by Bob Dylan
WWOZ was the kind of station I used to listen to late at night growing up, and it brought me back to the trials of my youth and touched the spirit of it. Back then when something was wrong the radio could lay hands on you and you’d be all right. There was a country radio station, too, that came on early, before daylight, that played all the ’50s songs, a lot of Western Swing stuff—clip clop rhythms, songs like, “Jingle, Jangle, Jingle,” “Under the Double Eagle,” “There’s a New Moon over My Shoulder,” Tex Ritter’s “Deck of Cards,” which I hadn’t heard in about thirty years, Red Foley songs. I listened to that a lot. There’d been a station like that also broadcast into my hometown. In a weird sense, I felt like I was starting over, beginning to live my life again. There was a jazz station, too—played mostly current stuff—Stanley Clark, Bobby Hutcherson, Charles Earland, Patti Austin and David Benoit. New Orleans had the best radio stations in the world.
Elliot Roberts, who was booking my tour dates, had come to New Orleans for a visit. He showed me my upcoming tour schedule and I was disappointed. It was far different than what we had talked about. There were very few of the same towns that I’d played the previous year. These upcoming shows would be going to Europe. I told him that this wasn’t what we talked about, that I needed to go back to the same towns that I played the previous year.
“You can’t play the same towns every year, nobody’s gonna get an erection over that. You gotta leave the towns alone. Leave ’em be for a while,” he said.
I understood what Elliot was saying, but I didn’t accept it. “I need to go back to the same places twice, even three times a year—it doesn’t matter.”
“You’re held up in a certain way. You’re mythological. Think about it like you think about Jesse James. There were a lot of bank robbers back then, a lot of jail breakers—a lot of holdup men, train robbers…but Jesse James is the only name people remember. He was mythological. You don’t play the same towns every year, you don’t rob the same banks.”
“Boy, that sounds good,” I said. The argument was pointless and it made no sense going into the depth of it.
I took Roberts to the studio with me where Lanois had already set up Rockin’ Dopsie and His Cajun Band in the big parlor room. We started recording “Dignity” about nine o’clock. I knew what Lanois had in mind and thought that there might be something to it. The dichotomy of cutting this lyrically driven song with melodic changes, with a rockin’ Cajun band, might be interesting…but the only way to find out, is to find out. Once we started trying to capture it, the song seemed to get caught in a stranglehold. All the chugging rhythms began imprisoning the lyrics. This style seemed to be oblivious to their existence. Both Dan and I became plainly perplexed. Every performance was stealing more energy. We recorded it a lot, varying the tempos and even the keys, but it was like being cast into sudden hell. The demo with just me and Willie and Brian had sounded effortless and it flowed smooth. Certainly, as Danny said, it didn’t sound finished, but what recording ever does? Dopsie got almost as frustrated as me. It was a strange bull we were riding. He and his band never lost their composure, though. This song is not exactly a twelve-bar song and needed to project the perception of intimacy to be effective. It was becoming way too complicated and convoluted. An ambiance of texture and atmosphere is what the song called for and what Lanois is so good at. I couldn’t figure out why we weren’t getting it. You work hours on something and you get dizzy. After a while you lose your judgment.
