Chronicles - Bob Dylan [88]
Although the record wouldn’t put me back on the map in radio land, ironically I had two records on the charts, even one in the Top 10, The Traveling Wilburys. The other one was the Dylan & the Dead album. The record Danny and I had just done would get good reviews, but reviews don’t sell records. Everyone who puts out a record gets at least one good review, but then there’s always a new crop of records and a new set of reviews. Sometimes you make records and you can’t give them away. The music business is strange. You curse it and you love it.
When we finished recording it felt like the studio could have gone up in a sheet of flame. It was so intense in there for the past couple of months or so. Lanois had created a haunting, not stumbling or halting album. He said he’d help me make a record and he didn’t break his word. We went by circuitous ways but we got there. We were simpatico although I think I always heard the record as sounding more strident than he did. I know that he wanted to understand me more as we went along, but you can’t do that, not unless you like to do puzzles. I think in the end, he gave up on that. A lot of the songs held up in a grand way and more than a few of them I’ve played plenty of times. I would have liked to been able to give him the kinds of songs that he wanted, like “Masters of War,” “Hard Rain,” “Gates of Eden,” but those kinds of songs were written under different circumstances, and circumstances never repeat themselves. Not exactly. I couldn’t get to those kinds of songs for him or anyone else. To do it, you’ve got to have power and dominion over the spirits. I had done it once, and once was enough. Someone would come along eventually who would have it again — someone who could see into things, the truth of things — not metaphorically, either — but really see, like seeing into metal and making it melt, see it for what it was and reveal it for what it was with hard words and vicious insight.
Danny asked me who I’d been listening to recently, and I told him Ice-T. He was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been. A few years earlier, Kurtis Blow, a rapper from Brooklyn who had a hit out called “The Breaks,” had asked me to be on one of his records and he familiarized me with that stuff, Ice-T, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Run-D.M.C. These guys definitely weren’t standing around bullshitting. They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs. They were all poets and knew what was going on. Somebody different was bound to come along sooner or later who would know that world, been born and raised with it…be all of it and more. Someone with a chopped topped head and a power in the community. He’d be able to balance himself on one leg on a tightrope that stretched across the universe and you’d know him when he came — there’d be only one like him. The audience would go that way, and I couldn’t blame them. The kind of music that Danny and I were making was archaic. I didn’t tell him that, but that’s how I honestly felt. With Ice-T and Public Enemy, who were laying the tracks, a new performer was bound to appear, and one unlike Presley. He wouldn’t be swinging his hips and staring at the lassies. He’d be doing it with hard words and he’d be working eighteen hours a day. Sun Pie had mentioned Elvis to me, said that Elvis was an Amazon woman, an enemy of democracy. At the time it sounded like crackpot talk, but at the same time I wasn’t so sure.
Sometimes you say things in songs even if there’s a small chance of them being true. And sometimes