Chronicles - Bob Dylan [80]
Though Lanois showed little excitement over the track, he knew it wasn’t a dog. I knew what he was looking for. He was looking for songs that defined me as a person, but what I do in the studio doesn’t define me as a person. There’s just too much small print in thousands of pages for anything like that to happen. He was helping me as a singer, though. As a singer, you could die without the right microphones and amps, and Lanois was doing his best to find the right combinations. I usually left the studio at night in a cold frame of mind. “Danny,” I’d say sometimes. “Are we still friends?”
After being in New Orleans for about a month, I was up early and I rooted my wife out of bed. Daylight was two hours away. “What’s wrong now?” she said. I hadn’t thought that anything was wrong. Within minutes she had slipped out of her loose robe and was making coffee. By daybreak we were riding on the Harley, had crossed the Mississippi River into Bridge City and headed over towards Thibodaux on Route 90. No purpose in heading there, it was just a place to go. At Raceland, we got onto 308. I was feeling stuffy — needed to get out of town. Something wasn’t clicking, like when the world is hidden from your eyes and you need to find it. If I wanted to keep awake for the rest of these sessions, I’d have to open a window and get a grip on something, and whatever it was I needed to be one hundred percent sure of it.
Crossing into Thibodaux, we rode near Bayou Lafourche. It was a clammy day, light rain off and on and the clouds were breaking up, heat lightning low on the horizon. The town has got a lot of streets with tree names, Oak Street, Magnolia Street, Willow Street, Sycamore Street. West 1st Street runs alongside the bayou. We walked on a boardwalk that ran out into the water above the eerie wetlands — small islands of grass in the distance and pontoon boats. It was quiet. If you looked you could spot a snake on a tree branch.
I moved the bike up close near an old water tower. We got off and walked around, walked along adjoining roads dwarfed by ancient cypress trees, some seven hundred years old. It felt far enough away from the city, the dirt roads surrounded by lush sugarcane fields, labyrinths of moss walls in crumbled heaps, marshlands and soft mud all around. On the bike again we cruised along Pecan Street, then over by St. Joseph’s Church, which is modeled after one in Paris or Rome. Inside there’s supposed to be the actual severed arm of an early Christian martyr. Nichols State University, the poor man’s Harvard, is just up the street. On St. Patrick’s Street we rode past the palatial grand homes and big plantation houses, deep porched and with many windows. There’s an antebellum courthouse that stands next to clapboard halls. Ancient oak trees and decrepit shacks side by side. It felt good to be off by ourselves.
It was early afternoon and we’d been going for a while. Dust was blowing, my mouth was dry and my nose was clogged. Feeling hungry, we stopped into Chester’s Cypress Inn on Route 20 near Morgan City, a fried chicken, fish and frog legs joint. I was beginning to get weary. The waitress came over to the table and said, “How about eating?” I looked at the menu, then I looked at my wife. The one thing about her that I always loved was that she was never one of those people who thinks that someone else is the answer to their happiness. Me or anybody else. She’s always had her own built-in happiness. I valued her opinion and I trusted her. “You order,” I said. Next thing I know, fried catfish, okra and Mississippi