by Bob Dylan
Later that night I sat at a window overlooking Central Park and wrote the song “Dark Eyes.” I recorded it the next night with only an acoustic guitar and it was the right thing to do. It did complete the album.
New York City wasn’t New Orleans, though. It wasn’t the city of astrology. It didn’t have any mysteries lurking in its vast recesses, mysteries built when and by whom no man could tell. New York was a city where you could be frozen to death in the midst of a busy street and nobody would notice. New Orleans wasn’t like that.
My wife would be leaving soon. She had to go to Baltimore to be in a gospel play and we were sitting outside on the porch facing the veranda, sipping coffee, low thunder rolling in. She stuck her tongue in my ear. “That tickles,” I said. My wife, who had the ability to see a grain of truth in just about anything, knew that the recording sessions hadn’t been going easy and at times had become heated. “Don’t go stoned crazy,” she reminded me.
Later, I was going to go to the studio but changed my mind and fell asleep and woke up. Morning hadn’t come, so I closed my eyes and went back to sleep again. I woke up. I’d slept the clock around and now it was night again. I went into the kitchen to make some coffee before leaving. The radio was on as usual. A singer was singing that life was monotonous, life is a drag. It was Eartha Kitt. I thought to myself, “That’s the truth, Eartha. That’s plenty good. I’m friends with ya. Go ahead and sing.”
We recorded “What Was It You Wanted?” with the full band: Malcolm Burn on bass, Mason Ruffner on guitar, Willie Green on drums, Cyril Neville on percussion. I played guitar and harmonica. Lanois played guitar, too. There aren’t any lyrics in the interludes, but there probably should have been. At the time it was more important to get the theme of the lyric across and to keep the rhythmic pulse going. I’d cut stranger songs. The way the microphones are placed makes the atmosphere seem to be texturally rich, jet lagged and loaded—Quaaludes, misty. It starts mixed and cooked in a pot like a gumbo, right from the downbeat, dreamy and ambiguous. We had to keep the song level and right-side up. Danny’s sonic atmosphere makes it sound like it’s coming out of some mysterious, silent land. The production gyrates and moves with all kinds of layered rhythms, and I don’t think Barry White could have done it any better. In this song, all our interests coincided.
I started seeing that all these compressors, processors, vintage gear, preamps and the reverb echo effects that were being used added up to a certain romance of sound that Lanois had in his head. Everything was pretty much live the way you hear it. Dan didn’t depend a lot on overdubbing, not that he wouldn’t overdub an occasional instrument, he just didn’t use it as a crutch. The song was like looking at words in a mirror and checking out the reverse images. It’s like you set up a thick smokescreen and then put the real action ten miles away. In some takes “Disease of Conceit” was cut as a weeper blues with an insistent beat. B-flat gives it a dark edge. I am playing the piano but I’m playing blocked chords. Allen Toussaint might have played the same thing only better and it would have freed me up to play guitar, but that didn’t happen. Arthur Rubinstein would have been the ultimate player. That would have been perfect. I could also hear the song being played as a march. It could have been recorded with a bugle band or a funeral band. That might have been even more perfect. We might have recorded four or five versions of this, every one going straight to the point and seeming to go down in an eternal second. None of these takes were ever swamped up at all.
We listened later to it on the big speakers with the bass jacked up and Danny said that we should leave it alone, that it’s right the way it is. “Think so?” “Yeah, it’s got something.” That’s the most you can ever get out of Lanois. He seldom showed any emotion or excitement over anything, unless he was whirling around and smashing guitars. That didn’t happen often, though. The song came in ready form and not a thing was changed about it. The night we recorded it, there was a lightning storm outside—leaves slapping on the banana trees. Something was guiding the song. It was like Joan of Arc was out there. (Or Joan Armatrading.) Whoever it was, somebody was out there working like hell.