At about three in the morning we had played ourselves out and just started playing any old stuff: “Jambalaya,” “Cheatin’ Heart,” “There Stands the Glass”—country classics. Just fooling around, playing like we were on a party boat. Two of Dan’s engineers had been changing shifts since the beginning, and it had been hot and sweaty all night. I was wearing a blue flannel shirt and it was soaked through. Sweat was pouring off my face. In the midst of all of this, I played another new song I had written, “Where Teardrops Fall.” I showed it quickly to Dopsie and we recorded it. Took about five minutes and it wasn’t rehearsed. In the finale of the song, Dopsie’s saxophone player, John Hart, played a sobbing solo that nearly took my breath away. I leaned over and caught a glimpse of the musician’s face. He’d been sitting there the whole night in the dark and I hadn’t noticed him. The man was the spitting image of Blind Gary Davis, the singing reverend that I’d known and followed around years earlier. What was he doing here? Same guy, same cheeks and chin, fedora, dark glasses. Same build, same height, same long black coat—the works. It was eerie. Reverend Gary Davis, one of the wizards of modern music…like he’d been raised upright and was watching over things, keeping constant vigilance over what was happening. He peered across the room at me in an odd way, like he had the ability to see beyond the moment, like he’d thrown a rope line out to grip. All of a sudden I know that I’m in the right place doing the right thing at the right time and Lanois is the right cat. Felt like I had turned a corner and was seeing the sight of a god’s face.
The next night, we began listening to all the different takes of “Dignity.” Lanois had kept them all. There must have been more than twenty. Whatever promise Dan had seen in the song was beaten into a bloody mess. Where we had started from, we’d never gotten back to, a fishing expedition gone nowhere. In no take did we ever turn back the clock. We just kept winding it. Every take another ball of confusion. Takes that could almost make you question your own existence.
Then, from out of nowhere in the midst of it all, came “Where Teardrops Fall.” It was just a three-minute ballad, but it made you stand straight up and stay right where you were. It’s like someone had pulled the cord to stop the train. The song was beautiful and magical, upbeat, and it was complete. I was wondering if Danny was thinking the same thing, and he was. “I can’t remember that at all,” Danny said. Okay, we were going to forget about “Dignity” for a while. (We never did go back to it.) Lanois said that he liked the ballad, too, that it’s got something, but—and it was a big “but”—he said we could do it better and I asked him how and he said that the timing was a little off and the song wavered. Maybe it did…three in the morning. We could get Mason and Daryl and whoever and lay down a better track. I said, sure, and went out the back door of the studio, through the courtyard down to Magazine Street to the ice cream parlor and stayed there a while, wanted to be by myself—un-plugged the switchboard.
I thumbed through the local music paper and saw that Mick Jones, the quintessential guitarist from The Clash, was recovering from pneumonia. The report said that he nearly died. I wished that I had thought of him to play in my band. He’d have been perfect, but it was premature for me to think about that. Marianne Faithfull was recording a new record, too. She was the great grand dame and I used to know her. Hadn’t seen her in a while. The paper said that she had a new attitude and feeling about life after going through rehab at Hazelden, a clinic up in Minnesota. I felt glad for her. Elton John was auctioning off all his furniture and costumes. In the pages was a photo of his pinball machine. It looked fantastic and I wished I was bidding on it.
I left the ice cream parlor, went back out on the sidewalk. A wet wind hit me in the face. Moonlight illuminated the glistening leaves and my footsteps disturbed a courtyard of cats. A dog snarled menacingly from behind a wrought-iron fence. A black sedan went by, a couple of winos in it—windows rolled down, Paula Abdul song blasting out of the speakers. I crossed the street as the car moved up the block, and walked back through Audubon Park towards the street I was staying on, off of St. Charles Avenue. Even with all the churches and temples and cemeteries, New Orleans doesn’t have the psychic current of holy places. That’s a cold, frozen fact. It takes you a while to figure that out. In a lot of places you have to change with the times. It’s not necessary here. I got back to the house, went into the kitchen and sat there for a while, listened to Brown Sugar. She was playing “Dangerous Woman” by Little Junior Parker. Then I went upstairs and crawled under the sheets.
In the coming days some of my family would be visiting, and they wanted to go to the famous Antoine’s for dinner. I didn’t want to go but went anyway. We had dinner in the back room and I sat under a portrait of Princess Margaret in the same chair that supposedly Franklin Delano Roosevelt sat in. I only ordered the turtle soup. I didn’t want to eat anything that would bog me down. Later, I would have to be back at Lanois’s. I left the supper room early, walked out into a torrential thunderstorm, but I was glad I went. Glad I saw the place firsthand.
