BOB DYLAN SPECIAL: The Complete Tell Tale Signs

In this month’s issue of Uncut, we celebrate the release of Tell Tale Signs, the Bootleg Series Vol 8, Bob Dylan’s astonishing 2 and 3CD collection of unreleased material from 1989-2006.

We spoke to the musicians, producers and crew who worked with him during this period. And now, here’s your chance to read the full, unedited transcripts of those interviews.

Today, we present part ten: Daniel Lanois.

You can read previous transcripts by clicking on the side panel (right).

Next one up Wednesday (October 22)!

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DANIEL LANOIS

The Joshua Tree producer was recommended to Dylan by Bono for 1989’s Oh Mercy, and he returned almost a decade later for Time Out Of Mind. The pursuit of Lanois’ signature sonic ambience resulted in two of Dylan’s most significant albums – and one of his most combative musical relationships.

Jeff Rosen called me a couple of months ago and said he was thinking or releasing the demo version of “I Can’t Wait”. That was my demo, which was done at my theatre. I was renting a theatre at the time in a place called Oxnard [California]. I had my shop set up there for a while. So Bob Dylan would roll down to the teatro, cos it was a Spanish town. That’s where we did the demos for Time Out Of Mind, and out of that demo session came some lovely things, including that version of “I Can’t Wait”, which I feel has a lot of thunder in it. It’s very stripped down ’cause it’s piano – Bob on my lovely turn of the century Steinway, which has a roaring bass in it; me on my goldtop 1956 Les Paul, through a Vox, and Pretty Tony on the drums, who was a friend of mine who stopped by the help with the demos. I was sad to abandon that version, ’cause I think it has lot of rock’n’roll in it.

I did a lot of preparation [for the album] with Pretty Tony in New York City. I listened to a lot of old records that Bob recommended I fish out. Some of them I knew already – some Charley Patton records, dusty old rock’n’roll records really, blues records. And Tony and I played along to those records, and then I built some loops of what Tony and I did, and then abandoned these sources; which is a hip-hop technique. And then I brought those loops to Bob at the teatro. And we built a lot of demos around them, and he loved the fact that there was a good vibe on those. Some of the ultimate productions ended up having those loops in them. Songs like “Million Miles” and, uh, is it “Heartland”? [We think he means “Highlands” – ed] – those long blues numbers have those preparations in their spine.

I wanted people to respond to the vocal and not play across the vocal, so when the singer sings, you keep quiet. And if you want to respond to the singing, then you should have a signature or a melody and not ramblings. The rambling thing belongs to an old Nashville sound, where people pick a lot. I didn’t want ramblings. Just like I don’t like Dixieland playing for that reason – it becomes like a mosquito in the room, like “Would you just stop playing for a minute?” I want to hear the singer. I wanted to make sure that we didn’t fall into the clichés of Nashville ramblings. I think that was OK for the past, but not for now. [Drummer] David Kemper said I told him that the players shouldn’t play pedestrian – they had to play strange? He might have been referring to that particular rant where I felt that people were on autopilot, and I didn’t want autopilot. I wanted Bob’s vocal and lyrics, and then if we had something to say musically aside from that, then let’s say it loud and proud, no meanderings.

Kemper said I didn’t like “Cold Irons Bound”, and that I said “The world doesn’t want another two-note melody from Bob.”? That might have been part of the same rant. But I love “Cold Irons Bound”. I think it’s fantastic. But Kemper wasn’t there for much of that record.

He said he recorded eight songs, but that’s the only one that he’s on the record? Yeah. And maybe not even that one. Brian Blade’s the man you want to speak to if you want to talk about drums. He’s on the record and the other guy’s not. Kemper’s not on the record and Brian Blade’s on the record. Have you not looked at the liner notes? Kemper was sent home. And the guys who played on the record are Brian Blade and Jim Keltner.

In terms of how I worked with Bob, I just operate the same way I always operate. I’m totally committed and I try and look out for the best expression, and the best performance. I’m completely honest and clear about what I think is the best for them. And if anything gets in the way of that, then they’re gonna have to deal with Lanois. But let’s put it this way. When people reach a certain stature, there’s a lot of confidence built around that person, and consequently there’s a lot of people around that think that that person must be right all the time. Unfortunately, it’s not my job to be one of those people!

Bob and I talked about the music he wanted. Oh yeah. In a major way. For Time Out Of Mind we got together in New York. We didn’t even have any instruments or any songs to listen to really. He just had a stack of lyrics. He read me all the lyrics and said: “What do you think, Daniel, do we have a record?” I said yes, because I could hear a record even though I had not heard a note. A lot of philosophical exchanges happened then, about what kind of sound Bob loved. And it was clear to me that he loved records that were made at the birth of a medium. There’s always something fantastic about the beginning of a medium. There’s obviously a fascination with the technology, but beyond that there’s an appetite for the end results.