To get my brain into something else for a minute, I’d gone back to the local movie theater, this time to see Homeboy starring Mickey Rourke, who played a shy and awkward cowboy boxer named Johnny Walker. Christopher Walken was in it, too. Everybody in the movie was pretty good, but Mickey’s acting was at the upper end. He could break your heart with a look. The movie traveled to the moon every time he came onto the screen. Nobody could hold a candle to him. He was just there, didn’t have to say hello or good-bye. Just seeing him act gave me the inspiration to cut the last two songs for this album.
“Shooting Star” was one of the songs I wrote in New Orleans. I felt like I didn’t write it so much as I inherited it. It would have been good to have a horn man or two on it, a throbbing hum that mingled into the music, but we had to cut it with what we had: Brian on guitar, Willie on drums, Tony on bass and Lanois on Omnichord, a plastic instrument that sounds like an autoharp—me playing guitar and harmonica. The song came to me complete, full in the eyes like I’d been traveling on the garden pathway of the sun and just found it. It was illuminated. I’d seen a shooting star from the backyard of our house, or maybe it was a meteorite.
In the big parlor room where we cut it there was no air conditioning so we had to keep going outside between takes. But that was the way I liked it anyway. I don’t like air conditioning to start with. It’s hard to cut songs in air conditioned rooms where all the good air is gone. In the courtyard, it was raining soup.
On “Shooting Star,” I would have liked to have played combination string stuff with somebody else playing the rhythm chords, but we didn’t get it that far. In this song, the microphones were pinned up in odd places. The band sounded full. It’s not like we had an increased number of options in how to cut it. I was hoping that when it was finished it would at least sound cohesive, like the effect of three or four instruments coming off like a full orchestra. But that’s hard to do with separate tracking. On one of the last takes, Dan had hyped the snare and captured the song in its essence. It was frigid and burning, yearning—lonely and apart. Many hundreds of miles of pain went into it.
New Orleans was heating up. The hundred percent humidity hadn’t settled in but you could feel it coming. I’d gone over to the Lion’s Den Club on Gravier Street to hear Irma Thomas, one of my favorite singers. She hadn’t had a hit since the ’60s, but she still was on the jukeboxes here with “Fever.” Irma played at the Lion’s Den Club frequently. I wanted to see her perform, maybe ask her about singing with me on “Shooting Star” and do something like the girl in Mickey and Sylvia. That would have been interesting.
Out in front of the club, a guy in a duck-bill cap was hosing down a car. Some people were sitting on porches and there were some revelers down the street. “She’s not here tonight,” the guy in the duck-bill cap said. The Stones, early in their career, had recorded Irma’s version of “Time Is on My Side.” Some newspaper writer once asked her, didn’t that make her feel pretty good? Irma said that she didn’t care, that she didn’t write the song. Only those in the music business would understand that.
On the way back to the studio I was thinking that if I had to do this again, I would have brought somebody to New Orleans with me, somebody that went back a ways—someone who I liked as a musician, who had ideas and could play them, who had come down the same musical path as me.
Lately I’d been thinking about Jim Dickinson and how it would have been good to have him here. Dickinson was in Memphis. He’d started out playing the same time as me, in about ’57 or ’58, listened to the same things and could play and sing pretty well. We were from opposite ends of the Mississippi River. Back then, rock and roll was hated and resented, and folk music even more so, and Dickinson stepped to the front in both. His influences were jug band and early rock-and-roll bebop, same as mine. He had played on the Stones’ song “Wild Horses” and so
me other things, but he had recorded way before then, actually was the last artist to ever release a single on Sam Phillips’s Sun Records with a song called “Cadillac Man.” Jim had manic purpose. We had a lot of things in common and it would have been good to have him around. He had kids, too, that played music just like some of mine did. But I didn’t bring anybody, didn’t think to, didn’t even bring any equipment. I guess I was skeptical to begin with. I wanted to see what Danny could do on his own. I was hoping he’d surprise me. And he did surprise me.