It had been raining off and on for the past three or four days, and now it was raining again. Danny had positioned everything just right to recut “Where Teardrops Fall.” We were back in the same parlor room and with about four or five musicians. In no time we were off and running. We laid down what sounded musically to be a perfectly proper track, but I wasn’t comfortable with it. It was hard to sing to—didn’t seem to have the magic that the previous version had. I shrugged, couldn’t get it, was having piss luck trying to cut this version. As a vocalist, it was like trying to scale the slippery trunk of a tree. I thought to myself, Why aren’t we using the other one? The other track? What was the matter with it? Danny thought the other track wasn’t right and of course, it wasn’t—not in technical terms. It couldn’t be fixed, but that was okay—there was no reason to interfere with it the way it was. It had a certain definite awe about it and eventually, Danny and I saw eye to eye, went back and listened to Dopsie’s version and used it.
We cut “Series of Dreams,” and although Lanois liked the song, he liked the bridge better, wanted the whole song to be like that. I knew what he meant, but it just couldn’t be done. Though I thought about it for a second, thinking that I could probably start with the bridge as the main part and use the main part as the bridge. Hank Williams had done that once with the song “Lovesick Blues,” but as much as I thought about it, the idea didn’t amount to much and thinking about the song this way wasn’t healthy. I felt like it was fine the way it was—didn’t want to lose myself in thinking too much about changing it. Danny was struggling to help me make this song work and he had the confidence to try anything. He cared a lot. Sometimes I thought he cared too much. He would have done anything to make a song happen—empty the pans, wash dishes, sweep the floors. It didn’t matter. All that mattered to him was getting that certain something and I understood that.
Lanois was a Yankee man, came from north of Toronto—snowshoe country, abstract thinking. Northerners think abstract. When it’s cold, you don’t fret because you know it’s going to be warm again…and when it’s warm, you don’t worry about that either because you know it’ll be cold eventually. It’s not like in the hot places where the weather is always the same and you don’t expect anything to change. Lanois’s thinking was fine with me. I think abstract, too. Lanois is technically minded and he’s a musician, usually plays on every record he produces. He’s got ideas about overdubbing and tape manipulation theories that he’s developed with the English producer Brian Eno on how to make a record, and he’s got strong convictions. But I’m pretty independent, too, and I don’t like to be told to do something if I don’t understand it. This was the problem we were going to have to work through. One thing about Lanois that I liked is that he didn’t want to float on the surface. He didn’t even want to swim. He wanted to jump in and go deep. He wanted to marry a mermaid. All that was fine with me. Off and on during the time we were cutting “Series of Dreams,” he’d say to me something like, “We need songs like ‘Masters of War,’ ‘Girl from the North Country,’ or ‘With God on Our Side.’ ” He began nagging at me, just about every other day, that we could sure use some songs like those. I nodded. I knew we could, but I felt like growling. I didn’t have anything like those songs.
When we began working on “What Good Am I?” I had to hunt for a melody and after working on it for a suitable length of time Danny thought he heard something. I thought that I was on to something but hadn’t quite found it yet. I was looking too hard. When it’s right, you don’t have to look for it. Maybe it was only a foot and a half away, I didn’t know. But I had exhausted my energy and I thought I might as well just go with what Lanois liked, although it was too slow for my taste. Danny used layered rhythms to create a mood for this song. I liked the words, but the melody wasn’t quite special enough—didn’t have any emotional impact. Setting aside our personal differences, we worked on this song for a while and completed it.
I had heard there was a Tennessee Williams literary festival going on for the past week or two and I wanted to see what was left of it. So one night I went to Coliseum Street in the Garden District to one of the double gallery–style houses with a gabled roof, flanked by columns, in hopes to hear something about Tom, discover something about the wondrous truth of his plays. On paper they always seemed kind of stiff. You had to see them live onstage to get the full freak effect. I’d met Williams once in the early ’60s, and he looked like the genius that he was. The society-sponsored lecture was ending as I got there. As I went in, most of the others were coming out, so I turned away and headed back to the recording studio, walking on Loyola Street past Lafayette Cemetery No. 2. Light rain was falling. Rats scurried across the telephone poles.