The ears had not been filled with too much music in the ‘40s, ‘50s, and the ‘30s, and so it was all exciting. The opportunity to hear any recording was regarded as a sacred moment. And that then feeds the work, and there’s a vibrant tone to early works that are flung out of a medium, and Bob wanted that vitality in his work. And I could not disagree with him. I felt that recordings prior to that time had been more for classical settings, where you were documenting something from a slight distance. So if you have an orchestra of 40 people, you don’t mike the lead violinist. You mike the orchestra further back because they have their own sound. They are acoustically balanced, and the job is to document them – and that’s where the term ‘record’ came from. It was a snapshot of something that was already happening. It was not: let’s go in the studio and see how creative we can be.

That came much later, in the ‘60s with The Beatles and all that. And great things came out of that. But Bob was not interested in that kind of patience; the patience required to go in and fiddle around for months on end. That’s not what he’s interested in, not then and not now. He wants to go in and capture the sound of his band or the sound of an orchestra. And so I helped him do that, and Time Out Of Mind had a large ensemble, and much of what you hear is a record of that ensemble with full, natural depth of field, given that you have a large room with people sitting in different chairs, then you automatically get bleeding and certain things getting into the vocal mike, and all of these things add up to an exciting feeling of spontaneous combustion, which is what we love about the birth of rock’n’roll. That’s what I wanted to get on Time Out Of Mind, and I believe we got it.

On Oh Mercy the concept was fully emphasising the centre of the picture. The centre of the picture being the song, and Bob’s voice, and Bob’s guitar playing or piano playing. So I became his companion and bodyguard. I sat next to him and it was essentially the two of us in the centre, and I was his bodyguard to make sure that he got into the centre and occupied the centre. And then we built the frame around the centre, with what we had available to us in the neighbourhood musically – some of the Neville Brothers. And my shop was set up in such a way that Bob and I were at the centre and there were some other instruments around where people could spontaneously stop by and be recording right away. So the preparation and the set up was the success of the additional framing of that record.

You have to be ready to roll at any moment. So, if we want to call that spontaneity, then let preparation be your friend. Because if you say to somebody, ‘could you hang on for a second, we need to fiddle with the microphone on the piano?’ then you’ve lost the moment. And at that point I was pretty much at the top of my game with my studio on the road, so we were a pretty well-oiled machine, so we didn’t miss too much.

The lyrics pretty much dictate the atmosphere, or set the tone for how you’re gonna light your shot. The Oh Mercy tracks were more night-time in feeling. Bob had a rule, we only recorded at night. I think he’s right about that: the body is ready to accommodate a certain tempo at night time – it feels comfortable with a certain tempo, and that tempo will be a little slower than what you would think is a good tempo at the noon bell. I think it’s something to do with the pushing and pulling of the moon. At night-time we’re OK with maybe four or five bpms slower, and ready to be more mysterious and dark. So Oh Mercy’s about that.

I think Bob’s one of the great phrasers. I think he ranks up there with some of my favourite singers, whether it be Stevie Wonder or James Brown. And people don’t talk about Bob that way, but I think he is a master phraser – and I believe a lot of that has come from his extensive study of rhyming schemes, and understanding that you write your lyrics with phrasing punctuation. I’ll give you an example. [Sings] “In the lonely night/in the shadow of a pale blue light/I think of you in black and white/when we were made of dreams.”

So that “When we were made of dreams” – that’s a written part. That’s like Bach, or Beethoven. It’s a written part that you don’t deviate from. So when you write your next verse, you might use a different line than ‘when we were made of dreams’ but it has to have that stab – dum-dum dum-dum dum-duh. If it does not have that stab, then you’ve strayed from the phrasing formula. You’ve strayed from the beauty of that particular commitment to a phrasing. So this is where Bob’s a master, and the newer artists, maybe somebody who came up in a different way, more of a live performer, may not be hip to those early phrasing studies, cos they were busy doing other things.

I’ve heard Bob have several voices over the decades and I like them all. I liked the Nashville Skyline era a lot. There was a particular tone that he adopted. The thing about Bob’s voice is that he has very dense print. The microphone loves his voice. He’s got about a 20 dB advantage over other singers – in the sense that he’s got that mid-range in his print. To we record-makers, that means that you get to turn the microphone down 20 dB, because he’s delivering an extra 20, which means you then get a 20dB improvement on your signal to noise ratio. So the bleeding into Bob’s mike is not a problem, it’s an enhancement. But if a quieter singer was in the room, with a lesser print, you could not get away with that recording that we did on Time Out Of Mind cos it would just be junky and mumbo-jumbo.

