Chronicles - Bob Dylan [75]
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.
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