden wall. Water lilies floated in the dark squared fountain and the stone floor was inlaid with swirling marble squares. We were sitting at a table near a small statue of Cleo with a clipped nose. The statue seemed to know we were there. The courtyard door swung back and Danny came in. G.E., who surveyed the world with a set of unblinking steel-blue eyes, looked up warily and met the gaze of Lanois with a glance. “See ya in a moment,” G.E. said, got up and left. The courtyard was haunted with friendly spirits and with a vague aroma of perfumed roses and lavender. Lanois sat down. He was noir all the way—dark sombrero, black britches, high boots, slip-on gloves—all shadow and silhouette—dimmed out, a black prince from the black hills. He was scuff proof. He orders a beer and I get an aspirin and Coke. He got right down to business, asked what kind of songs I had, what kind of record I had in mind. It wasn’t a real question—just a way to start the conversation.
Over the course of an hour or so, I knew I could work with this guy, had a conviction about him. I didn’t know what kind of record I had in mind. Didn’t even know if the songs were any good. Hadn’t looked at the songs since I’d shown them to Bono, who liked them a lot, but who knows if he really did. Most of them didn’t even have melodies. Danny says to me, “You can make a great record, you know, if you really want to.” I flatly said, “Of course I’ll need your help,” and he nodded. He wanted to know if I had any musicians in mind. When I told him I didn’t, he asked about the band he had heard me play with the night before. “Not this time,” I said. He told me that hit records don’t matter to him, “Miles Davis never made any.” That was fine with me.
At this point, we weren’t thinking of any fixed time to start, we were just putting our heads together in order to see if they were both on the same page—both right side up. We talked most of the afternoon and the purple sunset began to fade. He asked me if I wanted to hear the record he was making with The Neville Brothers and I said, sure. We went over to the makeshift recording studio that he’d set up in a Victorian mansion on St. Charles Avenue, a boulevard lined with enormous oaks where streetcars, olive green, run a thirteen-mile route. The Neville Brothers’ record Yellow Moon was nearly completed and we sat down to listen to some of the playbacks. One of The Neville Brothers was resting in the room, hands together in his lap, head tipped back, cap down over his eyes and his feet were up over one of the chairs. It surprised me to hear two of my songs, “Hollis Brown” and “With God on Our Side” sung by Aaron Neville. What a coincidence. Aaron is one of the world’s great singers, a figure of rugged power, built like a tank but has the most angelic singing voice, a voice that could almost redeem a lost soul. It seems so incongruous. So much for appearances. There’s so much spirituality in his singing that it could even bring sanity back in a world of madness. It always surprises me to hear a song of mine done by an artist like this who is on such a high level. Over the years, songs might get away from you, but a version like this always brings it closer again.
After hearing Aaron’s renditions of my songs, I faintly remembered the reason we were there. Danny asked me if any of my new songs were like these. I told him, not much, I didn’t think so, but we’ll see. I liked the atmosphere and the setup a lot. Lanois said he could rent another house in the district and we could record in it. I played some fragmented melodies on the piano to go with some of the songs and we called it a day. I didn’t realize he’d remember the spontaneous melodies and it would later come back to haunt me. We both agreed to try and meet up next spring. I liked Lanois. He didn’t have any colossal ego, seemed disciplined—nothing wheeler-dealer about him, and he had an extraordinary passion for music. If anybody had the light, I figured Danny did and he might turn it on. He seemed like the kind of cat who, when he works on something, he did it like the fate of the world hinged on its outcome. We’d meet up again in March, like something foretold in the scriptures.
I showed up in New Orleans in early spring, moved into a large rented house near Audubon Park, a comfortable place, all the rooms fair sized, furnished quite simply, wardrobe cupboards in just about every room. We couldn’t have come to a better place for me. It was really perfect. You could work slow here. They were waiting at the studio, but I didn’t feel like jumping into anything. Sooner or later I’d have to get to the point but I could try it on another day. I brought a lot of the songs with me, I was pretty sure they would hold up well.
Right now, I strolled into the dusk. The air was murky and intoxicating. At the corner of the block, a giant, gaunt cat crouched on a concrete ledge. I got up close to it and stopped and the cat didn’t move. I wished I had a jug of milk. My eyes and ears were open, my consciousness fully alive. The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds—the cemeteries—and they’re a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres—palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay—ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who’ve died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn’t pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing—spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don’t have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there’s a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There’s something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can’t see it, but you know it’s here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is.
There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There’s a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside.
Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou Temple–type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades—thirty-foot columns, gloriously beautiful—double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn’t move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There’s only one day at a time here, then it’s tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you’re in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon’s generals, Lallemand, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and y
ou might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you’ll get smart—to feed pigeons looking for handouts. A great place to record. It has to be—or so I thought.