Too many cymbals spilling into the singer’s mike and so on. So Bob is a great artist to record with people around him. That’s a very big part of the sound of Time Out Of Mind – the cacophonous out-of-control situation is well represented. And as a technical point, whenever we had to replace a vocal line, sometimes would change a lyric – [engineer Mark] Howard and I went to extensive set-up to replicate the bleeding of the band into Bob’s vocal mike. We set up speakers around the room for him to do those repairs, and the music was piped through those speakers, simulating the presence and volume of the band in the room. So that when we did a vocal repair, we also had the band bleeding in. It’s a skin graft that has the same pigment.

ALASTAIR McKAY

BOB DYLAN SPECIAL: The Complete Tell Tale Signs

In this month’s issue of Uncut, we celebrate the release of Tell Tale Signs, the Bootleg Series Vol 8, Bob Dylan’s astonishing 2 and 3CD collection of unreleased material from 1989-2006.

We spoke to the musicians, producers and crew who worked with him during this period. And now, here’s your chance to read the full, unedited transcripts of those interviews.

Today, we present part 9; drummer Jim Keltner talks about making Time Out of Mind, while Daniel Lanois and others will follow in a further four parts in the coming weeks.

You can catch up on our previous transcripts by clicking on the side panel (right).

Next one up Monday (October 20)!

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Jim Keltner

One of Time Out Of Mind’s three drummers, Keltner first worked with Dylan in ’71 and has worked with him often since, including the session that produced “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” – “I actually cried while we were recording it.”

To speak about Bob is usually to try and pin him down in some kind of way. See, the thing with Bob is – he’s not as mysterious as everybody seems to think he is. That’s the one thing that I’ve always found about Bob. He’s a really normal guy. There’s a great normalcy to him. I actually love how normal he is. But his immense gift is so great that that people have always elevated him to this other place and try really hard to figure him out, in a way they might not do other artists. I don’t believe that, when it comes to recording, Bob has done anything much differently from anybody else, really. Everybody is recording with mics and stuff – so, really, how different can it be? And everybody, when they go into the studio, they want to try something new, right? Bob has just always done that, too, try to do something that he hasn’t done before.

The first time I met him was early 1971. The earthquake had just hit Los Angeles, and I was over in England for a spell when I got a call from Leon [Russell], to go to New York to meet up with he and Carl Radle and Jesse Ed Davis at a studio to record with Bob.

It was around March, a cold, rainy day down in the Village. I remember Bob seemed to have a cold, because he was blowing his nose and tossing Kleenex around. He had a pencil and a notepad, and he was writing a lot. He was writing these songs on the spot in the studio, or finishing them up at least. And the rest of us, we just started playing, jamming around on some different chords and things, and finally the song came together, Bob came over, and we recorded them: “Watching The River Flow” and “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. Those two songs were done really quickly.

I remember that Bob didn’t say anything throughout the day. I mean, he and Leon were talking, but he didn’t say anything to the rest of us. And I didn’t think that it was weird. He didn’t seem weird, like he was trying not to talk. The thing was, *nobody was talking to him*, because I believe everybody was sort of afraid to try and talk to him. But I remember, later on, the talk was that Bob didn’t speak. I just thought, “Well, yeah. But you probably had to speak to him for him to speak back to you!” People will say that Bob’s not prone to smalltalk, and that’s actually not true. I’ve been with him many times when we’ve had lots of that. But, you have to appreciate: when you’re in the studio, there’s a lot of intensity. Your intention is to *make a record*. And that’s a big deal, y’know? It’s a record. So your mind is focused on a lot of different things.

I think it’s true that Bob is often happy to kind of jam a song together. If you’ve been writing a song and playing it on your own, and you want to hear what it’s gonna be like with a band, that’s just what you would want to do. You want to come in and see what the players have to offer. I mean, some artists do come in with a real definite thing in mind, and some don’t. I’ve played on records with both those attitudes, and I can’t say that somebody knowing exactly what they want from the get-go is best. I mean, sometimes you need direction, sure, but as far as searching for the song, I’d say that was pretty normal.

