Chronicles - Bob Dylan [87]
We recorded “Man in the Long Black Coat” and a peculiar change crept over the appearance of things. I had a feeling about it and so did he. The chord progression, the dominant chords and key changes give it the hypnotic effect right away — signal what the lyrics are about to do. The dread intro gives you the impression of a chronic rush. The production sounds deserted, like the intervals of the city have disappeared. It’s cut out from the abyss of blackness — visions of a maddened brain, a feeling of unreality — the heavy price of gold upon someone’s head. Nothing standing, even corruption is corrupt. Something menacing and terrible. The song came nearer and nearer — crowding itself into the smallest possible place. We didn’t even rehearse the song, we began working it out with visual cues. Before the lyrics even came in, you knew that the fight was on. This is Lanois-land and couldn’t have been coming from anywhere else. The lyrics try to tell you about someone whose body doesn’t belong to him. Someone who loved life but cannot live, and it rankles his soul that others should be able to live. Any other instrument on the track would have destroyed the magnetism. After we had completed a few takes of the song, Danny looked over to me as if to say, This is it. It was.
I wasn’t sure that we had recorded any historical tunes like what he had wanted, but I was thinking that we might have gotten close with these last two. “Man in the Long Black Coat” was the real facts. In some kind of weird way, I thought of it as my “I Walk the Line,” a song I’d always considered to be up there at the top, one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time, a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable spots, sharp words from a master.
I’d always thought that Sun Records and Sam Phillips himself had created the most crucial, uplifting and powerful records ever made. Next to Sam’s records, all the rest sounded fruity. On Sun Records the artists were singing for their lives and sounded like they were coming from the most mysterious place on the planet. No justice for them. They were so strong, can send you up a wall. If you were walking away and looked back at them, you could be turned into stone. Johnny Cash’s records were no exception, but they weren’t what you expected. Johnny didn’t have a piercing yell, but ten thousand years of culture fell from him. He could have been a cave dweller. He sounds like he’s at the edge of the fire, or in the deep snow, or in a ghostly forest, the coolness of conscious obvious strength, full tilt and vibrant with danger. “I keep a close watch on this heart of mine.” Indeed. I must have recited those lines to myself a million times. Johnny’s voice was so big, it made the world grow small, unusually low pitched — dark and booming, and he had the right band to match him, the rippling rhythm and cadence of click-clack. Words that were the rule of law and backed by the power of God. When I first heard “I Walk the Line” so many years earlier, it sounded like a voice calling out, “What are you doing there, boy?” I was trying to keep my eyes wide opened, too.
I don’t know how “Man in the Long Black Coat” could have been recorded without Lanois. Like Sam Phillips, he likes to push artists to the psychological edge, and he’d done that with me, but he didn’t have to do any of that with this song.
Our time was drawing to a close. Danny and I were sitting in the courtyard, the same way we had when we first met. Wind whipped in the open doorway and another kicking storm was rumbling earthward. There was a hurricane a hundred miles away. The light had gone out of the day. In the trees, a solitary bird warbling. We did it as we damn well pleased and there was nothing more to say. When the record was all added up, I hoped it would meet head on with the realities of life. I was going to thank him, but sometimes you can do