Lanois had set things up in one of his patented “pick up and move” studios—this one in a Victorian mansion on Soniat Street not far from Lafayette Cemetery No.1—parlor windows, louvered shutters, high Gothic ceilings, walled-in courtyard, bungalows and garages in the back. Heavy blankets soundproofed the windows.
Dan had recruited an eclectic alliance of musicians. They included the Fort Worth guitarist and singer Mason Ruffner who played in Bourbon Street clubs like the Old Absinthe Bar. Ruffner was a regional star, had a high pompadour, a gold tooth smile with a tiny guitar inlaid. He had a few records out and had bags of explosive licks with funky edges, rockabilly tremolo–influenced, wrote songs, too, said that he’d hung around in Texas libraries reading Rimbaud and Baudelaire to get his language down. He also told me that as a teenager he’d played with Memphis Slim. I thought I had something in common with him there. I’d played with Big Joe Williams when I was just a kid. Mason had some fine songs. One of them had the line, “You do good things for people and it just makes them bad.” I might have thought about recording it if I didn’t have my own originals. The other guitar player, Brian Stoltz, from Slidell, also played in a funky and blistering way, but he was more laid-back and he had articulate schemes—been playing with the Nevilles for years. Brian’s licks were thought out like piano patterns. He could play James Booker piano riffs on the guitar. Tony Hall was the electric bass player. Willie Green was on the bass drum and snare with Cyril Neville, who played percussion. Malcolm Burns, Lanois’s recording engineer, played keyboards, and Danny himself played a variety of instruments—mandolins, mandolas, cello-looking guitars and other fretted stuff, plastic novelty instruments resembling toys. Danny had all the equipment needed.
With this group, I didn’t see how you could go wrong unless you went a little crazy. The first song I took out of my note case was “Political World” and we started looking for quick, searching ways in how to do it. I didn’t bring my own equipment, so I picked up one of Lanois’s antiquated Telecasters—wicked sounding if you’re on a cement floor beneath a corrugated tin roof, but in some cases, it could be too brittle. I liked playing it, so I stuck with it anyway. We tried “Political World” a few different ways and it didn’t seem to be going anywhere. The sensation was always the same. The first way we tried was as good as the last, but someplace along the line as the night wore on, Lanois got committed to a funk style—he heard one of Mason’s licks and decided to put the whole song on it. By then, I was hearing the song differently than I had when I started. Playing it out had brought me to different conclusions, that the lyrics might work better in fragmented rhythms and that I could lose a lot of the verses and add a differently arranged part, but at the time I didn’t know what the part could be.
I was trying to figure out the realities of what Danny had in his mind, what he had to work with. I couldn’t do that in just one day or just one session. To make a record anywhere, anytime with anyone is possible, but the reality is rare. You have to be surrounded by musicians of like purpose. There were methods I would have instinctively used in the past with a song like this but here, they wouldn’t have worked. Long time ago, good; now, no good.
After a while I started to zone out, yawned heavily and left, took a tape of the song with me to study and headed back to the house. Passing the cemetery, I felt like going to pray at one of the tombs. Later that night, listening to what we’d done, I thought I’d figured it out. The following day, I went back to the studio and the song was played for me again, except this time it was even more funked up. A lot of work had continued after I’d left the night before. Ruffner had overdubbed torpedo licks over my very minimalistic Tele rhythms. My guitar was taken out of the mix entirely. My voice was out there in the middle of nowhere in some corridor of sonic atmosphere. The song got shanghaied. You could tap your foot to it, clap your hands or jig your head up and down, but it didn’t open up the world of the real. It sounded like I was singing from the midst of the herd, a lot of artillery and tanks in the background. The longer it went, the worse it got.
“Christ, all this happened while I was out of here?” I said to Lanois.
He said, “What do you think?”
“I think we missed it.”
I went into the kitchenette behind the courtyard and grabbed a beer out of the refrigerator and sank into a chair. One of Dan’s assistants was sitting on the couch watching the tube. The ex-Klansman David Duke from Metairie in Jefferson Parish had been elected to the Louisiana State House of Representatives and he was being interviewed. He said that welfare wasn’t working and that workfare would be better—make people on welfare work for the community instead of getting a free ride. He also wanted to put prisoners from state pens on work programs. Didn’t want them getting a free ride, either. I hadn’t seen Duke before; he looked like a movie star.
I gathered myself together and went back in to work with Dan. Jesus, I thought, this is only the first song. It should be easier than this. Lanois liked the tone of the song, asked what I didn’t like about it. I told him that we couldn’t turn it loose the way it was. We had to strip it down. With Lanois’s help, I tried to make the song fly, but nothing was working. First off, Mason’s part was clipped back, but then the kick and snare drum were out of place because they were playing to him and not to me. Once my original guitar was turned back up in the mix, the drums were out to lunch.
