Chronicles - Bob Dylan [86]
“Shooting Star” was one of the songs I wrote in New Orleans. I felt like I didn’t write it so much as I inherited it. It would have been good to have a horn man or two on it, a throbbing hum that mingled into the music, but we had to cut it with what we had: Brian on guitar, Willie on drums, Tony on bass and Lanois on Omnichord, a plastic instrument that sounds like an autoharp — me playing guitar and harmonica. The song came to me complete, full in the eyes like I’d been traveling on the garden pathway of the sun and just found it. It was illuminated. I’d seen a shooting star from the backyard of our house, or maybe it was a meteorite.
In the big parlor room where we cut it there was no air conditioning so we had to keep going outside between takes. But that was the way I liked it anyway. I don’t like air conditioning to start with. It’s hard to cut songs in air conditioned rooms where all the good air is gone. In the courtyard, it was raining soup.
On “Shooting Star,” I would have liked to have played combination string stuff with somebody else playing the rhythm chords, but we didn’t get it that far. In this song, the microphones were pinned up in odd places. The band sounded full. It’s not like we had an increased number of options in how to cut it. I was hoping that when it was finished it would at least sound cohesive, like the effect of three or four instruments coming off like a full orchestra. But that’s hard to do with separate tracking. On one of the last takes, Dan had hyped the snare and captured the song in its essence. It was frigid and burning, yearning — lonely and apart. Many hundreds of miles of pain went into it.
New Orleans was heating up. The hundred percent humidity hadn’t settled in but you could feel it coming. I’d gone over to the Lion’s Den Club on Gravier Street to hear Irma Thomas, one of my favorite singers. She hadn’t had a hit since the ’60s, but she still was on the jukeboxes here with “Fever.” Irma played at the Lion’s Den Club frequently. I wanted to see her perform, maybe ask her about singing with me on “Shooting Star” and do something like the girl in Mickey and Sylvia. That would have been interesting.
Out in front of the club, a guy in a duck-bill cap was hosing down a car. Some people were sitting on porches and there were some revelers down the street. “She’s not here tonight,” the guy in the duck-bill cap said. The Stones, early in their career, had recorded Irma’s version of “Time Is on My Side.” Some newspaper writer once asked her, didn’t that make her feel pretty good? Irma said that she didn’t care, that she didn’t write the song. Only those in the music business would understand that.
On the way back to the studio I was thinking that if I had to do this again, I would have brought somebody to New Orleans with me, somebody that went back a ways — someone who I liked as a musician, who had ideas and could play them, who had come down the same musical path as me.
Lately I’d been thinking about Jim Dickinson and how it would have been good to have him here. Dickinson was in Memphis. He’d started out playing the same time as me, in about ’57 or ’58, listened to the same things and could play and sing pretty well. We were from opposite ends of the Mississippi River. Back then, rock and roll was hated and resented, and folk music even more so, and Dickinson stepped to the front in both. His influences were jug band and early rock-and-roll bebop, same as mine. He had played on the Stones’ song “Wild Horses” and some other things, but he had recorded way before then, actually was the last artist to ever release a single on Sam Phillips’s Sun Records with a song called “Cadillac Man.” Jim had manic purpose. We had a lot of things in common and it would have been good to have him around. He had kids, too, that played music just like some of mine did. But I didn’t bring anybody,