We recorded “Man in the Long Black Coat” and a peculiar change crept over the appearance of things. I had a feeling about it and so did he. The chord progression, the dominant chords and key changes give it the hypnotic effect right away—signal what the lyrics are about to do. The dread intro gives you the impression of a chronic rush. The production sounds deserted, like the intervals of the city have disappeared. It’s cut out from the abyss of blackness—visions of a maddened brain, a feeling of unreality—the heavy price of gold upon someone’s head. Nothing standing, even corruption is corrupt. Something menacing and terrible. The song came nearer and nearer—crowding itself into the smallest possible place. We didn’t even rehearse the song, we began working it out with visual cues. Before the lyrics even came in, you knew that the fight was on. This is Lanois-land and couldn’t have been coming from anywhere else. The lyrics try to tell you about someone whose body doesn’t belong to him. Someone who loved life but cannot live, and it rankles his soul that others should be able to live. Any other instrument on the track would have destroyed the magnetism. After we had completed a few takes of the song, Danny looked over to me as if to say, This is it. It was.
I wasn’t sure that we had recorded any historical tunes like what he had wanted, but I was thinking that we might have gotten close with these last two. “Man in the Long Black Coat” was the real facts. In some kind of weird way, I thought of it as my “I Walk the Line,” a song I’d always considered to be up there at the top, one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time, a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable spots, sharp words from a master.
I’d always thought that Sun Records and Sam Phillips himself had created the most crucial, uplifting and powerful records ever made. Next to Sam’s records, all the rest sounded fruity. On Sun Records the artists were singing for their lives and sounded like they were coming from the most mysterious place on the planet. No justice for them. They were so strong, can send you up a wall. If you were walking away and looked back at them, you could be turned into stone. Johnny Cash’s records were no exception, but they weren’t what you expected. Johnny didn’t have a piercing yell, but ten thousand years of culture fell from him. He could have been a cave dweller. He sounds like he’s at the edge of the fire, or in the deep snow, or in a ghostly forest, the coolness of conscious obvious strength, full tilt and vibrant with danger. “I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.” Indeed. I must have recited those lines to myself a million times. Johnny’s voice was so big, it made the world grow small, unusually low pitched—dark and booming, and he had the right band to match him, the rippling rhythm and cadence of click-clack. Words that were the rule of law and backed by the power of God. When I first heard “I Walk the Line” so many years earlier, it sounded like a voice calling out, “What are you doing there, boy?” I was trying to keep my eyes wide opened, too.
I don’t know how “Man in the Long Black Coat” could have been recorded without Lanois. Like Sam Phillips, he likes to push artists to the psychological edge, and he’d done that with me, but he didn’t have to do any of that with this song.
Our time was drawing to a close. Danny and I were sitting in the courtyard, the same way we had when we first met. Wind whipped in the open doorway and another kicking storm was rumbling earthward. There was a hurricane a hundred miles away. The light had gone out of the day. In the trees, a solitary bird warbling. We did it as we damn well pleased and there was nothing more to say. When the record was all added up, I hoped it would meet head on with the realities of life. I was going to thank him, but sometimes you can do it without opening your mouth, you can live it. I’d come to town with a cacophony of ideas and spent all I had under the watching gods. There’d been a clashing of spirits at times, but nothing that had turned into a bitter or complicated struggle. In the end, there always has to be some compromise of personal interests and there was, but the record satisfied my purposes and his. I can’t say if it’s the record either of us wanted. Human dynamics plays too big a part, and getting what you want isn’t always the most important thing in life anyway.
Although the record wouldn’t put me back on the map in radio land, ironically I had two records on the charts, even one in the Top 10, The Traveling Wilburys. The other one was the Dylan & the Dead album. The record Danny and I had just done would get good reviews, but reviews don’t sell records. Everyone who puts out a record gets at least one good review, but then there’s always a new crop of records and a new set of reviews. Sometimes you make records and you can’t give them away. The music business is strange. You curse it and you love it.