We lost two or three days just goofing around. Through it all, I started seeing that the song should have been more of an upbeat ballad. We tried breaking the song apart and adding melodic lines like a chorus, but it was too time consuming. Nothing was going to make any difference. Danny had a strong belief in the funk version. I didn’t think we were communicating very well and it was beginning to break my bloody heart. At one point things really began to boil. He got so frustrated, he flashed into a rage, swung around, flinging a metallic dobro like it was some kind of toy and smashed it to the floor with furious actions. There was a momentary silence in the room. A young girl, who’d been cataloging tracks and taking notes, stopped grinning and left in tears. Poor doll. I felt terrible for her. Everything was beginning to collapse and we hadn’t gotten started yet. We would have to let this song go. It was either too early or too late for “Political World.” We’d have to put it away and listen to it later. It might sound better. That can happen.
Next song we tried was “Most of the Time.” It didn’t have a melody so I would just have to strum it ’til I found one. I never did come up with any definite melody, only generic chords, but Dan thought he heard something. Something that turned into a slow, melancholy song. On this, Danny was contributing as much as any musician. He added layers of parts and soon the song seemed to have some kind of attitude and purpose. Trouble was that the lyrics weren’t putting me in there, where I wanted to be. It wasn’t busting out the way it should. I could have easily given up five or six lines if I had phrased the verses differently. For what we were doing, though, Dan’s treatment was fine. But it was just like the other song. I began to feel differently about it as we moved along. It seemed to have more to do about time itself than it did with me. I felt that the sound of a clock like Big Ben should be ticking right through the tune at various levels. A big-band treatment would have been okay, too. In my mind I was beginning to hear me singing the song with the Johnny Otis Orchestra. A lot of the lyrics needed to be shifted around and I began to feel blocked off. Danny put as much ambiance in this song as he could and he kept things from drifting, but this wasn’t a song that I really felt like changing my grip on. You could change the lyrics, but the patterns were set. The tune was gaining weight by the minute and none of its clothes were fitting. It was all dammed up and stagnant.
We worked it to a standstill. Dan would have to be a shaman to make this work. The s
ong, which seemed unfinished to begin with, had just become more unfinished as we rolled on. I wondered what I had gotten myself into. I thought I’d left all this recording aggravation in the past. I didn’t need this. It’s not like I despised the song, I just didn’t have the will to work on it. The lyrics were so full of cloudy meaning and there was nothing in the song that was transforming itself, not even with all the ambiance.
After sitting around and talking for a while with Danny and Malcolm, I recorded the song “Dignity” with only Brian and Willie. This was the first song we did that delivered things and didn’t just dream them. We listened to the playback and Dan got excited, said that he felt the song had plenty of promise and arranged to cut it the next night with Rockin’ Dopsie and His Cajun Band. There was nothing the matter with the song the way we had just cut it, with a minimum of instruments and the vocal up front, but I knew what Dan was trying to do and I wanted to see him do it, so I didn’t feel any pressure or stress about recutting the song. I didn’t think it was unreasonable.
On the way back to the house I passed the local movie theater on Prytania Street, where The Mighty Quinn was showing. Years earlier I had written a song called “The Mighty Quinn” which was a hit in England, and I wondered what the movie was about. Eventually I’d sneak off and go there to see it. It was a mystery, suspense, Jamaican thriller with Denzel Washington as the mighty Xavier Quinn, a detective who solves crimes. Funny, that’s just the way I imagined him when I wrote the song “The Mighty Quinn.” Denzel Washington. He must have been a fan of mine…years later he would play the boxer Hurricane Carter, someone else I wrote a song about. I wondered if Denzel could play Woody Guthrie. In my dimension of reality, he certainly could have.
At the house on Audubon Place the radio was always on in the kitchen and always tuned to WWOZ, the great New Orleans station that plays mostly early rhythm and blues and rural South gospel music. My favorite DJ, hands down, was Brown Sugar, the female disc jockey. She was on in the midnight hours, played records by Wynonie Harris, Roy Brown, Ivory Joe Hunter, Little Walter, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Chuck Willis, all the greats. She used to keep me company a lot when everyone else was sleeping. Brown Sugar, whoever she was, had a thick, slow, dreamy, oozing molasses voice—she sounded as big as a buffalo—she’d ramble on, take phone calls, give love advice and spin records. I wondered how old she could be. I wondered if she knew her voice had drawn me in, filled me with inner peace and serenity and would upend all my frustration. It was relaxing listening to her. I’d stare at the radio. Whatever she said, I could see every word as she said it. I could listen to her for hours. Wherever she was, I wished I could put all of myself in there.