This is one of the reasons you surround yourself with musicians you trust. On Time Out Of Mind, Bob called me and a lot of other guys specifically. I remember one evening, maybe the first night, he asked me, “What do you think about Jim Dickinson for this?” I said, “Aw, that’s a great call.” Jim Dickinson’s usually a good call, anyway, on most stuff. Next day, Jim Dickinson was there. So Bob was thinking about the sound, y’know. He put the call out for Duke Robillard, Augie Meyers, all those guys, I think Bob’s process, more than going around individual musicians saying, “Hey, why doncha try this, or why doncha try that,” is to think to himself: who would play good on this record? I think that’s probably the best way to do it, in fact. You can either let somebody else get the musicians for you, and then figure out how to try to tell them to do it, or you get the musicians yourself who you think can pull off your ideas.

When we did Time Out Of Mind, I think there were some demos of the songs that we listened to, or earlier versions that had been done prior to the sessions that I played on that they wanted to do again and flesh out another way. And there were other songs Bob would just go out and begin to play, and we would begin to noodle around and back him up a little bit. There are a lot of first takes on there, in my recollection. Y’know, we would go on and do more takes, but often we’d come back and realise the first take was the one. I don’t know what Daniel and Bob might have done after the musicians left, I can’t speak to that, but I know that Bob, pretty much, when he does his performance, and he likes it and the band is good – that’s it. That’s the way, pretty much, that it’s always worked with Bob.

The second song I ever recorded with Bob after that “Watching The River Flow” session, was early in the morning, on the Warner Studio soundstage, where we did “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”, for the Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid film. Sam Peckinpah was there, and he was huddled up with Bob, talking to him. I admire Peckinpah as much as anyone, but that day, which was the only day I ever met him, he had a rumpled suit on, a red bandana round his head, and when I got up close to him, I saw his face and I felt so sorry for him, because he had the Hangover of *Death*. Y’know that one? I mean, his face was *crushed*.

Anyway, this is a very emotional thing for me, and a very powerful moment. The changes in that song were so haunting, and you put that together with the words, and you put that together with Bob’s performance – which was really beautiful, one of his great vocals – and then put that together with the image on the screen, because we had the movie playing there as we recorded, it was too much for me. I’ve told this story many times, but I actually cried while we were recording it. That was a perfect example of a beautiful session and how Bob works. We went in, we heard Bob play the song maybe once or twice. He played, we played, and that was it. The great thing about the really great songwriters, is that the great songs, the really magic ones, they play themselves. There’s very little question about what you’re supposed to do. I love that when it happens. And Bob has done that over the years to a great extent, with a great variety of musicians.

Of these unreleased songs that are coming out, I have a memory of “Girl From The Red River Shore”. I have a memory of it as being just beautiful. On Time Out Of Mind, I was sitting right in front of Bob. It was the first time I’d ever recorded with him like that. He was in the corner part of the room, facing out, and they had my drums facing him full on, with the rest of the musicians all around. It was interesting for me to work with him that way. And that particular song, it was one of those really beautiful Bob moments: a great song, and he sang it really beautifully.

I wanted to check the words with him. With Bob, I don’t get the words right away, there’s so much story in his songs that you usually only get it when you listen later, especially when you’re involved in the playing. What happens with me, though – and I’m sure it’s the same with the guitar players and the other musicians who play with Bob – is there’ll be key words in there that set me off in some musical direction. The more of a storyteller the artist is, the more it affects how the whole song comes together, and that was one of those songs. I could feel everybody in the room feeling that song. I think that was a first take. And, yeah, I was disappointed it wasn’t on the album.

Man, there were so many funny things that happened while we were doing that record, and, plus, I was going through a personal crisis at that time, that Bob was actually talking me through, in a funny way. There really was so much going on during that record – but I just can’t tell you any of those stories. I can’t tell you any of the personal stories, and the stories that were really funny to me, I don’t want to break the confidence that my friends have in me. But it was a funny time, and an intense time.

One thing I can say. Daniel Lanois was producing, Mark Howard was engineering, and you have a room full of musicians; some of whom *Daniel* wanted to be there, and some of whom *Bob* wanted to be there. So there was this curious dynamic. All the musicians are very respectful of each other. It was a great hang, everybody really loved hanging out and the musicians had a great time together. But there was this dynamic going on between Bob and Daniel.

What I saw was that Bob really was bouncing off Daniel. This may have appeared to some people to be Bob abusing Daniel, but I’d say it was more that he was using Daniel to bounce off. That was the main value that Daniel brought to the production of that record. He really allowed Bob to know what it was he wanted – and what he *didn’t* want. And I think the reason the recorded ended up really beautiful was exactly because of this dynamic that was going on between Lanois and Bob. I believe that, in the end, Bob got what he wanted, but he got it through that process. And it was a very intense process. That’s all I can really say. And maybe that’s enough.

DAMIEN LOVE