Chronicles - Bob Dylan [55]
Within a week I was in the New York Columbia studios with Johnston at the helm, and he’s thinking that everything I’m recording is fantastic. He always does. He’s thinking that something is gonna strike pay dirt, that everything is totally together. On the contrary. Nothing was ever together. Not even after a song had been finished and recorded was it ever together. For one of these sets of lyrics, Kooper played some Teddy Wilson riffs on the piano. There were three girl singers in the room, who sounded like they’d been plucked from a choir and one of them did some improvisational scat singing. The whole thing was done in just one take and called “If Dogs Run Free.”
I recorded some of the earlier stuff from the MacLeish play that did have melodies and that seemed to go well. Whatever else fit — fragments, tunes, offbeat phrases. It didn’t matter. My reputation was firm in hand — at least these songs wouldn’t make any gory headlines. Message songs? There weren’t any. Anybody listening for them would have to be disappointed. As if I was going to make a career out of that anyway. Regardless, you could still feel the anticipation in the air. When will the old him be back? When will the door burst open and the goose appear? Not today. I felt like these songs could blow away in cigar smoke, which suited me fine. That my records were still selling surprised even me. Maybe there were good songs in the grooves and maybe there weren’t — who knows? But they weren’t the kind where you hear an awful roaring in your head. I knew what those kind of songs were like and these weren’t them. It’s not like I hadn’t any talent, I just wasn’t feeling the full force of the wind. No stellar explosions. I was leaning against the console and listening to one of the playbacks. It sounded okay.
Johnston had asked me earlier, “What do you think you’ll call this record?” Titles! Everybody likes titles. There’s a lot to be said in a title. I didn’t know, though, and hadn’t thought about it. But one thing I did know was that there’d be a photo of me and Victoria Spivey on the cover. The photo had been taken a few years earlier in a small recording studio. I knew that this photo would be on the cover even before I recorded the songs. Maybe I was even making this record because I had the cover in mind and needed something to go into the sleeve. It could be. “Down and Out on the Scene, how does that sound?” Johnston stared at me and made out of it what he would. “Oh shit, that’s gonna defang ’em all.” I didn’t know who the “them all” were that he was referring to, probably the executives at Columbia Records. He was always at war with them for some reason or another. He thought of them all as a bunch of rattlesnakes. “On what scene, where?” he asked. “It should be big.” Johnston liked places. He had produced the Johnny Cash at San Quentin record. He liked naming places, thought they created atmospheres. “Oh, I don’t know, someplace on top the world. Paris, Barcelona, Athens…one of those places.” Johnston looked up. “Oh shit man, I gotta get me a travel poster. That’s great!” But it wasn’t great. It was too soon to be talking about a title, anyway.
I gazed around the room, got up and nervously paced around a few times, watched the clock on the wall — it seemed to be running backwards. I sat back down feeling lines plowing into my face and the whites of my eyes turning yellow. Al Kooper was clowning around, telling shaggy dog stories. I was