Chronicles - Bob Dylan [73]
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,