Chronicles - Bob Dylan [85]
Later, I was going to go to the studio but changed my mind and fell asleep and woke up. Morning hadn’t come, so I closed my eyes and went back to sleep again. I woke up. I’d slept the clock around and now it was night again. I went into the kitchen to make some coffee before leaving. The radio was on as usual. A singer was singing that life was monotonous, life is a drag. It was Eartha Kitt. I thought to myself, “That’s the truth, Eartha. That’s plenty good. I’m friends with ya. Go ahead and sing.”
We recorded “What Was It You Wanted?” with the full band: Malcolm Burn on bass, Mason Ruffner on guitar, Willie Green on drums, Cyril Neville on percussion. I played guitar and harmonica. Lanois played guitar, too. There aren’t any lyrics in the interludes, but there probably should have been. At the time it was more important to get the theme of the lyric across and to keep the rhythmic pulse going. I’d cut stranger songs. The way the microphones are placed makes the atmosphere seem to be texturally rich, jet lagged and loaded — Quaaludes, misty. It starts mixed and cooked in a pot like a gumbo, right from the downbeat, dreamy and ambiguous. We had to keep the song level and right-side up. Danny’s sonic atmosphere makes it sound like it’s coming out of some mysterious, silent land. The production gyrates and moves with all kinds of layered rhythms, and I don’t think Barry White could have done it any better. In this song, all our interests coincided.
I started seeing that all these compressors, processors, vintage gear, preamps and the reverb echo effects that were being used added up to a certain romance of sound that Lanois had in his head. Everything was pretty much live the way you hear it. Dan didn’t depend a lot on overdubbing, not that he wouldn’t overdub an occasional instrument, he just didn’t use it as a crutch. The song was like looking at words in a mirror and checking out the reverse images. It’s like you set up a thick smokescreen and then put the real action ten miles away. In some takes “Disease of Conceit” was cut as a weeper blues with an insistent beat. B-flat gives it a dark edge. I am playing the piano but I’m playing blocked chords. Allen Toussaint might have played the same thing only better and it would have freed me up to play guitar, but that didn’t happen. Arthur Rubinstein would have been the ultimate player. That would have been perfect. I could also hear the song being played as a march. It could have been recorded with a bugle band or a funeral band. That might have been even more perfect. We might have recorded four or five versions of this, every one going straight to the point and seeming to go down in an eternal second. None of these takes were ever swamped up at all.
We listened later to it on the big speakers with the bass jacked up and Danny said that we should leave it alone, that it’s right the way it is. “Think so?” “Yeah, it’s got something.” That’s the most you can ever get out of Lanois. He seldom showed any emotion or excitement over anything, unless he was whirling around and smashing guitars. That didn’t happen often, though. The song came in ready form and not a thing was changed about it. The night we recorded it, there was a lightning storm outside — leaves slapping on the banana trees. Something was guiding the song. It was like Joan of Arc was out there. (Or Joan Armatrading.) Whoever it was, somebody was out there working like hell.
To get my brain into something else for a minute, I’d gone back to the local movie theater, this time to see Homeboy starring Mickey Rourke, who played a shy and awkward cowboy boxer named Johnny Walker. Christopher Walken was in it, too. Everybody in the movie was pretty good, but Mickey’s acting was at the upper end. He could break your heart with a look. The movie traveled to the moon every