Chronicles - Bob Dylan [77]
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