Chronicles - Bob Dylan [78]
Lanois was a Yankee man, came from north of Toronto — snowshoe country, abstract thinking. Northerners think abstract. When it’s cold, you don’t fret because you know it’s going to be warm again…and when it’s warm, you don’t worry about that either because you know it’ll be cold eventually. It’s not like in the hot places where the weather is always the same and you don’t expect anything to change. Lanois’s thinking was fine with me. I think abstract, too. Lanois is technically minded and he’s a musician, usually plays on every record he produces. He’s got ideas about overdubbing and tape manipulation theories that he’s developed with the English producer Brian Eno on how to make a record, and he’s got strong convictions. But I’m pretty independent, too, and I don’t like to be told to do something if I don’t understand it. This was the problem we were going to have to work through. One thing about Lanois that I liked is that he didn’t want to float on the surface. He didn’t even want to swim. He wanted to jump in and go deep. He wanted to marry a mermaid. All that was fine with me. Off and on during the time we were cutting “Series of Dreams,” he’d say to me something like, “We need songs like ‘Masters of War,’ ‘Girl from the North Country,’ or ‘With God on Our Side.’ ” He began nagging at me, just about every other day, that we could sure use some songs like those. I nodded. I knew we could, but I felt like growling. I didn’t have anything like those songs.
When we began working on “What Good Am I?” I had to hunt for a melody and after working on it for a suitable length of time Danny thought he heard something. I thought that I was on to something but hadn’t quite found it yet. I was looking too hard. When it’s right, you don’t have to look for it. Maybe it was only a foot and a half away, I didn’t know. But I had exhausted my energy and I thought I might as well just go with what Lanois liked, although it was too slow for my taste. Danny used layered rhythms to create a mood for this song. I liked the words, but the melody wasn’t quite special enough — didn’t have any emotional impact. Setting aside our personal differences, we worked on this song for a while and completed it.
I had heard there was a Tennessee Williams literary festival going on for the past week or two and I wanted to see what was left of it. So one night I went to Coliseum Street in the Garden District to one of the double gallery–style houses with a gabled roof, flanked by columns, in hopes to hear something about Tom, discover something about the wondrous truth of his plays. On paper they always seemed kind of stiff. You had to see them live onstage to get the full freak effect. I’d met Williams once in the early ’60s, and he looked like the genius that he was. The society-sponsored lecture was ending as I got there. As I went in, most of the others were coming out, so I turned away and headed back to the recording studio, walking on Loyola Street past Lafayette Cemetery No. 2. Light rain was falling. Rats scurried across the telephone poles.
Later that night we began cutting “Ring Them Bells.” There was one line in the song that I was trying to fix, but never did…the last line…“breaking down the distance between right and wrong.” The line fit, but it didn’t verify what I felt. Right or wrong, like it fits in the Wanda Jackson song, or right from wrong, like the Billy Tate song, that makes sense, but not right and wrong.