When we finished recording it felt like the studio could have gone up in a sheet of flame. It was so intense in there for the past couple of months or so. Lanois had created a haunting, not stumbling or halting album. He said he’d help me make a record and he didn’t break his word. We went by circuitous ways but we got there. We were simpatico although I think I always heard the record as sounding more strident than he did. I know that he wanted to understand me more as we went along, but you can’t do that, not unless you like to do puzzles. I think in the end, he gave up on that. A lot of the songs held up in a grand way and more than a few of them I’ve played plenty of times. I would have liked to been able to give him the kinds of songs that he wanted, like “Masters of War,” “Hard Rain,” “Gates of Eden,” but those kinds of songs were written under different circumstances, and circumstances never repeat themselves. Not exactly. I couldn’t get to those kinds of songs for him or anyone else. To do it, you’ve got to have power and dominion over the spirits. I had done it once, and once was enough. Someone would come along eventually who would have it again—someone who could see into things, the truth of things—not metaphorically, either—but really see, like seeing into metal and making it melt, see it for what it was and reveal it for what it was with hard words and vicious insight.
Danny asked me who I’d been listening to recently, and I told him Ice-T. He was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been. A few years earlier, Kurtis Blow, a rapper from Brooklyn who had a hit out called “The Breaks,” had asked me to be on one of his records and he familiarized me with that stuff, Ice-T, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Run-D.M.C. These guys definitely weren’t standing around bullshitting. They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs. They were all poets and knew what was going on. Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later who would know that world, been born and raised with it…be all of it and more. Someone with a chopped topped head and a power in the community. He’d be able to balance himself on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the universe and you’d know him when he came—there’d be only one like him. The audience would go that way, and I couldn’t blame them. The kind of music that Danny and I were making was archaic. I didn’t tell him that, but that’s how I honestly felt. With Ice-T and Public Enemy, who were laying the tracks, a new performer was bound to appear, and one unlike Presley. He wouldn’t be swinging his hips and staring at the lassies. He’d be doing it with hard words and he’d be working eighteen hours a day. Sun Pie had mentioned Elvis to me, said that Elvis was an Amazon woman, an enemy of democracy. At the time it sounded like crackpot talk, but at the same time I wasn’t so sure.
Sometimes you say things in songs even if there’s a small chance of them being true. And sometimes you say things that have nothing to do with the truth of what you want to say and sometimes you say things that everyone knows
to be true. Then again, at the same time, you’re thinking that the only truth on earth is that there is no truth on it. Whatever you are saying, you’re saying in a ricky-tick way. There’s never time to reflect. You stitched and pressed and packed and drove, is what you did.
Lanois would be moving on, too, to another pick up and move studio. Lanois was a walking concept. He slept music. He ate it. He lived it. A lot of what he did was pure genius. He steered this record with deft turns and jerks, but he did it. He stood in the bell tower, scanning the alleys and rooftops. My limited vision didn’t permit me to see all around the thing. There were a lot of records out that were padded and schmaltzy odes to flunky-ism and neither one of us wanted to add to its ranks. When we began, that’s about all we had in common. There’s something magical about this record, though, and you might say that it was in the house or the parlor room or something, but there wasn’t any magic in the house. It’s what Lanois and me and Willie Green and Daryl and Brian Stoltz brought to the place that made it what it was. You live with what life deals you. We have to make things fit. The voice on the record was never going to be the voice of the martyred man of constant sorrow, and I think in the beginning, Danny had to come to terms with that, and when he gave that notion up, that’s when things started to work. None of it was planned that way. Though I was incapable of taking a lot of his emotional trips seriously, we were kind of kindred spirits. In another millions of days, thousands of millions of days, what would it all mean? What does anything ever mean? I try to use my material in the most effective way. The songs were written to the glory of man and not to his defeat, but all of these songs added together doesn’t even come close to my whole vision of life. Sometimes the things that you liked the best and that have meant the most to you are the things that meant nothing at all to you when you first heard or saw them. Some of these songs fit into that category. I suppose all these things are simple, matter of fact enough.