Later that night we began cutting “Ring Them Bells.” There was one line in the song that I was trying to fix, but never did…the last line…“breaking down the distance between right and wrong.” The line fit, but it didn’t verify what I felt. Right or wrong, like it fits in the Wanda Jackson song, or right from wrong, like the Billy Tate song, that makes sense, but not right and wrong. The concept didn’t exist in my subconscious mind. I’d always been confused about that kind of stuff, didn’t see any moral ideal played out there. The concept of being morally right or morally wrong seems to be wired to the wrong frequency. Things that aren’t in the script happen every day. If someone steals leather and then makes shoes for the poor, it might be a moral act, but it’s not legally right, so it’s wrong. That stuff troubled me, the legal and moral aspect of things. There are good deeds and bad deeds. A good person can do a bad thing and a bad person can do a good thing. But I never did get to fix the line. On this take it’s outright, natural sound with little experimentation. I felt I could have done it unaccompanied. That aside, Lanois captured the essence of it on this, put the magic into its heartbeat and pulse. We cut this song exactly the way I found it…two or three takes with me on the piano, Dan on guitar and Malcolm Burn on keyboards. He definitely captured the moment. He might have even captured the whole era. He did the right thing—came up with an accurate, dynamic version. Anybody can hear it. The song sustains itself from beginning to end—Lanois brought out all its keen, harmonic sense. In this Dan was more than a sound man. He was like a doctor with scientific principles. I asked him once, “Danny. Are you a doctor?” “Yeah, but not of medicine,” he smiled.
Lanois and his crew kept a bunch of vintage Harleys parked out back and in the courtyard of the studio. Mostly Panheads with Hydra-Glide front forks, chrome driving lamps, mostly solo seated, wide tires, tombstone taillights. I had to have one of these bikes. Mark Howard, one of Dan’s engineers and motorcycle enthusiast found me one—a ’66 Harley Police Special, out of Florida with a powder-coated frame, stainless steel spokes, black-powdered rim and hubs, everything original and it ran good. Once I got it, I began taking it out during breaks from the studio or early in the morning. I used to ride along Ferret Street all the way down to Canal, sometimes into East New Orleans over the Inter-coastal waters or sometimes went over and parked it around Jackson Square, near St. Louis Cathedral. Once I took it into the Wildlife Gardens around Lake Borgne with its water views and benches, where Andrew Jackson and his ragtag army of pirates, Choctaws, free blacks, lawyers and merchants militia defeated Britain’s finest, sent them back out to sea for good. Britain was supposed to have ten thousand troops and Jackson about four, but he overcame them anyway, so the history books say. Jackson said that he’d burn New Orleans to t
he ground before he’d surrender it. Jackson, Old Hickory, Master of Bloody Deeds—tall and raw-boned, blue eyes and bushy gray hair, cantankerous, a backwoodsman, opposed the Bank of the United States. At least he didn’t drop bombs killing civilians and innocent children for the glory of his nation’s honor. He wouldn’t be going to hell for that.
Once I rode the bike over to the Spanish Plaza and parked it at the foot of Canal Street. Nearby, a paddle wheeler was moored on the river, the chinka-chinka beat of a Cajun band on the boat sounded almost hysterical. Under the southernmost magnolia I started feeling something about a song called “Shooting Star,” a song I hadn’t written yet. I could vaguely hear it in my mind. The kind of song you hear when you’re wide awake in your head and see and feel things, but all the rest of you is asleep. I didn’t want to forget this. Before I left town, I wanted to write it and record it. I thought it might be something Lanois was looking for.